I Was Sexually Harassed, And I'm Fighting Back

It Happens to Roughly One in Three Women in the Workplace, a Cosmopolitan Survey Found—but 70 Percent of Them Don’t Report It. Former Fox News Cohost Andrea Tantaros Tells Why She Risked Everything to File Alawsuit and Speak Out.

- Abigail Pesta

Andrea Tantaros was a rising star at Fox News, a political analyst and cohost of the popular show The Five, when she says the powerful head of the company, Roger Ailes, began sexually harassing her.

As she alleges in an ongoing lawsuit, he asked her to spin around to show him her body, to wear a tighter dress, and to hug him, in addition to prying into her love life, speculating about how she would look in a bikini, and asking her to discuss the sex lives of other employees. “Flagrant misogyny, that was the environment,” she says.

Tantaros alleges she reported the harassment and was first ignored, then later told to drop it because Ailes was a powerful man. But she didn’t drop it. “I don’t care how much power men have. They don’t have the right to disrespect women,” she says.

The network moved her to a much less visible show with no explanation, she says in her lawsuit, and no announcement to alert viewers. As Tantaros tells it, she was blackballed and bad-mouthed by executives and blocked from publicity opportunities. And, in what she saw as the ultimate act of retaliation, she was yanked off the air this past April, hours before the launch of her book about feminism, Tied Up in Knots. The network maintains it suspended her because the book was unauthorized. She has called that claim “outrageously false.”

In July, former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment and retaliation suit against Ailes. After an internal investigation by parent company 21st Century Fox, Ailes departed the network with a $40 million severance. In August, Tantaros filed her own suit—against Fox News, Ailes, and four network executives—alleging the details of sexual harassment and retaliation outlined in this article.