Fox settles with Gretchen Carlson over Roger Ailes sexual harassment claims

Fox News has reached a settlement with former news anchor Gretchen Carlson for a reported $20m over claims she was fired from the network after she refused sexual advances from chairman Roger Ailes.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Fox News’s parent company expressed “sincere regret” over the incident.

“21st Century Fox is pleased to announce that it has settled Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit,” the statement said. “During her tenure at Fox News, Gretchen exhibited the highest standards of journalism and professionalism.”

The company apologized to the former Fox & Friends anchor “for the fact that Gretchen was not treated with the respect and dignity that she and all of our colleagues deserve”.

Carlson filed a lawsuit against the executive himself on 6 July that accused Ailes of propositioning her for sex and threatening to ruin her career if she refused. Her claims unleashed a wave of accusations from other women who encountered Ailes during his decades-long career in television and Republican politics. In the weeks following her lawsuit, more than 20 women contacted Carlson’s attorneys to say they had also been victims. A similar number spoke to investigators hired by 21st Century Fox to look into Carlson’s accusations.

Though Carlson sued Ailes personally, Fox News is liable for the settlement of the suit according to a report on the deals in Vanity Fair, which broke the news of the $20m payout. It’s unclear how much of the money Ailes is personally responsible for.

In response to the suit, Ailes initially maintained that he fired Carlson over poor ratings. He dismissed her and others’ allegations as categorically false and reportedly called on other Fox News anchors to publicly lend their support. One of the loudest voices in Ailes’s defense, Greta Van Susteren, abruptly left the network on Tuesday.

Van Susteren wrote on her Facebook page: “Fox has not felt like home to me for a few years and I took advantage of the clause in my contract which allows me to leave now.” According to a report in New York Magazine, the clause stipulated that Van Susteren could leave if Ailes left. “The clause had a time limitation, meaning I could not wait,” Van Susteren wrote.

New York reported that Van Susteren was “troubled” by the culture exposed by the lawsuit and the investigation by law firm Paul, Weiss.

The internal investigation has apparently concluded without a wider examination of the alleged sexism in the corporate culture at Fox News, according to the Vanity Fair report. Ailes himself has retained Beverly Hills attorney Charles Harder, the lawyer who helped Peter Thiel sue Gawker through proxy Hulk Hogan in a suit that, though the verdict is likely to be overturned on appeal, bankrupted the company and left one of its editors penniless.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Ailes wants Harder to help him pursue legal action against New York Magazine and its reporter Gabriel Sherman, who broke many of the stories around Ailes’s decline and fall.

With the accusations mounting – including, reportedly, a claim of sexual harassment by the network’s star anchor, Megyn Kelly – Ailes’s position had become increasingly tenuous. On 21 July, Ailes was ousted from the rightwing cable giant he helped found nearly two decades ago.

Claims of harassment and intimidation have continued to emerge in the wake of Ailes’s departure. In late July, Laurie Dhue, a former on-air host, announced her plans for a tell-all book detailing claims of sexual harassment against Ailes.

On Friday, Sherman reported that a private investigator hired by Fox News had accessed the phone records of a reporter for Media Matters, a watchdog group that monitors conservative media outlets, at the behest of a Fox executive. In the US, obtaining phone records without permission is a crime. The private investigator allegedly accessed the records around the same time another Rupert Murdoch company, News International, was dealing with a mammoth phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

Separately, a longtime aide to Ailes, Laurie Luhn, claimed to Sherman that Ailes had carried on a coercive sexual relationship with her for years. Luhn claimed that Fox News entered a multimillion-dollar settlement with her, and implicated a top Ailes deputy in the alleged effort to silence her, raising the possibility that rumors of Ailes’s misconduct were well-known to the upper echelons of Fox News executives.

Two top Ailes lieutenants, Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, were given promotions after Ailes left and now run the network in his place.

Carlson’s is not the only legal action dogging parent company 21st Century Fox. In late August, former Fox News host Andrea Tarantos filed a lawsuit that criticized the network as a “sex-fueled, Playboy mansion-like cult” where Ailes, host Bill O’Reilly, and other contributors sexually harassed her. A motion that lawyers for Fox News filed last week called Tarantos a “wannabe” and an “opportunist”.

Ailes left Fox News with a non-compete clause that prevents him from working with a rival cable news network anytime in the near future. A leaked draft of his severance agreement included a $40m payout and a two-year consultant relationship with the cable news network he helped build into a ratings behemoth.

Since leaving Fox, Ailes has reportedly begun to advise Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Ailes is reported to be instrumental in Trump’s preparation for the upcoming televised debates with Hillary Clinton – a series of major media events for which Ailes is uniquely qualified to ready the first-time candidate.

In the statement 21st Century Fox issued on Tuesday, Carlson thanked other women who came forward with their own harassment complaints.

“I’m ready to move on to the next chapter of my life in which I will redouble my efforts to empower women in the workplace,” she said. “I want to thank all the brave women who came forward to tell their own stories and the many people across the country who embraced and supported me in their #StandWithGretchen. All women deserve a dignified and respectful workplace in which talent, hard work and loyalty are recognized, revered and rewarded.”

Sam Thielman contributed additional reporting

• This article was amended on 6 September 2016. A previous version misidentified whose contract contained an opt-out clause if Roger Ailes left Fox News; it was Greta Van Susteren’s, not Gretchen Carlson’s.