Fox News will not have to face a lawsuit brought by a former associate producer who accused the network of ignoring the risk that she’d be raped by former White House chief correspondent Ed Henry.
U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams on Wednesday dismissed sexual assault, sex trafficking, revenge porn, harassment and retaliation claims from Jennifer Eckhart against the network while allowing the majority of her case against Henry to proceed to trial.
In a statement, a lawyer for Eckhart said the ruling will be appealed. “We look forward to holding Mr. Henry accountable before a jury,” the statement added.
The lawsuit, filed in 2020 in New York federal court, involved allegations that Eckhart endured years of sexual harassment from Henry that culminated in him violently raping her in a hotel room. The alleged incident followed Henry coercing her into a sexual relationship by threatening her career and him assaulting her at the network’s New York offices.
Fox News maintained that it couldn’t have known Henry would assault Eckhart, who joined the network in 2013 as an administrative assistant and was promoted to associate producer, because it didn’t learn of his alleged misconduct until years later. It denied allegations of retaliation, saying that she never complained about sexual harassment before she was fired. Henry has said his relationship with Eckhart was consensual.
In Wednesday’s ruling, the court sided with the network that its management couldn’t have failed to prevent Henry from assaulting Eckhart. “There is no direct evidence that Fox News was aware of Henry’s alleged harassment of Eckhart before it occurred,” wrote Abrams, who noted that she acknowledged that she didn’t tell anyone at the company about their relationship until after she was terminated in 2020.
On summary judgment, Eckhart argued that Fox News supervisors knew that Henry was harassing other women at the network. She pointed to the network directing him to receive sex rehabilitation treatment in 2016 after it was revealed that he was engaged in an extramarital affair.
Still, the court said that Fox News “did not know about many of them until after Eckhart and Henry’s final sexual encounter in 2017.” It added, “Because there is no evidence that Fox News learned about these affairs until April 2017 or later, no reasonable jury could find that they put it on notice that Henry would assault her.”
Fox News wasn’t on notice of Henry’s alleged sexual misconduct until Eckhart first reported it to the network through her lawyers in 2020, the order stated. Once it learned of the allegations, the court said it investigated and terminated him six days later.
“We are pleased with the court’s decision,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement.
Henry and Eckhart advanced clashing portrayals of the two meeting for a drink in 2014 at a New York hotel. By Henry’s telling, she accepted an invitation to his room, where they had consensual sex. By Eckhart’s telling, he locked the door to the room, threw her against a wall and had sex with her. She claimed she couldn’t reject his sexual advance because she feared consequences to her career, citing another incident in 2017 in which she said she was violently raped and beaten.
Henry will face a trial scheduled to start in May over claims of assault, battery, sex trafficking and harassment.
