An attorney for Grossberg confirmed late Monday that she plans to sue Fox for alleged gender discrimination and retaliation. Fox lawyers, in their filing with the court, said they believe the producer planned to share sensitive and confidential information from in-house legal discussions in “a transparent attempt to gain leverage over Fox News.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, Grossberg’s attorney, Parisis G. Filippatos called Fox’s restraining order an “attempt to chill her,” adding that “her suit will reveal the truth, not the selected version of sanitized events that Fox is famous for.”
Grossberg, an off-air staffer at Fox News for the past four years, has emerged as a key player in one of the programming decisions at the center of Dominion Voting Systems’ suit against Fox News.
Dominion has sued Fox for $1.6 billion for airing spurious claims from attorneys for Donald Trump that the election-technology company rigged their voting machines in favor of Joe Biden in the 2020 race. Both sides will appear in Delaware Superior Court Tuesday to argue for the judge to rule in their favor — likely the last major hearing before the case is expected to go to trial next month.
Grossberg, who now works as a booker for Tucker Carlson’s prime time show, was working in the fall of 2020 as a producer for Fox host Maria Bartiromo — one of the hosts that Dominion has singled out for promoting false election-fraud claims.
In Grossberg’s September deposition, Dominion lawyers asked her about the circumstances surrounding a Nov. 8, 2020 appearance by Trump-affiliated attorney Sidney Powell, who told Bartiromo on air that there had been “computer glitches” during the election and “fraud … where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.”
Grossberg defended the decision to air claims like those Powell was promoting, according to segments of her deposition made public this month. “We bring on people and they give their opinions,” she said. “We are not an investigative program. The news was happening very quickly at this time. Often it was unfolding as we were on air. … Maria asked questions. The guests responded and gave their points of view, and it was up to the audience to decide.”
She told Dominion’s lawyers that the fraud claims were “established, serious” allegations coming from the president of the United States, and her production team “thought the public deserved to hear what the current administration was saying.”
According to Fox’s complaint, first reported by the Daily Beast, the network’s lawyers advised Grossberg in meetings before her deposition that “they represented Fox News and not her in her individual capacity” and that their discussions with her “were subject to the attorney-client privilege” and must be kept confidential.
The complaint stated that Fox received a draft of Grossberg’s potential legal filing against the company last month, and that the document quoted “purported conversations between Fox News’s attorneys and Grossberg” that shed light on the network’s “legal analysis and trial strategy.”
The network said that Grossberg contended that her conversations with the attorneys were not subject to such attorney-client privilege.
Sarah Ellison contributed to this report.
