NEW YORK (Legal Newsline) – A former Fox News personality is hoping Congressional action on sexual harassment litigation will help keep her case in court and out of arbitration.
The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, signed into law on March 3, points to a long-existing policy of opposing arbitration of sexual harassment claims, lawyers for Andrea Tantaros wrote on April 7.
The notice quotes Vice President Kamala Harris, who said “Forced arbitration silences survivors of sexual assault and harassment.”
Tantaros and her new lawyers are hoping this action convinces a federal judge to turn around what has been so far an unsuccessful quest to have her sexual harassment case against Fox News and the estate of Roger Ailes heard.
She filed in state court before defendants removed to federal, where they could invoke an arbitration clause in her contract from 2014 – years before a New York law ending forced arbitration for her type of lawsuit took effect.
She tried to get the case back to state court to avoid arbitration, but the U.S. Court of Appeals last year ruled it belonged in federal. The judge hearing the case is now deciding whether to send to arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act.
Tantaros, a former co-host of "The Five," first claimed sexual harassment in 2016.
She alleges the late Ailes made disparaging comments about her body, made sexual advances towards her and banished her to a "graveyard" on-air time slot when she rejected him. Tantaros also alleges she was sexually harassed by former Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly, according to court filings and news reports.
The arbitration process is designed to "silence" her repeated, documented complaints of sexual harassment, retaliation and workplace hostility,” she has alleged. Arbitration was, in effect, helping to "kill her professionally, emotionally and financially.”
Fox News says the New York #MeToo law only applies to contracts entered into after July 11, 2018 – four years after she signed hers, and that she was required to object to arbitration within 20 days after the grounds for invalidity arose.