A federal judge dismissed Fox News from a sexual assault lawsuit that a former employee filed against former anchor Ed Henry.
U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams rejected Jennifer Eckhart‘s retaliation and other claims. Eckhart, a former associate producer for the network, alleged that Henry sexually harassed and raped her.
“Fox News did not have actual notice of Henry’s alleged misconduct towards her until she first reported it to the network through her counsel on June 25, 2020—three years after their last sexual encounter,” the judge wrote. “Once the network finally learned of his behavior, its response was the opposite of forgiveness: it swiftly investigated and terminated him just six days later.”
Read the judge’s dismissal of Fox News from Ed Henry lawsuit.
Henry, who now works at Newsmax, has claimed that the sexual relations with Eckhart were consensual.
The judge also dismissed a revenge porn claim against Henry, but denied his motion to toss claims of gender-motivated violence, assault, battery, sex trafficking and harassment. A trial is scheduled to start May 12.
“While a reasonable jury could conclude that Eckhart consented to some or all of their sexual activity, it could also conclude otherwise,” the judge wrote. “In her deposition, Eckhart testified at length that Henry forced her to engage in sexual activity without her consent, and on three separate occasions.”
The judge cited three instances in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
Among other things, Henry argued that Eckhart sent sexually charged text messages before and after the incidents. But the judge wrote that such questions should be left to a jury.
The judge wrote, “A jury may well find that Eckhart’s text messages—many of which were sexually explicit—belie her testimony that she did not pursue or consent to the sexual interactions she had with Henry. But that credibility inquiry falls squarely within the province of the jury, and the Court may not wade into it at this stage.”
The judge added, “There is no evidence that refutes Eckhart’s assertion that the three sexual incidents were nonconsensual. To be sure, she admits to sending sexual messages and photographs that a jury could interpret as inviting sexual relations with Henry. … But those messages could be read in other ways too. A reasonable jury could, for instance, find that Eckhart voluntarily sent some messages to be friendly, or even flirtatious, yet did not consent to the violent sexual encounters that followed.”
The judge also noted that the record included evidence that Henry “harassed and even assaulted other female colleagues, including one incident where he digitally penetrated a woman under a table without her consent. A reasonable jury could believe those accounts and infer that Henry engaged in similar misconduct with Eckhart.”
Attorneys for Henry and Eckhart did not immediately return requests for comment.
Fox News terminated Henry on July 1, 2020, after a law firm’s investigation that found that Eckhart and Henry had engaged in communications between 2014 and 2017, and had the three sexual encounters. That included a September, 2015 incident in which Eckhart performed oral sex on Henry in the Fox News office.
Eckhart was fired from Fox News in June, 2020, in what the network said was due to tardiness, disclosure of a proprietary graphics package and misappropriation of company resources.
Eckhart claimed that Fox News knew that Henry was harassing other women at the network, something that should have warned executives that he might do the same to her. But the judge wrote, that “no reasonable jury could find Fox News liable based on that evidence. For starters, even though Fox News eventually learned about Henry’s extramarital affairs, it did not know about many of them until after Eckhart and Henry’s final sexual encounter in 2017.”
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