Looking at Andrea Tantaros’ lawsuit against Fox News for harassment and retaliation, we know one thing right off the bat. The fair and balanced network has some of the worst lawyers in the world.
I already knew that Fox News general counsel Dianne Brandi—named as one of the defendants—and the rest of Fox News’ legal team weren’t the brightest tools in the shed. Remember how they claimed Tantaros was taken off the air because she didn’t run their book by network officials? Well, we know that’s a lie. Tantaros actually promoted the book on the February 29 edition of “Outnumbered”—and that segment is still available in Fox News’ video archive.
Indeed, Tantaros claims in her complaint that Fox News officials knew about this book as early as 2013—and didn’t raise a peep. Also noteworthy—the book is published by HarperCollins, a corporate cousin to Fox News; all Fox News personalities are contractually obligated to publish their books through HarperCollins. HarperCollins followed most of the Murdoch print interests into the “new” News Corp, while Fox News is owned by 21st Century Fox; Rupert Murdoch is chairman of both companies.
But while perusing this at Liberal America, I discovered that the part that proves that Fox News’ lawyers are really, really dumb comes late in the complaint. Specifically, starting on page 31. On August 9, Tantaros’ lawyer, Judd Bernstein, was notified that his client had until August 24 to accept Fox News’ offer to go to arbitration.
However, the very next day, Bernstein got a call from Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast. Grove told Bernstein that someone at Fox News had told him she had 14 days to agree to arbitration. One problem—by doing so, Fox News actually breached the terms of the arbitration provision in Tantaros’ contract. It explicitly forbids either party from “publicly revealing anything about the existence or course of an arbitration.”
In other words, if Brandi and her team had just kept their mouths shut, they might have had grounds to shut down Tantaros’ suit. But they had to keep smearing her, apparently thinking it would bully her into silence. If that’s the case, they may be about to wind up dead losers.