A Fox News producer who accused the network of pressuring her into giving misleading testimony as part of its ongoing Dominion defamation case says she was fired last week in retaliation for correcting her deposition.
Abby Grossberg filed an amended complaint against the network on Monday accusing it of unlawfully terminating her on Friday — four days after she filed two lawsuits against the company and a corrected deposition ― in what she called “yet another thinly veiled act of retaliation.”
“When Fox News realized that it could not stop Ms. Grossberg from speaking her truth to the world in her immutable ‘public filings’ — either by intimidation, obfuscation, or baseless attempts at judicial intervention — it terminated her employment,” her complaint states.
In an errata sheet filed last week but made public Monday, the former Tucker Carlson producer amended some of the answers that she gave in her deposition back in September. In one amendment, she changed her answer from “yes” to “no” in whether she trusted the Fox News producers that she worked with, according to the court filing reviewed by CNN.
“They’re activists, not journalists, and impose their political agendas on the programming,” she stated in the filing.
Grossberg also changed her response to a question about whether it was important to issue a correction when a guest said something untrue on Maria Bartiromo’s program “Sunday Morning Futures,” which Grossberg worked for prior to her role with Carlson.
Grossberg originally said it wasn’t important but in her new testimony she said it is important because “although our guests had the right to answer how they pleased, it was Maria’s responsibility to push back against untrue statements with facts or follow-up questions.”
Fox News, in a statement to JS on Monday, said Grossberg was fired after publicly disclosing “privileged information” that had been exchanged between her and the network’s attorneys regarding Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News. The Dominion lawsuit accuses the network of spreading false claims of election fraud including lies that Dominion’s voting machines were rigged and contributed to Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
“We were clear that if she violated our instructions, Fox would take appropriate action including termination,” the network stated. “Ms. Grossberg ignored these communications and chose to file her complaint without taking any steps to protect those portions containing Fox’s privileged information.”
Grossberg, in her lawsuits filed last week, accused Fox News’ attorneys of pressuring her to avoid mentioning prominent male executives and on-air talent in her deposition in order to protect them in the Dominion lawsuit. She also alleged that she and Bartiromo were to become scapegoats for any conspiracy theories that Fox News circulated about Dominion.
“They don’t respect or value women,” she said of the network.
Grossberg, in Monday’s amended complaint, offered more detail about the pressure that she said Fox News’ attorneys put on her to hide information in her deposition.
In her deposition preparation sessions, Grossberg said she felt pressured by attorneys to answer questions with a generic “I do not recall,” “whenever she had the opportunity, even if she, in fact, did have a recollection, albeit perhaps not a perfect one.”
“Indeed, several times during her deposition prep, one of the Fox News Attorneys would suggestively demur, ‘who really can recall anything after nearly two years?’, thereby tricking Ms. Grossberg into doubting her own faculties,” her complaint states.
By giving misleading and evasive answers, she was put at risk of civil and criminal liability for perjury and had “all responsibility for the alleged defamation against Dominion on her shoulders.” Her sworn statements could also end her career as a journalist, her complaint states.
“Fox News Attorneys were conditioning and fraudulently inducing her to deny facts she knew to exist, thereby exposing her to legal and reputational jeopardy,” her complaint states.
She later asked to review and correct her deposition but was repeatedly ignored until she retained her own attorneys, she claims.