Ex-producer escalates lawsuit, claiming Fox News lawyers deleted messages from her phone
Maria Bartiromo prepares for a taping in 2018.
By Marshall Cohen, CNN
A former Fox News producer who claims the right-wing network pressured her to give false testimony escalated her own lawsuit against the company, adding CEO Suzanne Scott as defendant and accusing Fox’s lawyers of deleting messages from her phone.
In explosive lawsuits filed last month, Abby Grossberg claimed Fox lawyers bullied her into protecting the network and its on-air personalities in her deposition for the Dominion Voting Systems’ case.
Grossberg now accuses Scott of being complicit in the alleged coercion, according to her amended lawsuit.
Fox News has previously said her lawsuits are “riddled with false allegations” and says its lawyers never acted improperly.
The network fired Grossberg after she initiated the litigation.
Grossberg worked for Maria Bartiromo during the 2020 election cycle, and some of the comments made on Bartiromo’s show are at the center of Dominion’s defamation case against Fox, which saw jury selection begin Thursday in Delaware. The network says it never defamed Dominion and that Dominion’s lawsuit undermines US press freedoms.
In Grossberg’s amended complaint filed this week, she accused Fox’s lawyers of deleting messages from her phone. The lawsuit says Grossberg gave her phone to Fox lawyers in 2022, and “that certain messages between Ms. Grossberg and Ms. Bartiromo were missing/appeared to have been deleted” when she got the device back from Fox’s team.
The topic of potentially missing or withheld evidence is looming large over the Dominion case. A judge sanctioned Fox on Wednesday for withholding key material from Dominion — audio recordings of Bartiromo talking off-air with Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
Fox said it never withheld any evidence from Dominion, and Fox lawyers said in court Wednesday that they only learned that Grossberg had made the recordings when she mentioned them in her lawsuits in recent weeks.
In response to Grossberg’s new allegations, a Fox spokesperson said in a statement: “As our lawyer explained in court, we learned that there might be responsive audio recordings for the first time on March 20 from Grossberg’s errata sheet. Our attorneys then accessed the forensic image of Grossberg’s phone and reviewed the recordings, which were produced within 15 days of first learning of their existence.”
The right-wing network blasted Grossberg for adding Scott as a defendant, calling it a “publicity stunt” in a statement issued Friday.
“Suzanne Scott never interacted with Abby Grossberg while she was an employee and had absolutely nothing to do with her deposition prep,” a Fox spokesperson said.
Dominion has said that it plans to call Grossberg as a witness as part of its case against Fox News.
Scott, the Fox News CEO, is expected to testify at the trial.
Emails made public in the Dominion case revealed that Scott said in 2020 it was “bad for business” for Fox News reporters to debunk Donald Trump’s false assertions that the presidential election was rigged. (Fox News said these emails have been taken out of context by Dominion in its court filings.)
Scott was also on the receiving end of emails from Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, where he decried Trump’s election denialism and blamed Trump for the January 6 insurrection.
— CNN’s Oliver Darcy contributed to this story
The-CNN-Wire
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