When Fox News chief Roger Ailes asked a court on Friday to dismiss former Fox TV host Gretchen Carlson’s sexual harassment suit against him and force it into secret arbitration, he put on display a hornet’s nest of increasingly common and controversial employment practices.
The notion that the powerful head of a media company—whose cable TV stations regularly air sordid accusations about politicians, business leaders, and entertainment personalities—could sweep the allegations against himself out of a public courtroom and under the rug of strictly confidential arbitration has struck some as unfair and hypocritical.
Nevertheless, according to Thomas Doherty, a management-side employment lawyer with McCarter & English, Ailes’ lawyers have some legal support for their claim that Carlson is still bound by the arbitration provision. “Otherwise,” Doherty writes in an email, “it would make it very easy to do an end run around the arbitration clause by just suing individual employees instead of the employer.”