Former Fox Sports anchor accuses network's executive VP of sexual assault

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Former Fox Sports news anchor Julie Stewart-Binks on Friday sued the network and Executive Vice President for Content Charlie Dixon for sexual assault.

Stewart-Binks says in a complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court that Dixon pushed her against the wall and forcibly tried to kiss her after inviting her to admire the view from his hotel room balcony in Marina del Rey, California, in 2016.

Dixon, Stewart-Binks claims, asked her to meet him at the hotel bar to go over notes for an upcoming Super Bowl show. But when she arrived at the bar, she says, he told her he didn’t want her to be on the show because he didn’t think she was funny, interesting or talented.

Although alarms went off in her mind when Dixon wanted to show her the view from his balcony, she says, she felt that she couldn’t say no because he was her boss and her career depended on his opinion of her.

After telling her mom what happened, Stewart-Binks says, the two agreed that it would be wiser for her to remain silent rather than risk the career she worked so hard to build.

“This was before the #MeToo movement, and sadly, they feared speaking out would cost her everything,” according to her complaint.

A few months after the January 2016 incident, Stewart-Binks was informed that Fox Sports wouldn’t renew her contract, purportedly because they didn’t need a news update anchor any longer. However, Fox’s soccer department still wanted to use her to cover the Major League Soccer season, and she got a separate contract at a reduced rate.

The National Hockey League’s Anaheim Ducks also arranged for her to sign a contract with Fox, securing her services as a freelancer with Fox Sports West. But by the end of 2016, she left Fox Sports for a job at ESPN.

The following, year Stewart-Binks says, the network’s human resources department spoke with her as part of their sexual harassment investigation of John Horowitz, another Fox Sports executive who got fired that year. She informed the human resources people about the incident with Dixon, but no action was taken.

“Fox egregiously made the deliberate decision to protect Dixon and allow a sexual predator to remain an executive at Fox for nearly a decade,” she argues in her complaint. “This case thus represents yet another in a long line of cases chronicling the toxic culture at Fox, marked by bad faith promises and repeated failures to address a poisonous and entrenched patriarchy.”

Fox Sports didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Stewart-Binks is suing Dixon and the network for sexual assault and sexual battery, and she seeks unspecified compensatory damages as well as damages for emotional distress and punitive damages.

She is represented by Rana Ayazi and Devin Abney of Ayazi Abney APC in Los Angeles.

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