NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Gretchen Carlson said the #MeToo movement has made significant strides since it went viral six years ago and that her former employer "has lost its rudder."
Carlson, the former Fox News host whose 2016 sexual harassment lawsuit against the network resulted in the network's chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes, stepping down, discussed the movement's progress in an interview on Newsline with Brigitte Quinn on Tuesday.
"We've made a tremendous amount of progress," the 56-year-old said. "Sometimes you see stories crop up every now and then saying is the #MeToo movement over, you know, if there's some sort of setback."
She added, "Making change and changing the world basically is difficult, and you're going to ruffle some feathers along the way when you're trying to make workplaces safer, especially when certain things have just been the way it is."
Carlson described the creation of her nonprofit organization, Lift Our Voices, which she co-founded in 2019, as the most difficult challenge since the movement's founding, but she points to the "amazing progress" that has been made. Lift Our Voices' mission is "to eradicate forced arbitration clauses and non-disclosure agreements in workplace contracts that keep toxic workplace issues silent."
That progress, Carlson said, includes "two of the biggest labor law changes in the last 100 years" and makes it "safer for women who faced sexual misconduct at work."
One of the bills passed, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which Carlson advocated for, was signed into law last March and excludes sexual assault and sexual harassment complaints from arbitration clauses, including retroactively.
"I had the honor of being at the White House when the first bill was signed into law on March 3rd of last year," she added. "So we just had the first year anniversary. That bill means that if you face sexual misconduct at work, you cannot be forced into secret arbitration. Instead, you have a choice, and you can publicly file your lawsuit."
Carlson in February launched her "Know Your Rights" educational campaign, which is meant to "raise awareness about the law and help survivors and witnesses of sexual misconduct better understand their new rights."
Carlson also noted that she is "fighting for" smaller cases of workplace sexual harassment, citing workers earning $13 or less per hour and people of color as being the "most subjected to these silencing mechanisms, whether it's forced arbitration or nondisclosure agreements."
"I'm not just fighting for well-known journalists or high-paid actresses, where we saw this movement really explode initially from," she continued. "I'm fighting for the little people who don't have the platform but are subjected to these kinds of mechanisms at a higher rate than others."
Carlson also spoke out against Fox after legal filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the media giant and its networks surfaced, revealing that Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said in the months following the 2020 election that the networks parroted false fraud claims.
She said the network has "changed dramatically" since she was there, adding that they "lost their moral compass."
"The idea that a company would promote false lies about something as important as the election and the survival of our democracy," Carlson said. "All for the bottom line is unbelievable to me and inexcusable."
The journalist made her remarks a day after Fox News host Tucker Carlson began airing newly released footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot, which he described as "mostly peaceful chaos."
Carlson, who is not related to Tucker, went on to say that Fox "lost its rudder" by doing a "disservice to the American people" with "opinion TV," which she said is no longer the "brilliant marketing move" that it was "20 years ago."
Now in the years since she left the network, Carlson, who has been portrayed by Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts in two dramatizations, said she has "more work" ahead of her to get "other things done" for the workplace.
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