Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Gretchen Carlson: The Journalist Who Defied Fox News and Exposed Workplace Abuse | E110
Tue, 03 Jun 2025
In 2016, former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson made a bold move that transformed the conversation around workplace harassment. After enduring years of mistreatment, she filed a lawsuit against Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Despite the immense personal and professional risks, this courageous act helped spark the #MeToo movement, giving a voice to countless women who had suffered in silence. Now, through her nonprofit, Gretchen is working to dismantle the silencing mechanisms that allow harassment to thrive in the workplace. In this episode, Gretchen joins Ilana to share how her painful experiences fueled her mission to create safer, more inclusive environments for all. Gretchen Carlson is a journalist, author, and women’s rights advocate. As the co-founder of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit combating forced arbitration and toxic workplace environments, her advocacy has led to significant legislative changes. In this episode, Ilana and Gretchen will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:15) The Decision to File a Sexual Harassment Lawsuit (04:42) Why Most Victims Struggle to Speak Out (11:40) The Role of a Support System in Tough Times (15:19) Learning to Advocate for Herself as a Child (17:57) From Violin Prodigy to Miss America (23:37) Building a Thick Skin as Miss America (26:47) Facing Sexual Assault Early in Her Career (30:00) How to Foster Safe and Inclusive Workplaces (37:11) Balancing Ambition, Family, and Career in TV (42:19) Creating Change Through Reforms and Advocacy (48:24) Overcoming Rejection in Nonprofits Gretchen Carlson is a journalist, author, and women’s rights advocate. As the co-founder of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit combating forced arbitration and toxic workplace environments, her advocacy has led to significant legislative changes, including the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. The bestselling author of Getting Real and Be Fierce, Gretchen was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2017. Connect with Gretchen: Gretchen’s Website: gretchencarlson.com Gretchen’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gretchen-carlson Resources Mentioned: Gretchen’s Book, Getting Real: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Real-Gretchen-Carlson/dp/0143109243 Gretchen’s Book, Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Fierce-Stop-Harassment-Power/dp/1478992174 Lift Our Voices: liftourvoices.org Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training
Chapter 1: What motivated Gretchen Carlson to file a sexual harassment lawsuit?
Gretchen Carlson, she is a trailblazing journalist, former host of Fox News. In July 2016, she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes. Dozens of other women also stepped forward.
Fox took away the career that I had killed myself for. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. When I did what I did in 2016, you know, the number one thing my lawyer said to me is, they're gonna kill you. They will do everything in their power to malign you, to call you a liar, to dig up everything in their past life, you know, and make it all a negative. That all happened.
Chapter 2: Why do most victims struggle to speak out against harassment?
What happened immediately after I filed the lawsuit was that I started hearing from women all across the world. And they all had the same eerie, similar story, which was, I did what you did, I came forward, I was fired, and I've never worked in my chosen profession ever again, and I was silenced. And I was like, holy crap.
And so I rolled up my sleeves, I got to work, because I was like, we have to change the laws. The laws I helped pass are the two biggest labor law changes in the last 100 years. And what they do is...
Today, I have a really, really special episode with Gretchen Carlson. She is a trailblazing journalist, former host of Fox News, CBS. In July 2016, she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the Fox News chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes. Dozens of other women also stepped forward. It was incredible to see it. She won the case and received a public apology.
Gretchen Carlson was one of the first really high publicity cases of the Me Too movement. She then decided to leverage her voice to fight for workers' rights in the workplace by co-founding the nonprofit organization Lift Our Voices. Gretchen, I am so, so, so excited to have you on the show today. I think it's going to be an epic conversation. So thank you. Thank you for having me.
Looking forward to it. Usually we take you back to your childhood and what brought you to this career. But I actually would love for you to take us to the moment when you're in Fox News. I know there's a lot that you can't talk about, but the things are piling up and there's a moment where you decide to literally, you call it, jump off the cliff on your own and file this lawsuit.
Can you describe the situation, your workplace, where are you at with this decision? It's one of the hardest decisions in anybody's life.
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Chapter 3: How important is a support system during tough times?
Yeah, that's why I'm hesitating. But thank you so much for having me because I always say that building up the courage that it takes to do something that monumental is not something that you decide the night before. I mean, it's not like you just suddenly go, hey, I think I'll do this massive change in my life and shake up the whole world about accusing somebody of this.
So it really took me many, many years of... enduring bad behavior and at the same time trying to walk a tightrope at work to do the best job that I could and also attempt to also get out. And I can't give all the details of what was going on because I did sign a nondisclosure, which is what I work against now, which we can get into.
But I guess what eventually happened was that Fox took away the career that I had killed myself for. I had reached the pinnacle of television. I was hosting the number one morning show on cable in the country and they fired me and I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. And so at that point, I just finally decided that if I don't do this, who will? And that was really the decision.
I would just also add that I looked into the eyes of my children who were middle schoolers at the time. And I just decided that I was doing it for their generation as well. I think there was sort of this... misconception in our society, even in 2016, that women had come much more far along in not only equality, but in being treated with harassment in the workplace.
Chapter 4: What lessons did Gretchen learn from her childhood?
And one of the reasons why Americans were fooled about that is because of the silencing mechanisms like nondisclosures that have kept all these issues secret. And it gave this perception that women were being treated wonderfully, and that wasn't the case.
So I decided to jump. So take me there for a second. Because again, most women do not come forward. That's just the reality. We chatted a few seconds before. Most women have sexual harassment episode in their life. Most will never have come forward with it. I am to blame as well. I never talk about these things. For me, there's a zillion things that came as fear, like they won't listen to me.
I will need to prove myself. Why do I need to create trouble? At that point, you have kids, you have a husband, you have parents, you have friends. It takes a toll. And you knew that you're doing something that will definitely make it to the media, right? This is not some thing that will go away. Gretchen, talk to me for a second about the fear of going public.
Chapter 5: How did Gretchen Carlson become Miss America?
We still, almost nine years later now, women are still going to be penalized if they come forward. And especially back when I did what I did in 2016, you know, the number one thing my lawyer said to me is they're going to kill you. They will do everything in their power to malign you, to call you a liar, to dig up everything in their past life, you know, and make it all a negative.
And, you know, that all happened. But We've made a lot of strides since then with the work that I've done. I mean, women are actually believed now, right? You've seen juries convict people of similar crimes because juries are also just more knowledgeable now about why women stay at their jobs in these types of situations, why women stay in these relationships if it's domestic violence.
So there's been great strides, but with all the people who reach out to me, I still say it's such a personal decision to come forward because you will probably be penalized. You probably will be fired. You probably won't work in your chosen profession ever again. And so it's a huge risk. And most people can't afford, quite honestly, to do that. And so they just suck it up and they endure.
And that's what keeps this vicious cycle going, along with making sure that it's all secret, right? So what I'm trying to do with the work at Lift Our Voices is normalize this enough that where more and more women come forward, the more that we make it not such a one-off situation, the more that we can change the hearts and minds of people who run companies to not penalize people who come forward.
It's a tangled web to fix, but... Currently, women are probably still going to be punished.
That day when you did that, you were kind of pushed in the corner. You're at that point, lost your job. You don't have to, but you decide to do this. How did your family take it? Did you talk to your kids before? Because I think that's also part of it. I don't want to hurt them, right? Right, right. Talk to me a little bit because that's a fear.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Gretchen face early in her career?
Yeah, and just to be clear, I had been preparing my lawsuit for months and months and months before they fired me. Honestly, my legal team never thought they were going to fire me because it was such an act of alleged retaliation then, right? It made it so crystal clear that I had done nothing wrong. And so they were shocked when they fired me.
So I don't want to give the implication that they fired me and then I hurriedly put together a lawsuit. No, this was something that I had going on behind the scenes for quite some time. But back to my family, yes, it's hard on a marriage. It's not like you come home from work every day and say to your partner, hey, this is what's happened to me at work.
It's hard to come home to your husband and say, this is what another man is saying to me or doing to me. So there's that. My children were, as I said, in middle school, so a very vulnerable age of acceptance already being difficult, friendships being fractured, and they were my paramount concern. But I'll start with my parents, who I'm still blessed to have in my life.
I grew up in a small town in Minnesota and Minnesotans are very nice people, very altruistic people. They don't really sue a lot of people. And so I think it took my parents a long time to get to the point where they actually were supportive of what I was going to do. And when they finally got to that place, I can still remember being on the phone with both of them.
And we were all very emotional. And they finally said that they wanted me to do what I felt I needed to do. And that was a big turning point for me because no matter how old you get, you still want the blessing of your parents. So that was number one.
Number two, as I said earlier, looking in the eyes of my children, if we couldn't accomplish just to make this better for my generation, then what about my kids? If I don't do this, then they're going to still be going through this. And I didn't tell them until the night before because it had to be so secretive. I couldn't get out what I was doing.
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Chapter 7: How can we create safe and inclusive workplaces?
I couldn't give them the upper advantage of knowing what I was going to be doing.
Which is also really hard. You carried a lot of weight on your shoulders at that point.
Yeah, tons. I was carrying for every other woman that worked at Fox. That was just the starting point. But I remember I was fired on June 23rd. I didn't file my lawsuit until July 6th. So it was a good two weeks. of sitting, knowing that I had to sort of put on this game, even to my own staff. I just said I was going on an extended vacation because it was over the 4th of July holiday.
You know, it happened to be my 50th birthday right around that time, which was a wonderful birthday present. Hi, you're fired. So I had some reasonable excuses about why I might not be around for a while, but I had to keep it from all of my friends. So on the night I finally told my children, my son,
the first thing he said was he looked at me and he goes, mommy, he goes, what's going to happen to Tara, our babysitter? And I was like, okay, that's a genuine concern, but what about mommy? Right. But this wonderful babysitter had lived with us for 12 years, thankfully doing a wonderful job taking care of my children because I was getting up in the middle of the night to go to work.
And it was a genuine concern that he had because he didn't want to lose this other support system. And I said, don't worry, she's going to be fine and mommy will be fine too and you will be fine. And the other thing was we were planning on going on a trip to California at the time, again, not expecting that I was going to get fired, not expecting that I was going to be filing this lawsuit.
So I told my husband, You should still take them. And I will be here by myself and endure this all by myself. So in a way, it was wonderful because my children were not there to witness all the reporters chasing me down and camping out outside my house for days. But the flip side of that was that I was by myself. But in my life, I've been by myself for a lot of monumental decisions.
It's just the way that it's worked out. And so I've been taught how to dig really deep. So it was bad being by myself, but at the same time, I've been there before. And so I knew how to handle that situation.
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Chapter 8: What changes has Gretchen made through her advocacy work?
Take me to the day after, right? So your family is going away. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's beautiful that you let that. And then you need to sit there. You don't know that it's going to become...
kind of your legacy and your calling and your way of changing millions of lives you didn't know that at that point I'm sure of that right so how do you take it do you cry in the corner like what do you do I would be frantic
Yeah, well, thank you for asking that because actually this is a really important lesson for people if they're ever going to go through something tough in their life and you find out who your friends are. I mean, that's the first thing. It's almost like when somebody dies and people don't know what to say and so they say nothing. They don't reach out to people.
That happened to me with this in a big way. People who live on my street have never acknowledged that this happened to me, some people. I had a woman come up to me two years later and say, you know, I was going to send you some sort of an email when this happened, but I just figured you were too busy. And I was like, what? I was sitting here in a pool of emotion.
And so then she did send me this wonderful email after the fact. And I said, thank you so much for sending me, even though it's two years later, because it means so much to me. And so my lesson to people is if you know somebody who's going through a really tough time and you don't feel comfortable reaching out, reach out.
because they will appreciate it so much because they are so by themselves, which by the way is what companies and people who are doing bad things to people, they want you to feel like you're by yourself because then maybe you don't come forward because it's such a lonely feeling. They want you to suffer.
So the more that people can reach out to you and let you know that you're not alone, it's really important. For me personally, I had a very close knit group of friends who I went to have dinner at their house that night so that I wouldn't be by myself. Actually, my minister at the time said, sent me some Bible verses.
It was just whatever way in which you can pick up somebody, I think it's really important for people to know that, that they can be very helpful to others. I didn't sleep at all because my phone was ringing off the hook all night. My home phone, reporters were trying to find me, wanting to get comment. The next day, I didn't know what to do with myself.
So I actually drove to one of my lawyer's houses and stayed there with them all day just for comfort. But the way in which my case immediately got world attention, was nothing that we ever expected. We knew it would have attention, but we didn't know it would be that much. But the biggest thing was we didn't know that Fox would announce that they were going to start an investigation.
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