Federal probe of Fox News focuses on potential disguising of harassment payout
Federal prosecutors are looking into whether Fox News Channel and its parent company tried to disguise a $3.15 million payment to a former employee who said she had a 20-year affair with the network’s former chairman, Roger Ailes, according to people involved with the investigation.
Investigators in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York have focused on a payment to Laurie Luhn, a former Fox booker and event planner who left the company in 2011 with the seven-figure severance package. Luhn later claimed that she had engaged in a consensual but a mentally abusive, relationship with Ailes and that several of his lieutenants facilitated the assignations and were aware of his alleged mistreatment of her.
.. A series of such payments could be considered material not because of their size but because they could raise concerns among investors about the stability of the company’s management or finances.