A former Fox News staffer is accusing Tucker Carlson's former top producer, Justin Wells, of sexual assault and harassment, according to a lawsuit filed in Manhattan court on Monday.
The lawsuit filed by former Fox News Edge producer Andrew Delancey, which was first reported on by The Washington Post, claims that Wells repeatedly grabbed Delancey's genitals while the staffer was visiting his apartment in 2008. Wells previously worked as the senior executive producer for Carlson's talk show on Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, before the show was canceled in April.
Wells has previously been described as Carlson's "right-hand man," and was fired from Fox News this spring after Carlson's prime-time show was nixed. At the time of the alleged encounter with Delancey, according to the lawsuit, Wells was working as a senior producer for the Fox News show On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.
What the Lawsuit Says
According to the lawsuit, which was shared with Newsweek by Delancey's attorneys, Wells first contacted Delancey through Facebook Messenger in August 2007, during which time Delancey was a producer at Fox 13 in Tampa Bay. Wells, on the other hand, was working as a producer for Fox 5 in New York City.
In a later exchange in February 2008, Wells reportedly encouraged Delancey to move to New York City, after which point Delancey shared his resume with Wells. The staffer eventually moved to the city in September 2008 after accepting a producer position on the Fox News Edge team.
During Delancey's first few weeks at Fox News, Wells reportedly showered the lesser-senior staffer "with gifts," and repeatedly "stressed" that his status at Fox News could help Delancey move up in his career. Eventually, Delancey was invited over to Well's apartment "so that they could become more familiar with each other," read the lawsuit.
The suit claims that, after offering Delancey an alcoholic drink, Wells "violently forced" himself onto the staffer, including attempting to take off Delancey's clothes and "aggressively" grabbing at his genitals, "causing him severe pain." The lawsuit reads that Delancey rejected Wells' advances on two different occasions before leaving the apartment.
Delancey's legal team also writes that the staffer went to a higher-up Fox News employee, who is described as "a senior female co-worker at Fox News Edge," about the encounter not long after the alleged assault occurred. The employee in question shared that Wells had also assaulted her in a previous encounter and that Fox News' human resources team and the appropriate supervisors were told of the incident. Wells also reportedly "admitted to the harassment of this female employee in a letter that was provided to Fox," read the lawsuit.
After the conversation with a co-worker, Delancey took his complaints to his supervisor at the time, Mykel McCarthy. According to the civil suit, however, McCarthy told Delancey not to alert the network's human resources department about the alleged assault, saying that Delancy "could not 'trust' them." The suit also accused McCarthy, who is gay, of "frequently" inviting younger gay producers that he supervised at Fox News out for drinks, during which he would make "inappropriate remarks about other Fox employees."
"Mr. McCarthy made these employees, including Mr. Delancey, swear not to inform upper management of anything that was said during their discussions," read the lawsuit. "This further led Mr. Delancey to believe that he could not make complaints as he would be violating his supervisor's directives."
The Fox Corporation, as well as the Fox News Network, are also listed as defendants in the lawsuit. Newsweek reached out to Fox News executive Irena Briganti via email for comment Monday evening.
What Wells' Defense Team Says
In a statement shared with Newsweek, Wells' attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, called Delancey's lawsuit "meritless," noting that it was "filed 15 years after the alleged incident and mere days before the extended statute of limitations would have run." The Washington Post reported that a brief version of Delancey's suit was filed in late November just ahead of the deadline for New York's Adult Survivors Act, which briefly lifted the statute of limitations for sexual assault victims to file civil complaints.
"Mr. Wells denies the allegations unequivocally, and will contest them vigorously," Dhillon added. "This is yet another attempt by a law firm with a history of suing Fox and its former employees to cash in on frivolous allegations."
Dhillon's office also shared a statement from Carlson regarding the lawsuit, who dismissed Delancey's claims because they were several years old.
"As a general matter, if you believe you've been the victim of a sex crime, you have a moral obligation to alert police, so it doesn't happen to someone else," Carlson said. "If you wait 15 years to cash in with a civil suit, no one should take you seriously. I certainly don't."
The New York-based law firm representing Delancey, Filippatos PLLC, also represented former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, who sued the Fox Corporation, Carlson and other stars of the network earlier this year over accusations of a hostile and discriminatory workplace. Grossberg also accused the network of pressuring her into providing misleading testimony in the $1.6 billion defamation case brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems.
Fox and Grossberg settled the lawsuit for $12 million in June, reported Reuters.
Update 12/4/23 7:10 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Kaitlin Lewis is a Newsweek reporter on the Night Team based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her focus is reporting on national ... Read more
