Even As She Sues Fox, Andrea Tantaros Defends Herself in Another Lawsuit

By Chris Ariens 

Former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros filed a sexual harassment suit against the network a year ago this month. Today, it’s been revealed that she is a defendant in a suit against her.

In 2015 a man named Michael Krechmer signed on to assist Tantaros in the writing of her book Tied Up In Knots. Krechmer sued Tantaros last October, but because he’d signed a confidentiality provision, no names were used.

THR’s Eriq Gardner takes a look at the lawsuit that followed, and why it was unsealed just yesterday.

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Krechmer and Tantaros entered into a collaboration agreement in May, 2015. Krechmer alleges that a couple months later, the two agreed to terminate the agreement in favor of a new “Ghostwriting Agreement,” where he’d be paid a flat fee of $150,000. But the latter was an oral deal. Tantaros allegedly did not want to negotiate a deal with Krechmer’s agent because she “feared” it would “cause her editor to discover that she was not writing the book herself” and the book’s publisher, Harper Collins, “would cancel the book if they discovered that there were any negative issues in the writing process, particularly since she was already running more than two years behind schedule, and she would “suffer professional repercussions and personal humiliation if her colleagues at Fox News discovered that the publication agreement with Harper Collins was cancelled.”

The reason this is coming to light now is that Tantaros sought a preliminary injunction to keep the suit secret. But the judge denied the injunction. Krechmer claims that as of last October, when he filed the suit, he’s only been paid $30,000 for his work.

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