Ailes Legal Team Wants to Move Harassment Suit to New York

By Chris Ariens 

Roger Ailes‘s attorneys have filed another motion in Gretchen Carlson‘s sexual harassment case against him. After removing the case to U.S. District Court in New Jersey last week, today attorneys requested that the case be moved to U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in New York City.

Carlson filed suit July 6 in Superior Court in New Jersey. The Ailes team argues that Carlson lives in Connecticut, that Ailes’s “primary residence” is in New York, and that all of the alleged harassment “occurred at her place of employment in New York City.”

The motion also continues to argue that Carlson, bound by her employment contract, was to bring any complaints to a 3-person arbitration panel. “Courts have uniformly held that an employee such as Ms. Carlson cannot evade an agreed-to arbitration clause in a contract with her employer by suing only an individual corporate officer in court,” the motion argues.

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“The goal of Ms. Carlson’s entire campaign is obvious: besmirch Mr. Ailes’s reputation so that he will pay her an exorbitant settlement,” his attorney states.

For this motion, Ailes also brought on the law firm Quinn Emanuel, which includes longtime Fox News political analyst Susan Estrich as partner.

“Gretchen Carlson’s attorney has led a concerted smear campaign to prejudice the rights of Roger Ailes in this case,” Estrich says in a statement. “Her attempt to game the system so as to avoid the arbitration clause for her client’s baseless allegations is contrary to law and unsupported by the facts.”

Carlson’s attorneys plan to file a motion that objects to what they call “judge shopping.”

“After invoking jurisdiction of the New Jersey federal court and filing a motion there, Mr. Ailes decided that he doesn’t like the judge assigned to this case and he illegally is attempting to judge shop by now seeking to move the lawsuit to another jurisdiction,” said Nancy Smith, Carlson’s attorney. “We feel confident that the law will not allow such maneuvering.”

A Fox News spokesperson responded to the response: “We’re trying to get this to the court where it belongs – if anything, Gretchen Carlson’s lawyer was attempting to judge shop by having this heard in her comfort zone of state court in Bergen County, where neither Roger nor Carlson reside. This is the latest false statement she has made. She has tried to rig this case to deny Mr. Ailes the agreed-upon forum, which is arbitration.”

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