Thursday, March 14, marked the second anniversary of the horrific attack in Ukraine that saw Fox News’ correspondent Benjamin Hall severely injured and killed two of his colleagues, cameraman Pierre Zakrewski and network consultant/Ukranian journalist Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova.
Now, two years after the tragic event, Kuvshynova’s family has filed a lawsuit against Fox News, accusing the network of wrongful death, fraud and defamation. They are also challenging the official narrative of the moment Sasha was killed.
Kuvshynova’s parents allege that Fox News did not adequately protect its reporting team at that time and that they were pressured to venture into a dangerous area despite multiple warnings from residents and its security contractors.
In an interview with NPR, Stephen Humphreys, the Kuvshynovas’ attorney, said, “It’s time for Fox to come clean for her, for better or worse, and deal with the consequences.” He added, “The thing that’s most important for the Kuvshynovas, when they think about their daughter, is that this doesn’t ever happen to anybody else again.”
Also, in the suit, the family is saying that the official account of Sasha’s death, as recounted in Hall’s memoir, Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make It Home, published last year by HarperCollins, a Fox News corporate sibling, is false.
In a statement sent to TVNewser, Fox News said, “While we understand the grief and continue to mourn the loss of both Pierre Zakrzewski and Sasha Kuvshynova, we will respectfully defend against the inaccurate claims within this lawsuit. The safety of our journalists has always been our number one priority, and we are immensely grateful to the Fox News reporters who have covered the war in Ukraine and we remain committed to reporting from the region.”
In a Washington Post story from Nov. 2022, Zakrzewski’s wife said her husband had felt confident in their safety, noting New York Times journalists had made the same trip the day before. The same story cited Ukrainian reporter Andriy Dubchak, who worked with the New York Times on that assignment. According to the reporter, there was “a lot of shelling.”
Dubchak added, “No one knew where the front line was. It was really unpredictable.”