Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Female Fox News Correspondent Sues Company, Local NY Fox5 News Director for Sexual Harassment

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Roger Ailes and Fox News are back in boiling water again. Fox News is being sued, along with New York Fox 5 News Director Byron Harmon, for sexual harassment by an Emmy winning female reporter. Ailes isn’t a defendant, but his name and his alleged activities are outlined specifically.

The suit was filed by Lidia Curanaj, who details Ailes’s randy and inappropriate behavior in detail. She was on the local news here in 2011, met Ailes at a dinner, and he invited her to come see him about moving up to the network. In his office, she says, Ailes asked her to twirl around, said he liked what he saw, told her Fox News female anchors’ legs had to be good. Then he called her boyfriend, a State Senator, and asked “if the sex was good.”

Oh boy. Curanaj, who’s still at Fox5, obviously has had enough. You know, she’s from the Bronx. She also has two two local Emmy Awards. She’s also suing her news director, Byron Harmon. It just gets better and better. Curanaj says Harmon told her– thinking she was Albanian– that “all Albanians are criminals or doormen.” She’s American of Montenegrin descent. Among other things.

Here’s the complaint.

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Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz411. He wrote the FOX411 column on FoxNews.com from 1999 to 2009, where he covered Michael Jackson, and previously wrote the "Intelligencer" column at New York magazine in the mid-1990s, where he covered the O.J. Simpson trial. He also edited Fame magazine. His bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Vogue, Details, and the Miami Herald. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Awards (Film and Television branches), and his movie reviews are tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. With D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he co-produced the 2002 documentary "Only the Strong Survive," which screened at Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

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