Fox Paid $4M to Assistant After Booting Kimberly Guilfoyle

Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, now a major fundraiser for the Trump campaign, faced allegations of sexual harassment before leaving the network in July 2018, as HuffPost reported at the time, though her lawyer said the claims were "unequivocally baseless," per CNN. Now, the New Yorker is reporting that Guilfoyle—chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee and the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr.—was forced out before Fox paid upward of $4 million to her accuser, a female assistant. In a draft complaint sent to company executives in November 2018, the unidentified woman claimed she was forced to work from and sleep at Guilfoyle's New York apartment, where the host would expose her naked body, talk incessantly of her sex life, and showcase lewd photos of men with whom she'd been intimate.

Guilfoyle also allegedly told her assistant to submit to a Fox employee's demands for sexual favors and asked for a massage of her bare thighs, according to people familiar with the complaint, which is subject to a nondisclosure agreement. Per the New Yorker, the assistant also claimed Guilfoyle offered up to $1 million in hush money and other favors around August 2017 if the woman agreed to lie to lawyers hired to investigate sexual misconduct at the network. Those lawyers had begun looking at claims the same assistant made against host Eric Bolling, whom the woman also served. Bolling, who's denied wrongdoing, left Fox in September 2017. Guilfoyle similarly denies any misbehavior in a statement. "In my 30-year career working … in media and in politics, I have never engaged in any workplace misconduct of any kind," she says. (More Kimberly Guilfoyle stories.)