Fired Fox News Host Ed Henry Is Suing Everyone in Media: His Former Employers, and Now CNN and NPR

Former Fox News anchor Ed Henry, who was fired after being accused of raping one of his colleagues, is already suing his former network for defamation. He’s now adding several more defendants to his list, going after CNN, National Public Radio, along with NPR journalist David Folkenflik and CNN hosts Brian Stelter and Alisyn Camerota. Henry was also a former White House correspondent for CNN. And there’s an additional tangle in this sordid web: Henry’s wife, Shirley Hung Henry, is currently the chief Washington editor for NPR News. The couple married in 2010.

Fox News fired Henry a year ago after receiving a complaint from the attorney of a former employee that the network said involved “willful sexual misconduct in the workplace years ago.” He was initially suspended, and then after an investigation from an outside law firm, his termination was announced. Henry has denied the allegations.

Henry had also been previously suspended by Fox News in 2016 after allegedly having an affair with a Las Vegas stripper.

Earlier this week, Henry filed a complaint against Fox News and the network CEO Suzanne Scott for defamation, claiming that Scott had “sandbagged” him with a statement announcing his termination in an effort “to save her own career and burnish her image as a tough, no nonsense female executive who cleaned up Fox News.” In a statement responding to the lawsuit, Fox said it conducted a “thorough investigation” of the claims against Henry and stands by its decision to fire him for sexual misconduct. The network also defended Scott’s work to reform Fox News culture.

The new complaint against CNN and NPR includes the Fox News lawsuit as an exhibit and claims a similar story: that Henry and his accuser, former Fox Business producer Jennifer Eckhart, had engaged in a “consensual affair” that ended in 2017, and that Fox News executives “scapegoated” him to attempt to rehabilitate the network’s reputation after high profile scandals regarding former CEO Roger Ailes and former host Bill O’Reilly.

Henry alleged that Eckhart had responded favorably to his text messages and sent “unsolicited, sexually-explicit photographs of herself” to him:

Ms. Eckhart and her lawyers selectively quoted sexually-explicit text messages that Mr. Henry and Ms. Eckhardt exchanged during their consensual affair, omitting those portions that showed the relationship was, in fact, consensual. For example, Ms. Eckhardt’s original complaint alleged that Mr. Henry sent her unwanted “lewd and graphic sexual messages,” including one in which he said, “I’d like to wipe you with my tongue.” In his motion to dismiss, Mr. Henry noted that Ms. Eckhart failed to include her response to that message: “I bet you would, dirty boy. Come n get it ;).” That sentence alone shoots a gigantic hole through Ms. Eckhart’s claim – in all versions of her complaint – that she never had any romantic interest in Mr. Henry…Furthermore, Ms. Eckhart and her lawyers omitted the fact that she had sent unsolicited, sexually-explicit photographs of herself to Mr. Henry while they were dating. [Citations omitted.]

Folkenflik “has a longstanding grudge against Fox News,” Henry’s complaint stated, pointing out a book Folkenflik wrote about the Murdoch media empire. A July 1, 2020 tweet and article by Folkenflik “falsely implied” Eckhart’s accusations were true and that Henry had a “history of sexual misconduct” at Fox News, the complaint said.

An NPR spokesperson told Mediaite in a statement: “NPR stands behind David Folkenflik’s reporting and will vigorously defend it against this meritless claim. Millions of Americans trust NPR to provide accurate information about the world and their communities every day; we take this responsibility very seriously.”

Henry’s complaint took similar issue with Stelter and Camerota of CNN, alleging that the two have “longstanding grudges against Fox News and/or individuals associated with the company,” and citing a July 21, 2020 segment in which Folkenflik’s article was mentioned.

In that segment, the complaint stated, Stelter said that Henry “was known to be a problem internally,” and Camerota made other comments calling Fox News “rotten to the core” for allegedly knowing that Henry was committing these acts of sexual misconduct. Camerota had accused Ailes of sexually harassing her in 2017 when she was at Fox News, and like Folkenflik, Stelter has written a book about Fox News.

“As journalists, Ms. Camerota and Mr. Stelter (like Mr. Folkenflik) should have known that allegations in a lawsuit are not necessarily true, and that one may not recklessly portray those allegations as true.”

CNN declined to comment on the suit.

Ty Clevenger, Henry’s attorney, said in a statement to Mediaite that his client “is a journalist’s journalist who won the top award for excellence in White House coverage twice, so he reluctantly brings this action,” because “there is no excuse for sloppy, reckless journalism that smears him or anyone else.”

“CNN and NPR will be held accountable for what they’ve done to Ed,” Clevenger continued, “and given their animosity toward Fox News, I suspect they will be serving a lot of interesting subpoenas on Fox.”