From Fox News to #MeToo: Lifting the Voices of Sexual Harassment Victims
Gretchen Carlson, a former CBS News and Fox News journalist, will visit the University of Notre Dame to talk about legislative victories that lifted workers’ voices.
Carlson became an internationally recognized advocate for women’s rights after her bold actions against Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes in 2016 helped pave the way for the #MeToo movement. She is the co-founder of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit organization that works to end silencing mechanisms in the workplace that keep toxic issues secret.
Carlson will participate in a fireside chat with Jennifer Mason McAward, director of the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights in the Keough School of Global Affairs and an associate professor of law at Notre Dame Law School.
This event is hosted by the Klau Institute with cosponsorship from the Law School, the Department of American Studies, the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy, the Gender Studies Program, and the Institute for Social Concerns.
About the speaker
Gretchen Carlson is an honors graduate of Stanford University who also studied at Oxford University. As a child, she was a violin prodigy who performed with the Minnesota Orchestra as a soloist at 13 and later became the first classical violinist to win Miss America in 1989.
As a journalist, she has been a national correspondent and anchor for CBS, one of the hosts of Fox & Friends, and the host of her own show, The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson. She is a frequent contributor to CNN and MS Now, and the author of two bestselling books, Be Fierce and Getting Real. Her story of harassment and retaliation at Fox News was the subject of a Showtime miniseries, The Loudest Voice, and a feature film, Bombshell, both of which were released in 2019.
Working with a bipartisan coalition of legislators in Congress, her signature advocacy achievements include the passage of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (2022) and the Speak Out Act (2022) — two significant changes in labor law that eradicated arbitration and predispute nondisclosure agreements for workplace sexual misconduct. More recently, she has been instrumental in advocating for the passage of the Protecting Older Americans Act, which would eliminate forced arbitration for age discrimination.
Carlson serves on the advisory council for the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and the advisory board of the Center for Ethical Leadership in Media at the University of Texas at Austin.
Originally published at klau.nd.edu.