Even by the standards of Fox Corp, Fox Sports 1 seems like a pretty sinister place for an employee. Over the past few months, enough lawsuits, complaints, and allegations have emerged to suggest that the workplace environment is so rotten and sinister that it might be best to raze it and start over.
The big story this week is former FS1 and for-now ESPN talking head Shannon Sharpe, who is being accused of rape in a lawsuit filed by a Nevada woman. On Thursday, as Sharpe announced that he would "step aside temporarily" from his job at ESPN, Front Office Sports reported that while he worked as a co-host on Fox Sports 1's Undisputed, he and the network settled with a female production assistant who said he choked her in a workplace setting. ("On one occasion, [Sharpe] and a few colleagues were involved in some light physical interaction in a playful context," Sharpe's rep told Front Office Sports.)
Sharpe's counterpart on the now-defunct Undisputed, Skip Bayless, abruptly left FS1 last year. This past January, he was named in a lawsuit by hairstylist Noushin Faraji, who worked for FS1 and said that the commentator repeatedly harassed her, at one point offering her $1.5 million to have sex with him. Additionally, Faraji filed suit against Joy Taylor, the former moderator for Undisputed, as well as Charlie Dixon, the executive vice president of content for FS1. Faraji alleged that Taylor and Dixon were romantically involved; that Dixon groped Faraji at a party in 2017; that once her friendship ended with Taylor, Taylor belittled her and made her life miserable in the workplace; and that Dixon and FS1 eventually pushed Faraji out of her job after she made formal complaints about her treatment.
Dixon was the focus of separate litigation by former FS1 employee Julie Stewart-Binks, who said in her lawsuit filed earlier this year that Dixon forcibly kissed her at a hotel in January 2016. Stewart-Binks alleged that she reported what happened to human resources, but nothing happened. A few months later, her contract wasn't renewed.
“They knew and didn’t do anything about it,” Stewart-Binks told Katie Strang of The Athletic, in an article published in January. “It meant they didn’t care about the damage done to me and how it affected others.”
Fox Sports reportedly placed Dixon on administrative leave in February, but he remains with the company. In a prior era, a different FS1 executive received a different punishment. Onetime ESPN exec Jamie Horowitz joined FS1 in May 2015, almost two years after the channel launched, so he could fill the programming with the sports shouting he knew best. In 2017, he was fired after Fox began an internal investigation into workplace sexual harassment. The Los Angeles Times reported that "the company interviewed several women at L.A.-based Fox Sports about Horowitz’s behavior." In the years since, he worked at WWE, a company with its own horrific workplace environment, and co-founded Omaha Productions with former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning.
Horowitz, Sharpe, and Bayless are no longer at FS1; Dixon still is, and Taylor returned in March after a two-week absence off the air. She agreed to participate in a profile with The Cut published earlier this month, but declined to give any substantive answers about the network's workplace when asked by the author, Irin Carmon. The article's most insightful quote about Fox Sports came via email from Katie Nolan, who worked at FS1 for four years: "Charlie Dixon sucks. On the record."
The ongoing litigation means that the parties involved will not elaborate beyond what is filed in court, as is standard. The necessary denials and no-comments have already been issued; the settlements may come soon. But a reasonable person can look at all of this and conclude that regardless of the legal outcomes here, there is something fundamentally irreparable about FS1. Sharpe and Bayless were already odious in public; now they've been accused of being even worse in private. In reaction to the lawsuit against Taylor, former FS1 commentator Jason Whitlock used his conservative media show to say truly heinous shit about her, remarks that would've merited an HR investigation if they still worked together. Horowitz and Dixon were not low-level issues; they were at the executive level, and previously at ESPN. If the leadership above them was unaware of what was happening, they should be fired for incompetence. And all of this was done in service of airing some of the emptiest, most obnoxious sports programming in existence.
