ESPN Nears Mike Garafolo Deal As It Goes All In on NFL Reporters
One week ago, Front Office Sports was first to report the news of a bombshell workplace misconduct lawsuit filed against Fox Sports by a former hairstylist.
The 42-page lawsuit takes a kitchen-sink approach; enumerating the whole litany of claims takes a lot of words. The most salacious of them are against FS1 exec Charlie Dixon, former host Skip Bayless, and current host Joy Taylor.
Fox, Fox Sports, FS1, and FS2 are all named as defendants in the suit.
The plaintiff, Noushin Faraji, accuses Bayless of years of sexual harassment, offering her $1.5 million for sex, and accusing her of sleeping with Shannon Sharpe; she accuses Taylor of sleeping with Dixon and Emmanuel Acho; she accuses Dixon of grabbing her buttocks at a bar, and elevating Taylor thanks to their relationship; she accuses Fox of ignoring multiple complaints she lodged with HR over the years.
The lawsuit has possible ripple effects beyond those named in the document. Marcellus Wiley, who hosted the FS1 show Speak for Yourself for four years and was replaced on the show in 2022 by Joy Taylor and LeSean McCoy, told Jason Whitlock in the wake of the lawsuit, “Lawyers are reaching out to me. Because when they saw me get surprised by the allegations, especially the one about Charlie Dixon, they said, ‘That is actionable.’ Now I’m trying to make sure that everything that I went through, and everything that I read in that article, is actually true.” It sounds like Wiley is getting legal advice urging him to file his own lawsuit for wrongful termination.
What will happen next? What will Fox do with Dixon? Who else will come out of the woodwork to corroborate or deny the claims? All we know for sure is that the lawsuit won’t go quietly into the night.
By Friday, perhaps the news cycle around the lawsuit had died down just a little bit, giving Fox’s crisis PR people a reprieve. But then came the news that Venu, the highly anticipated live sports streaming bundle from Fox, Disney, and WBD, is dead.
The news that Venu is canceled came as a shock just a few days after Disney bought 70% of Fubo, the “little guy” who had sued the television goliaths to block Venu from launching. (Fubo CEO David Gandler told me in an interview in October, “Our goal is to really demonstrate the negative impact these types of companies have had on the industry as a whole, particularly over the last 35 years, and consumers have really paid the price for it.” Nevermind.) By swallowing its loudest opponent, it looked like Disney did Fox and WBD a solid and cleared Venu’s path to launch. Nope.
“After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture, and not launch the streaming service,” the triumvirate said in a statement. “In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels.”
Or they determined that the effort has become more trouble than it’s worth, an albatross around their necks that lawmakers are still likely to block, even after Fubo got removed from the equation. A judge in August agreed with Fubo’s accusations that Venu was anti-competitive and granted a temporary injunction against Venu that stopped it from launching. In November, the DOJ and 17 state attorneys generals filed amicus briefs arguing Venu should not be allowed to watch. DealBook reports that the DOJ “was not pleased to learn that Disney had acquired a rival apparently to make an antitrust case go away.”
The death of Venu is arguably a more crushing loss for Fox than for Disney, which is more focused on its ESPN direct-to-consumer offering “Flagship” anyway. Fox has no such exciting imminent OTT offering, and WBD is reeling from missing out on the new NBA rights package but has responded by gobbling up other rights like college football games and Unrivaled women’s basketball.
On top of all this, Fox faces a $2.7 billion defamation suit on the news side of the house from electronic voting system company Smartmatic. It settled a similar lawsuit by paying Dominion Voting Systems $787 million in 2023.
Fox Sports has endured a tough past few years and remains the perennial No. 2 in the live sports broadcast race. It has attempted to make its college football show, Big Noon Kickoff, a real challenger to ESPN’s College GameDay, but the latter is far ahead, often with double the viewership. ESPN says 2024 was GameDay’s most-watched season ever.
Fox has gone all-in on soccer in the last few years, but losing the next two FIFA Women’s World Cups to Netflix was another blow.
Despite it all, Fox has the Super Bowl on Feb 9. It’s the biggest annual spectacle left on live TV and a chance for Fox to get some glory back. Tom Brady will be in the booth. Kendrick Lamar will be on stage at halftime. Fox will look to get people to stop talking about Netflix. FOS will be there with a team on the ground.
