Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Gretchen Carlson: The Journalist Who Defied Fox News and Exposed Workplace Abuse | E110

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

In 2016, former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson made a bold move that transformed the conversation around workplace harassment. After enduring years of mistreatment, she filed a lawsuit against Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Despite the immense personal and professional risks, this courageous act helped spark the #MeToo movement, giving a voice to countless women who had suffered in silence. Now, through her nonprofit, Gretchen is working to dismantle the silencing mechanisms that allow harassment to thrive in the workplace. In this episode, Gretchen joins Ilana to share how her painful experiences fueled her mission to create safer, more inclusive environments for all. Gretchen Carlson is a journalist, author, and women’s rights advocate. As the co-founder of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit combating forced arbitration and toxic workplace environments, her advocacy has led to significant legislative changes. In this episode, Ilana and Gretchen will discuss: (00:00) Introduction  (02:15) The Decision to File a Sexual Harassment Lawsuit (04:42) Why Most Victims Struggle to Speak Out (11:40) The Role of a Support System in Tough Times (15:19) Learning to Advocate for Herself as a Child (17:57) From Violin Prodigy to Miss America (23:37) Building a Thick Skin as Miss America (26:47) Facing Sexual Assault Early in Her Career (30:00) How to Foster Safe and Inclusive Workplaces (37:11) Balancing Ambition, Family, and Career in TV (42:19) Creating Change Through Reforms and Advocacy (48:24) Overcoming Rejection in Nonprofits Gretchen Carlson is a journalist, author, and women’s rights advocate. As the co-founder of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit combating forced arbitration and toxic workplace environments, her advocacy has led to significant legislative changes, including the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. The bestselling author of Getting Real and Be Fierce, Gretchen was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2017. Connect with Gretchen: Gretchen’s Website: gretchencarlson.com  Gretchen’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gretchen-carlson  Resources Mentioned: Gretchen’s Book, Getting Real:  https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Real-Gretchen-Carlson/dp/0143109243  Gretchen’s Book, Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Fierce-Stop-Harassment-Power/dp/1478992174  Lift Our Voices: liftourvoices.org  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training

Wow, this show is going to be incredible. So buckle up and I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. But before we get started, I want to ask you for a favor. See, it's really, really important for me to help millions of people elevate their career, fast-track to leadership, land dream roles, jump to entrepreneurship or create portfolio careers. And this podcast is all about enabling this for millions of people to see a map of what it actually takes for big leaders to reach success.

So subscribe and download so you never miss it. Plus, it really, really helps me continue to bring amazing guests. Okay? So let's dive in. Why do we ingrain in our culture to penalize people who come forward? Gretchen Carlson. She is a trailblazing journalist, former host of Fox News. In July 2016, she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes.

Dozens of other women also stepped forward. Fox took away the career that I had killed myself for. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. When I did what I did in 2016, you know, the number one thing my lawyer said to me is, they're gonna kill you. They will do everything in their power to malign you, to call you a liar, to dig up everything in their past life, you know, and make it all a negative.

That all happened. What happened immediately after I filed the lawsuit was that I started hearing from women all across the world, and they all had the same eerie, similar story, which was, I did what you did, I came forward, I was fired, and I've never worked in my chosen profession ever again, and I was silenced. And I was like, holy crap. And so I rolled up my sleeves, I got to work, because I was like, we have to change the laws. The laws I helped pass are the two biggest labor law changes in the last 100 years.

And what they do is... Today, I have a really, really special episode with Gretchen Carlson. She is a trailblazing journalist, former host of Fox News, CBS. In July 2016, she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes. Dozens of other women also stepped forward. It was incredible to see it. She won the case and

received a public apology. Gretchen Carlson was one of the first really high publicity cases of the MeToo movement. She then decided to leverage her voice to fight for workers' rights in the workplace by co-founding the nonprofit organization Lift Up Voices. Gretchen, I am so, so, so excited to have you on the show today. I think it's gonna be an epic conversation, so thank you. Thank you for having me, looking forward to it. Usually we take you back to your childhood and what brought you to this career,

but I actually would love for you to take us to the moment. When you're in Fox News, I know there's a lot that you can't talk about, but the things are piling up, and there's a moment where you decide to literally, you call it, jump off the cliff on your own and file this lawsuit. Can you describe the situation, your workplace,

where are you at with this decision? It's one of the hardest decisions in anybody's life. Yeah, that's why I'm hesitating, but thank you so much for having me, because I always say that building up the courage that it takes to do something that monumental is not something that you decide the night before. I mean, it's not like you just suddenly go, hey, I think I'll do this massive change in my life and shake up the whole world about accusing somebody of this. So it really took me many,

many years of enduring bad behavior and at the same time, trying to walk a tightrope at work to do the best job that I could and also attempt to also get out. I can't give all the details of what was going on because I did sign a nondisclosure which is what I work against now, which we can get into. But I guess what eventually happened was that Fox took away the career that I had killed myself for.

I had reached the pinnacle of television. I was hosting the number one morning show on cable in the country, and they fired me. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. So at that point, I just finally decided that if I don't do this, who will? That was really the decision. I would just also add that I looked into the eyes of

my children who were middle schoolers at the time, and I just decided that I was doing it for their generation as well. I think there was sort of this misconception in our society even in 2016 that women had come much more far along in not only equality but in being treated with harassment in the workplace and one of the reasons why Americans were fooled about that is because of the silencing mechanisms like non-disclosures that have kept all these issues secret. And it gave this perception that women were being treated wonderfully.

And that wasn't the case. So I decided to jump. So take me there for a second. Because again, most women do not come forward. That's just the reality. We chatted a few seconds before. Most women have sexual harassment episode in their life. Most will never have come forward with it. I am to blame as well. I never talk about these things.

For me, there's resilient things that came as fear. Like they won't listen to me. I will need to prove myself. Why do I need to create trouble? At that point, you have kids, you have a husband, you have parents, you have friends. It takes a toll and you knew that you're doing something that will definitely make it to the media, right? This is not some thing that will go away. Gretchen, talk to me for a second about the fear of going public.

We still, almost nine years later now, women are still going to be penalized if they come forward. And especially back when I did what I did in 2016, you know, the number one thing my lawyer said to me is they're going to kill you. They will do everything in their power to malign you, to call you a liar, to dig up everything in their past life and make it all a negative. That all happened. But we've made a lot of strides since then with the work that I've done. I mean, women are actually believed now.

You've seen juries convict people of similar crimes because juries are also just more knowledgeable now about why women stay at their jobs in these types of situations, why women stay in these relationships, if it's domestic violence. There's been great strides, but with all the people who reach out to me,

I still say it's such a personal decision to come forward because you will probably be penalized. You probably will be fired. You probably won't work in your chosen profession ever again. And so it's a huge risk. And most people can't afford quite honestly to do that. And so they just suck it up and they endure. And that's what keeps this vicious cycle going

along with making sure that it's all secret. What I'm trying to do with the work at Lift Our Voices is normalize this enough where more and more women come forward, the more that we make it not such a one-off situation, the more that we can change the hearts and minds of people who run companies to not penalize people who come forward. It's a tangled web to fix, but currently, women are probably still going to be punished.

That day when you did that, you were pushed in the corner. You're at that point lost your job. You don't have to, but you decide to do this. How did your family take it? Did you talk to your kids before? Because I think that's also part of it. I don't want to hurt them, right?

Talk to me a little bit, because that's a fear. Yeah, and just to be clear, I had been preparing my lawsuit for months and months and months before they fired me. Honestly, my legal team never thought they were going to fire me because it was such an act of alleged retaliation then. It made it so crystal clear that I had done nothing wrong,

and so they were shocked when they fired me. So I don't want to give the implication that they fired me, and then I hurriedly put together a lawsuit. No, this was something that I had going on behind the scenes for quite some time. But back to my family, yes, it's hard on a marriage. It's not like you come home from work every day and say to

your partner, hey, this is what's happened to me at work. It's hard to come home to your husband and say, this is what another man is saying to me or doing to me. So there's that. My children were, as I said, in middle school, so very vulnerable age of acceptance already being difficult, friendships being fractured, and they were my paramount concern.

But I'll start with my parents who I'm still blessed to have in my life. I grew up in a small town in Minnesota, and Minnesotans are very nice people, very altruistic people. They don't really sue a lot of people. Right. So I think it took my parents a long time to get to

the point where they actually were supportive of what I was going to do. When they finally got to that place, I can still remember being on the phone with both of them and we were all very emotional. They finally said that they wanted me to do what I felt I needed to do. That was a big turning point for me because no matter how old you

get you still want the blessing of your parents. So that was number one. Number two, as I said earlier, looking in the eyes of my children, if we couldn't accomplish just to make this better for my generation, then what about my kids? If I don't do this, then they're gonna still be going through this.

And I didn't tell them until the night before because it had to be so secretive. I couldn't get out what I was doing. I couldn't give them until the night before because it had to be so secretive. I couldn't get out what I was doing. I couldn't give them the upper advantage of knowing what I was going to be doing. Which is also really hard. You carried a lot of weight on your shoulders at that point. Yeah, tons. I was carrying for every other woman that worked at Fox. That was just the starting point.

But I remember I was fired on June 23rd. I didn't file my lawsuit until July 6th. So it was a good two weeks of sitting, knowing that I had to sort of put on this game, even to my own staff. I just said I was going on an extended vacation because it was over the 4th of July holiday. You know, it happened to be my 50th birthday

right around that time, which was a wonderful birthday present. Hi, you're fired. So I had some reasonable excuses about why I might not be around for a while, but I had to keep it from all of my friends. So on the night I finally told my children and my son, the first thing he said was he looked at me and he goes,

mommy, he goes, what's gonna happen to Tara, our babysitter? And I was like, okay, that's a genuine concern, but what about mommy? But this wonderful babysitter had lived with us for 12 years, thankfully doing a wonderful job taking care of my children because I was getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a genuine concern that he had because he didn't want to

lose this other support system. I said, don't worry, she's going to be fine and mommy will be fine too, and you will be fine. The other thing was we were planning on going on a trip to California at the time. Again, not expecting that I was going to get fired, not expecting that I was going to be filing this lawsuit.

So I told my husband, you should still take them and I will be here by myself and endure this all by myself. In a way, it was wonderful because my children were not there to witness all the reporters chasing me down and camping outside my house for days. But the flip side of that was that I was by myself. But in my life, I've been by myself for a lot of monumental decisions. It's just the way that it's worked out.

And so I've been taught how to dig really deep. So it was bad being by myself, but at the same time, I've been there before. And so I knew how to handle that situation. Take me to the day after, right? So your family is going away. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's beautiful that you let that.

And then you need to sit there. You don't know that that's good or bad, but it's beautiful that you let that. And then you need to sit there. You don't know that it's going to become kind of your legacy and your calling and your way of changing millions of lives. You didn't know that at that point, I'm sure of that, right? So how do you take it? Do you cry in the corner? Like, what do you do? I would be frantic. Yeah, well, thank you for asking that because actually, this is a really important lesson for people

if they're ever going to go through something tough in their life and you find out who your friends are. I mean, that's the first thing. It's almost like when somebody dies and people don't know what to say, and so they say nothing, they don't reach out to people. That happened to me with this in a big way. People who live on my street have never

acknowledged that this happens to me, some people. I had a woman come up to me two years later and say, I was going to send you some sort of an e-mail when this happened, but I just figured you were too busy. I was like, what? I was sitting here in a pool of emotion. Then she did send me this wonderful e-mail after the fact, and I said, thank you so much for sending me,

even though it's two years later, because it means so much to me. My lesson to people is if you know somebody who's going through a really tough time and you don't feel comfortable reaching out, reach out because they will appreciate it so much because they are so by themselves. Which by the way is what companies and people who are doing bad things to people, they want you to feel like you're by yourself.

Because then maybe you don't come forward because it's such a lonely feeling. They want you to suffer. So the more that people can reach out to you and let you know that you're not alone, it's really important. For me personally, I had a very close-knit group of friends who I went to have dinner at their house that night so that I wouldn't be by myself. Actually, my minister at the time sent me some Bible verses. It was just whatever way in which you can pick up somebody,

I think it's really important for people to know that they can be very helpful to others. I didn't sleep at all because my phone was ringing off the hook all night. My home phone, reporters were trying to find me, wanting to get comment. The next day, I didn't know what to do with myself. I actually drove to one of

my lawyer's houses and stayed there with them all day, just for comfort. But the way in which my case immediately got world attention was nothing that we ever expected. We knew it would have attention, but we didn't know it would be that much. But the biggest thing was we didn't know that Fox would announce that they were going to start an investigation.

That was huge news because we just assumed that they would deny everything and call me a horrible person. I mean, that happened, but they also said that they were going to start an investigation. So it immediately took this interesting turn where I was thinking, wow, maybe I'm not going to spend the rest of my life crying my eyes out. Maybe this is going to turn into something good. So it was almost from the beginning,

an unexpected thing happened and then it just morphed into more unexpected, and my alleged perpetrator was fired within two weeks. It was unbelievable. That's incredible. We actually had Anne Baylor. She is the founder of Auntie Anne's Pretzels. She talked about years of harassment that she was afraid to come forward. Few months later, the whole Me Too started and it changed everything in the conversation.

But maybe at this point, I will take you back in time because I think we need to understand this bold Gretchen that is able to do these things because I don't take it lightly. But let's still go back in time. Gretchen, you grew up in a peaceful environment, right? You're already a high achiever. Talk to me a little bit about that. If anyone has ever listened to Garrison Keillor or read his books, Lake Wobegon is my hometown.

It's Anoka, Minnesota. It's a suburb of Minneapolis. At the time, like 14,000 people, not a big town at all. It was an idyllic upbringing with the Protestant work ethic, which was my mom said to me every day, you can be whatever you want to be in this world, but you're going to have to work incredibly hard.

And so I believed her. I grew up thinking, I'll be president of the United States. Why not? And that was so important. I found out later in life that lots of kids are not told that. And so it came with the caveat that you're going to have to work really hard.

I worked hard my whole life from early on. I played the violin early. I started when I was six and it just happened to click, and I started practicing hours and hours a day. From my music, I developed immense discipline in my life, and it gave me immense self-confidence going out on stage and doing so many competitions because the more I practiced, the better I got, and that gave me immense self-confidence going out on stage and doing so many competitions. Because the more I practiced, the better I got,

and that made me realize that when you invest time in things and effort, you have rewards. So that was really important in my life, also what my mom would tell me every day. But there was a moment when I was in kindergarten on the first day of school, where unfortunately back then, the teacher divided the kids into two groups, the kids who could read and the kids who could not read.

I don't think they do that anymore, but she unfortunately put me in the wrong group. She put me in the kids who could not read. I was so upset about it and I went up to her desk three times that day and I said, but Mrs. Barroncott, I know how to read. She kept saying, Gretchen, just go back and sit down and you'll be fine. I said, but Mrs. Barron caught, I know how to read and she kept saying, Gretchen just go back and sit down and you'll be fine.

I ran home from school, I can still feel myself rushing in yelling for my mom to say I was in the wrong group. She called the school and the next day it was sorted out. But I thought about that bold little girl a lot before I decided to jump off the cliff. Because what would have happened if I had not had that persistence in my heart and mind at five years old,

to stand up for myself just about reading, right? That could have changed my entire educational trajectory number one, but my life trajectory of, I learned from an early age that if I stood up for myself and I knew what I believed and I stood up for the truth, that it would turn out to be okay. And I thought about that little girl a lot

before I decided to do what I did. So you become this violin prodigy, if you will, but you do decide not to continue making that your profession. But it did come forward at the end. So talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah. I realized, number one, I saw a lot of unhappy musicians surrounding me.

I'm sure there's tons of people who are happy, but it seems like it really back to being solo by myself. Playing the violin and doing these kinds of competitions, I wanted to be a famous concert artist, the soloist that would come and play with the orchestras. Again, a very lonely solo experience. Winning a competition, it was all up to me. This was not a team sport.

I realized that to be the best of the best of the best, I was going to have to give up everything else in my life. And I would just have to have tunnel vision and not be able to do anything else. And I enjoyed so many other things in life. I was in drama in high school and I excelled as a student. And I quite honestly, as a teenager, liked boys. I mean, I wanted to do all these other things

and I never had time because I was practicing four hours a day. So I decided to quit when I was 17 and my parents were just really devastated by that. You can understand that now as an adult, you have this child that has this gift and now she says she doesn't want to do it anymore but you've invested all of this time and maybe she's not making the right decision for herself because she's not really an adult yet.

But I had decided that I wanted to live a more well-rounded life. So that's really when I went off to Stanford University and really focused on my studies. I didn't pick up the violin once. It's an odd story because I did have this massive talent. But I think when you're a kid, sometimes I was known as the violin girl, and I just wanted to be normal.

I mean, now we realize as adults, oh, it's really special to have something that you were good at. But at the time, I just wanted to fit in. So that factored into it as well. In many other twists and turns in my life, like how the hell did I become Miss America? Well, because half of your points are based on talent, and my mom got a brochure in the mail, and this was after I quit the violin,

and she was bound and determined to get me to play again. And she called me up. I happened to be studying at Oxford in England at the time. I was a junior in college. She said, I found something for you to do. And I said, what? And she said, Miss America. And I was like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm focusing on my studies. She's like, half your points are based on talent, and I just read that they're looking for Ivy League students to enter. My mom's a very powerful person in my life,

and so she got me into a position to agree to do this. Again, twists and turns, like how does a chubby little kid from a small town in Minnesota who plays the violin, it had never won before, and Minnesota wasn't in pageant state. How did it happen? But I just used all of the same hard work ethic and once she convinced me to do it, I decided, well, I'm really going to put

120 million percent into this then. I actually quit Stanford my senior year to come home and do nothing but prepare for this. There was a lot of luck involved, but it just happened to work out. So again, another like total detour in my life of now I'm Miss America. Like, what am I doing? Let's talk about that because I think that's fascinating, right? Because on one hand, you grow up as this incredibly high achiever

that is really good at things, right? Like the violin, the Stanford, the Oxford, you're well known for your smarts, et cetera. And suddenly you're this a little bit of, now I'm also gonna be well known for the woman that I am or what I look like, et cetera. How has this shift? Well, honestly, the only two reasons that I did,

well, three that I did Miss America was my violin. Because as my mom said to me, nobody's going to be able to touch your talent. Now, granted, there were tremendous talent. There were four other Juilliard students who were in the top 10 my year, opera and ballet, and I had studied at Juilliard. So we had immense talent. With half your points being based on talent,

you can understand how you would get to that point. But I had this talent, so that was one thing. I had the smarts to hopefully do well in the interview. But the other thing was, four things, I'm incredibly competitive. Then number four was that the money that you won was scholarship money for college. At the time, my parents had four children who were in college,

or going to be getting into college, and it's very expensive. If I won, I was going to be able to pay for my whole final year at Stanford, which is exactly what happened. Miss America at the time was the largest scholarship program in the world for women. People don't know that. Wow. I didn't know that.

Those were the reasons why I did it. After I won, I remember looking in the mirror that night and I was like, oh my God, this actually happened. Now what? Because I had focused so much on getting there, and I hadn't focused at all on what would it mean to actually be Miss America. And that was actually a really incredibly difficult transition for me, because this was 1989.

I mean, this was still back when Miss America was spending a lot of time sitting in drugstores and shopping malls signing autographs. And I was like, what am I doing with my life? This is not what I thought it was going to be. I really tried to perform my violin at every possible place. I tried to make sure that I could speak at every possible venue so that I could continue to spread the message and try to break down

the stereotypes that Miss America is not some dumb blonde. That was still existing a lot. It's followed me my whole career, quite honestly. People just assume that you're a bimbo. It was almost like my resume with all these achievements. All my achievements, they just disappeared. There was a time at CBS when I took it off my resume, actually, because it was just easier to not own up to it.

Now, I'm to the point like, look people, you've got to get past this. These are really smart women. But yeah, it was an interesting shift in my life and being looked at for my exterior. As I mentioned, I was a chubby kid, so I had built my self-confidence from the inside of my soul, not from my exterior at all.

And now I was suddenly being judged on my exterior. One of my celebrity judges wrote an entire book about me and how I was too fat to be Miss America, and he called me Miss Piggy throughout the whole book. Yeah. Yes, talk about shaming a person. Yeah, there were a lot of people that were really incredibly rude to me that year, including

journalists. Some of them I got back at once I got into the television industry. I happened to run into one of them and put her in her place after I had made it a little bit. But it's a horrible shaming experience. I mean, I think it really prepared me for actually what I went through later on at Fox. I wanted to say that because that builds a little bit of a thicker skin like hate is really hard to cope with especially if you're a nice girl and you want people to kind of like you and that's why it felt like that was

such a bold move that you did there. People say things that they don't understand that actually on this somebody on the other side is hearing that. Oh, exactly. When people were standing in line to get my autograph at some ridiculous drugstore event that I hated, I would actually hear people say when they got close, that's Miss America? Because I didn't look how they wanted me to. First of all, I'm five foot three,

but there was no category for height, but people just assumed that you're supposed to be some statuesque model to, I mean, first of all, I'm five foot three, right? But there was no category for height, but people just assumed that you're supposed to be some statuesque model, which I was. And I would have been dead last in Miss USA, which is all based on beauty. There's no talent, there's no scholarship, just to be clear. But yeah, it started to build my thick skin. And then when I got into the television industry,

my goodness, I mean, the things you hear from viewers as well, like, so by the time I got to Fox, my skin was really thick. I think it really prepared me and helped me for what I endured and made me have the ability to finally do something about it. And by the way, those are watching us on YouTube. She is freaking gorgeous, which is kind of annoying, but no, you're amazing. And she's incredibly smart, gritty.

Gretchen, first of all, you did have, and I think, again, we all do. I had my share of whatever, 18, 20 year old in the Air Force with massive sexual harassment that I shut up about because I didn't feel like I should talk about. Obviously as somebody somebody Miss America, you have these agents, you have your own share of things that you decided at that point not to share. Can you share a little bit about it? Yes. I can only imagine what you went through.

I hear from so many women in the military over the last nine years. My heart goes out to all of them and to anyone else who's a survivor of any kind of sexual misconduct. But yes, when I was Miss America, I was sexually assaulted twice. I never ever told anyone for 25 years until I wrote my memoir, which was called Getting Real. What happened was, so many women will be able to relate to this.

I was actually trying to get ahead again in life. It was coming to the end of my years as Miss America. I realized that maybe I would be interested in going into television. So I started cold calling people in the business, from agents to PR people to television executives. I actually got a huge meeting with a national television executive in New York.

He spent the whole day helping me and I thought, wow, he really likes me and I thought, wow, he really likes me and he thinks I'm smart and all this. We went to dinner and we were in the back of a car service and I was going back to my friend's apartment and all of a sudden, he was on top of me and his tongue was down my throat. I was like, what the hell is going on? I panicked. I somehow got myself away from him and got out of the car.

I was like, wait a minute, what just happened to me? You can't do that to me. Yet, I sobbed and sobbed. I never told anyone. Three weeks later, this time I was in LA, I was meeting with a high-powered PR executive. Again, in a car, I got into the passenger seat, he took my neck in his hands and he shoved my face into his crotch.

I couldn't breathe. I was like, what is happening to me again? I managed to get away from him. Again, never told anyone about these sexual assaults. It was actually when I was speaking to a Donald Trump accuser to write my book Be Be Fierce, after my situation at Fox, where I was telling her these stories and she said to me, Gretchen, you realized that that was sexual assault, right?

I said, no, no, no, no. She was Gretchen. That was sexual assault. I myself hadn't called it that, even though I had come forward already a year prior with sexual harassment. Years later. Yes. Women, what we do is we have these experiences, we stuff them down deep into our souls so

that we never think about them ever again because that's what society's told us to do. And that's what I had done. And it felt so liberating to have somebody put a name on it, what it actually was, and for me to actually own it, and to be proud to stand up and say, this was horrible that this happened to me, but I'm proud to share it with you in the hopes that you will

also feel comfortable sharing what has happened to you. Look, if I speak in front of 2,000 people and I ask them to raise their hands if they've ever faced any kind of sexual misconduct in their life, every single hand goes up. So everyone listening knows what we're talking about. But yeah, I faced it at an early age. Just as a caveat, that PR executive,

just to show you how the shame stays with you for your life, that PR executive, 25 years later, maybe 30, was walking the halls of Fox, up on the floor where strangers couldn't get up. So somebody had invited him, and I saw him walk past my office. And I went into panic. I started sweating. All those feelings came back about what he had done to me. I got up from my desk, I slammed the door, I was shaking.

I was like, how am I going to get out of my office without running into this person? That's how scared I was all those years later. And it shows you the shame that these kinds of situations put on women, that it was affecting me that much. I was still so scared of him all those years later. If you're feeling stuck, underpaid or unappreciated, or you're simply ready to take your career

and life to the next level, I have the perfect solution for you. We have a program that helps you fast-track and leap your reputation and career, become the best version of yourself, get the dream role you deserve, move up to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship, or even build a portfolio career. This program helps hundreds a year, and it will help you gain the income, influence, and impact that will transform the second part of your life. Watch our free training today at leapacademy.com slash free hyphen training. The link is in the show notes.

Now back to the show. One of the reasons that I know I didn't share is that fear. Nobody will leave me, I don't want to be a troublemaker, what if this closes doors? A lot of things. So at that point, what do you see? Why are people not sharing? What are some of the things that you see?

Because we're told not to. My colleague in Lift Our Voice is my non-profit. She says that for years, she was a political consultant. She gave advice to young women if they came to her for something bad, she would just say, oh, don't bring it up. This is what women deal with. Now, she'll say when we're on panels,

she'll be like, that was the biggest mistake I made in my life was not telling these women to actually come forward and say something because that's how you make change. The more people that come forward, at great risk. But the more people that come forward, the more we normalize this and the more that we push out the bad actors and hopefully start to celebrate the people that have the courage to tell the truth.

But what's been happening since the beginning of time, was just that we were told to shut up and endure and that this is what women have to deal with in order to get ahead. And hopefully my actions and the actions of so many other people before me and so many other people past have started to change that landscape. I said earlier, it's a tangled web to fix this and I've passed two two laws, federal laws to start the process. That forces change. When you change the law,

that forces behavioral change. But I often say that changing culture is more difficult than even passing bipartisan laws in this fractured America that we live in politically. That's saying a lot because that was really hard. But changing culture is really, really difficult because it's ingrained in us from an early age, how we treat people, how we think about people. Why do we ingrain in our culture to penalize people who come forward? I don't know,

but we do. And so that's why people stay silent. That's why they shut up. And then we add in silencing mechanisms and then you just have this horrible vicious cycle. My advice is that the more that we can put bravery inside of people by example, the more that we can start to change laws and that changes culture, the more we normalize the ability for people to come forward, the more that we can change the hearts and minds of men who still run the majority of the world

to understand these issues. It's a lot of different things that have to happen at the same time for things to actually change. I want to ask this because I also see a little bit of a pendulum, and I would love to hear your thoughts, and I totally didn't mean to go there in this podcast, but this is fascinating. I hope the listeners are enjoying this.

But there's a little bit of a pendulum. So when I grew up, yes, there was a little bit of sexual harassment in the military, but in the general sense, I grew up, we would hug our male partners or male peers. We would go to dinners. It felt fun. And to some extent, the pendulum flew in a way that now there's so much fear from almost over sexual harassment and what will happen, that it almost became so distant that I'm actually, do I want this trouble? Do I want another Anita Hill?

Do I want, should I just go with hiring a man, a man, right? So do you feel like there's a pendulum that can somehow be somewhere in the middle of, yes, there are just really clear boundaries, but except for that, it should be fun. Look, I think that that's a cop-out. When I started hearing that, that even our own vice president at the time,

Mike Pence said that men shouldn't take women out to dinner for work anymore. Like, what? Okay. You know when you are behaving badly. You know what crosses the line. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what's appropriate and what is not. It shouldn't be on the shoulders of women at work to have to

take another hit to not be able to go to dinners, to not be able to go to travel outings, to have men feel even more uncomfortable now. No, you should know how to behave is where we should be thinking. So that to me was like this massive cop out, like, well, we're just going to hire men now. Okay, go ahead. Go ahead because every study shows

that the more diversity you have, the greater your bottom line. So even if you only care about money, you should hire women and people of color. So that was, to me, was such a cop out because what was happening was that we had this shift in power. When this MeToo movement started, men were starting to be held accountable.

Women were starting to gain more power and voice, and so were people of color with the Black Lives Movement. That was a threat to the paradigm of which America has subsisted on for far too long. And so I think one of the reactions was what you just said was, well, then we're not going to hire you anymore. And we're not going to take you to dinner at work. Well, that's not the answer.

That's not the solution. That's not the solution. You know how to behave correctly. So just do it. And so that was really frustrating to me when I started hearing that as a cop out. I do understand the nuances. I'm not trying to be naive because I've had legitimate men say to me, to your point, should I hug somebody at work?

Should I say, hey, I love your dress? Hey, I noticed you got your hair done. That looks really great. Are women going to suddenly run to HR and file a harassment claim because you said any of those things that I just pointed out? No. Look, it ain't fun to come forward, and I can attest to that.

So the majority of the cases are horrible, horrible behavior, not somebody saying, I like your dress. Let's set the parameters, let's understand that we're going to work on this together. Let's not come up with cop-out excuses about how women shouldn't be employed anymore, because men just can't handle themselves. We have to have some reasonable parameters

to deal with this moving forward. I love your answer, Gretchen. Let's go back for a second to your media, because you grew in TV, you climbed the ladder. There's obviously some areas where you needed to reinvent and leap, which is the theme that I look at, Leap Academy, right? And there's some, also stages in your life.

There's marriage, there's kids, there's stages that actually cause you to like almost restart, like what's next, right? Talk to me a little bit about CBS and then climbing there and then moving from there to NBC and Fox. I came up the television world like the old school way, and I'm really grateful for that because what I mean by that is I went from city to city to city to city in

local television before I made it to the network. Television has just changed so dramatically since I started in it, and there's really no set pathway. If there was, everyone would follow it. But I'm really glad that I did it the way I did it because I did every single job behind the scenes while I was on camera as well. So I'm really glad that I did it the way I did it because I did every single job behind the scenes while I was on camera as well. So I learned how to edit,

I learned how to shoot, I learned how to write. That was just invaluable to me as I got to the top of my profession because I had the utmost respect for every single person on the team. Television is a team job. Many people who don't come up the way I did, get huge egos and they treat people horribly.

You can always tell a person on television who has not done it the right way because they just think it's all about them. Just as a note of reference, the photographer can make you fuzzy. If you're not nice to them, they can blur you. So the audio person can make your voice sound crazy. So I learned the right way. I started in Richmond, Virginia for two years,

and then I went to Cincinnati, and then I went to Cleveland, and then I went to Dallas. So I lived all over the place and it sucked moving and picking myself up all the time. I quite honestly put off personal relationships for quite some time because I knew if I got married,

it would be hard for the other person if they also had a serious career. I actually met my husband when I got to Cleveland in my 30s on a blind date. On the third date, I said to him, if you don't want to live in New York City eventually, don't call me back because that's where I'm going. He said, well, luckily, I do want to live in New York City eventually, don't call me back because that's where I'm going." He said, well, luckily, I do want to live in New York City. So he called me back. That was my mindset.

I was like, look, I've invested too much in my career already. This is where I want to go. Relationship sort of came second. But then in Cleveland, I got promoted. I was doing the weekend news there. I got promoted to the main Monday through Friday, and I was with another woman and we were the first two female local prime time newscast in the country.

Wow. It was wonderful until it wasn't because it didn't work. It's not because it was two women, it just didn't rate. So the other woman was born and bred in Cleveland, so I was the likely one to go. So I got fired a week after I got back from my honeymoon. Ouch.

I know. The general manager actually said to me something that was illegal, still is, was at the time, which was, don't worry, now that you're married, you'll be fine. And I was like, what? I'm 32 years old. This is who I am. This has nothing to do with being married. So I had a very tough first year of marriage because I was out of work and I knew to get another job, I was probably going to have to move to another place because that's the way TV works. And in fact, that's what happened.

I ended up getting a job in Dallas. I moved to Dallas, my husband didn't, so we commuted for the second year of our marriage. There was a lot of sacrifice there. But then he eventually moved to Dallas. I was only there 20 months and then I got a job with CBS in New York, so we were both happy and we moved there. Then I was a national correspondent for CBS.

I traveled the world. It was an amazing experience. Not a good job if you wanted to have children. I didn't have children at that point. I was on the road all the time. Then I got promoted to do the Saturday morning show for CBS. And morning shows are kind of a comfortable spot for women if they want to have children, because you're doing serious hard news,

but you're also doing more kind of fluff and you talk about yourself a little bit more. And so being pregnant and all that was probably a better option at that time. So then I had two kids back to back. And then when my son was three months old, was when I got the offer to go to Fox and do a morning show five days a week.

I went there strictly on ambition. I mean, this was my goal in life was to do a national morning show. It's a dream job. Yeah. First of all, this was more than 20 years ago at Fox. So Fox today is not what Fox was back then, as far as being a far-right entity. And also, how could I ever know what I was going to face there when I took the job, you know?

It's a great opportunity. Yeah. That's why I did it. You know, and then I was there 11 years, and a lot of it was hell. That sucks. That's about all I can I did it. You know, and then I was there 11 years and a lot of it was hell. That sucks. That's about all I can say about it. Right. Okay, so you win the lawsuit. I assume that's a really hard time.

How do you decide to reinvent yourself and create this legacy with books and your memoir and getting real and be fierce and now the trauma recovery pathways and the nonprofit. What is that reinvention that happens from that low point, I guess? Well what happened immediately after I filed the lawsuit was that I started hearing from women all across the country, actually all across the world. And they all had the same eerie similar story, which was, I did what you did, I came forward, I was penalized,

I was fired, and I've never worked in my chosen profession ever again, and I was silenced. I was like, holy crap. Not only was there an epidemic of bad misconduct in the workplace still, but there was an epidemic of silencing all these people and taking them out of their careers.

I was like, I have to do something about this. It was all of these voiceless women who were actually my inspiration. I rolled up my sleeves, I got to work. I went back to my same work ethic I've had my whole life that I honed in Minnesota as a little kid. I started walking the halls of Congress because I was like, we have to change the laws.

It was a perfect storm because there were so many groups of people who had been trying to change laws with non-disclosure agreements and with something called forced arbitration, which is another way we keep people silent at work. But they didn't have a well-known case to bring this into reality. Yeah, because nobody knows

what the hell forced arbitration is. They just don't understand it. They sign it in their contract, but they have no idea what that means, which is you can't actually sue. You have to go to this secret chamber of arbitration. And that's where everyone was going all these years, which is why nobody heard about any of these cases.

So I come along and I had a forced arbitration clause in my Fox contract. So I was also going to face the same fate, which is why my lawyers came up with the brilliant move to sue Roger Ailes personally to try and get around my forced arbitration clause. That's why my lawsuit was not against Fox because I would have been immediately thrown into the secret my forced arbitration clause. That's why my lawsuit was not against Fox, because I would have been immediately thrown

into the secret chamber of arbitration. So I start walking the halls of Congress. I suddenly have some sort of celebrity around this. All these people had the institutional knowledge. They'd been doing this for years. And we started creating interest in this. It took though five years for me to actually get enough bipartisan support to pass the first law, which was signed in March 2022.

Actually, if people can see behind me, right on the edges, those two things hanging behind me are my two laws. They both have photos with President Biden, but one of them actually has the pen that he used to sign the law, and he handed it to me right after. There were big events at the White House because the laws I helped pass are the two biggest labor law changes in the last 100 years. What they do is that they don't allow you to use forced arbitration anymore or non-disclosure agreements

for sexual misconduct at work. I mean, it's huge because you can't hide it anymore. Again, a twist and turn in my life, I'm like, okay, now I'm an expert on passing laws? What? You know, I've gone from playing the violin to being Miss America to doing TV, and now I'm passing laws. But it's a good testament to other people

who are not sure what they should do with their life or at a crossroads. You can always reinvent yourself. And the work I'm doing now will actually end up being my legacy. not sure what they should do with their life or at a crossroads, you can always reinvent yourself. And the work I'm doing now will actually end up being my legacy. It's so much more important than what I did as a journalist, even though I'm still doing that today too. But the work I'm doing now is just gonna be much more profound.

And I love that. And I think sometimes there's moments that define you, but also I tell our clients, I think sometimes it is darkest before the sunrise, right? It almost feels like that's kind of, it was for you. Like it almost builds you towards the person that can change now millions of lives and create such a big impact. So how do you see, lift our voices?

How do you see the future or what do you see for yourself and the organization and the millions of lives I guess? We still have a lot of work to do, right? As we've been talking about, it's hard to solve this. We decided that we would try to get these laws passed because that forces change and then eventually you hope that that changes culture. But as an organization, we believe in not silencing anyone at work, so we are still working on behalf of other protected classes that are still silenced through forced arbitration and NDAs

like gender discrimination, race discrimination, LGBTQ+, disability, age. We actually have a new bill on age discrimination and arbitration. So we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that those classes are not silenced like sexual misconduct used to be. And even though we've changed the laws as we've been discussing this whole podcast, it's still hard to come forward and you're still going to probably face consequences that are not good. So at Lift Our Voices, we are still doing tremendous amount of education on

these issues so that people understand what they're signing when they start a new job. Most people have no clue, and then they don't care about it till something bad happens, and then they realize that they're going to be silenced, but they didn't realize that before. We do a lot of research because that's how you change the hearts and minds of people when you show them

the numbers of how many people are affected by these things. And we do a lot of work at the state level as well, passing laws, where we've actually been able to pass complete bans on non-disclosure agreements at work. So California, New Jersey, and Washington state, you can't use NDAs for anything anymore at work, which is a huge change. So we're currently trying to do that in Connecticut and New York as well.

So we have our work cut out for us. It's two of us running this organization that we were small but mighty. We've made massive change, but we have a lot more work to do. In nonprofits, especially in areas that you're touching, there's going to be a lot of no's. How do you stay motivated? There's a lot of rejection along the way when you're fundraising, for example. We are the only nonprofit in America doing this work, by the way.

So if you want to learn more, it's liftourvoices.org. And every little penny counts as we're trying to move this process along. But I think one of the things that helped me with rejection in running a non-profit is being a reporter. Because when you think about it, I had to cold call so many people from my career to try and get them to talk to me. The majority of the time, the answer was no.

I had to knock on a lot of doors, and the majority of the time, I got the door slammed in my face. So you can't take any of this personally. Again, it was part of building me up as a tough, thick-skinned person. So getting rejections now is disappointing, but it actually motivates me to keep going

because I've had it so much in my life. So who knows what's going to happen with nonprofits now in our political realm. Hopefully, we will continue to thrive. But I will just say on that note that our work is more important than ever before. Oh, I agree. And I didn't think of the connections with all the rejections before. I love that. And I think this is also something that we see in the podcast. It's something that we see like every time you're going to try to reach out to a lot of people. The rejection is inevitable.

It's just about what you're making it mean. We have a lot of listeners here and they're trying to reinvent themselves. They're trying to leap their careers. They're trying to figure out how they find their legacy or become their full potential. What would be something that you wish somebody told your younger self? Just to keep pounding your head against the brick wall. I have this fire in my belly.

I think part of it was innate, but part of it was learned. And so teach yourself to do that, to never give up. If you are a parent, please, please, please tell your children every single day that they can be whatever they want to be with hard work so that we can start instilling in them, especially young girls, that belief that they can be anything. And to our men out there, please, please, please honor us

and help us because you still run the majority of companies out there, you still rule the world, and we need your help. We need you to understand our issues. We need you to pay us fairly. We need you to pay us fairly. We need you to not slam the door in our face speaking of rejection when we come forward and say that something bad is happening to us. Don't try to get rid of us.

Let's get rid of the bad actor, not the person that has the courage to come forward. I have a ton of messages for different people like, oh, raising our boys. My gosh, this is one of the biggest lessons that I've learned. We have to get to our boys young. We have to because they form their opinions and their values and their respect for women at an early age and we have to get to them

young to treat their fellow women in the workplace the same way they would treat their sisters or their mothers. It is crucial to this movement if we intend to continue to develop and really try to reach equality and treating people with respect, everyone. Gretchen, thank you so much for this beautiful conversation. It's completely not where usually our podcasts go and I just love it. I think it's critical, critical, critical for everybody to hear and I'm so grateful that you came to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

And thank you for what you're doing. That will change a lot of lives. So we'll have all the information in the show notes, but thank you for joining, Bridget. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. If you did, please share it with friends. Now also if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this 30-minute free training at leapacademy.com slash training.

That's leapacademy.com slash training. See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy with Ilana Golanshchuk.