Former Fox News employees ask 2020 candidates to speak out against nondisclosure agreements

Gretchen Carlson and other former Fox News employees are seeking help from 2020 candidates in their fight against nondisclosure agreements.

Carlson in 2016 filed a retaliation and sexual harassment lawsuit against Roger Ailes, the late CEO and chair of Fox News, but signed a nondisclosure agreement in a settlement. She has formed the group Lift Our Voices along with two other Fox News employees who sued the network and signed nondisclosure agreements, Julie Roginsky and Diana Falzone, to end the practice of silencing workers from speaking out about such workplace issues.

The group is now calling on 2020 candidates for president to publicly condemn these nondisclosure agreements, The New York Times reports.

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"It is time for our leaders to demonstrate that they are on the side of the women and men who have been silenced for too long from discussing the hostility they have encountered by speaking out loudly and publicly against NDAs," the letter says.

The Times notes that the group is not calling for the end of all nondisclosure agreements in general but specifically ones having to do with workplace environment issues like sexual harassment. Carlson, whose story of alleged sexual harassment at Fox News is depicted in the new movie Bombshell, has spoken out about being "forced into silence" by a nondisclosure agreement she has asked to be release from, as she wrote in a recent Times op-ed.

"This is the next phase in the #MeToo movement, and it is one that needs to gain traction if we truly want to change the culture for better," she wrote.