In 2006, after nearly a decade at CNN, Rudi Bakhtiar came to the Fox News Channel in New York with a command of foreign policy, an appealing personality and a delivery that easily switched between light and serious.
After a six-month freelance arrangement, Fox signed her to a three-year deal. Pretty quickly, she was spending half her time in Washington, where the network sent her to fill in as a weekend correspondent, a post she hoped to win permanently, she said.
Her break seemed to come in early 2007, she said, when she met for coffee in the lobby of her Washington hotel with a friend and colleague, Brian Wilson. He told her he would soon become Washington bureau chief and wanted to help her get the weekend job. Then he said, "You know how I feel about you, Rudi."
Recalling the encounter, Bakhtiar said that she was thrilled and told Wilson she would make him proud. But, she said, he repeated himself, asking, "You know how I feel about you?" When she asked him what he meant, he said, "Well, I'd like to see the inside of your hotel room."
She politely rebuffed him, she said. After that rejection, she said, network executives canceled her Washington appearances, directed her to report her allegations to human resources and, a few weeks later, let her go, with the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, telling her that her tenure was ending because of her performance. On Saturday, a senior Fox News executive repeated that assertion.
After a mediation process, she reached a settlement in which Fox News paid her an undisclosed amount.
Contacted on Friday, Wilson, who went on to get the bureau chief job, said of her account: "I take strong exception to the facts of the story as you have relayed it to me, period. Beyond that, I will have no further comment."
Bakhtiar conceded that she agreed in her settlement not to speak of her experience. But she said she was emboldened to step forward by the sexual harassment lawsuit that former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson brought against Ailes this month, and a subsequent investigation that has brought to light at least 10 other claims of improper behavior involving him. Ailes resigned on Thursday.