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Dogged throughout her broadcast television career for lacking gravitas, Katie Couric liked to joke that the word must be Latin for “testicles.” Lately, Joy Taylor — one of the very few women on TV who opines about sports for a living and one of an even tinier number of Black women — has been accused of much worse. She’s been implicated in a sexual-harassment scandal at Fox Sports in two recent lawsuits — alleged, among other things, to have risen in the ranks by sleeping with her boss.
So it felt a bit on the nose to meet Taylor, in late February, at a members-only club in Beverly Hills called Gravitas. The place didn’t seem to take the name too seriously: It had the cavernous feel of a Vegas megarestaurant, with the inexplicable addition of piles of silk flowers, in bright salmon and turquoise, rising along the perimeter. When I arrived a few minutes early for our appointment, Taylor, 38, was already there. On the air and on social media, she favors curve-hugging wrap dresses, bold colors, and cutouts, but that evening she was wearing an unbleached linen button-down and relatively little makeup, her golden-flecked hair pulled away from her face. She had the most flawless skin I have ever seen on an adult.
Taylor is in her ninth year hosting at FS1, Fox Sports’ flagship cable channel, where she has held forth with brisk confidence on everything from whether the Dallas Cowboys should dump their coach to the dustup between women’s basketball stars Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark to allegations of domestic violence involving an NFL player. She’s usually on the air five days a week, but when we met she’d been absent from her show, Speak, for three consecutive days — this would be her fourth. The network had not announced or explained why the star was missing, and she didn’t want to discuss it with me either. Her publicist, whom she’d hired independently, had warned me that much I wanted to talk with Taylor about would be off the table.
Taylor, whose voice is husky and whose cadence is matter-of-fact, was at pains to show that she wasn’t wilting under the scrutiny. She was used to it: “The language of sports fans, it’s hostility,” she said. “We yell at each other, we boo the refs — we’re angry all the time. And then we win, and we all love each other.”
In January, two former employees had filed separate discrimination lawsuits against FS1 and its corporate parent, portraying the network as a den of misogyny where executives engaged in undisguised sexual quid pro quo. The first suit, filed by a woman named Noushin Faraji, who was a hairstylist at Fox Sports for more than a decade, accused Fox and the network of fostering a hostile work environment. (Fox declined to comment. In a reply to the court, it denied “each and every allegation.”) Faraji alleged that top executive Charlie Dixon had groped her and that former star Skip Bayless had offered her $1.5 million for sex. But what seemed to catch the public’s attention much more than this, lighting up the internet in a frenzy of horny vitriol, was that Taylor had also been named as a defendant. (Dixon did not respond to requests for comment and has not responded to these allegations publicly. Bayless denied the allegations in court.)
Legally, Taylor stood accused of discriminating against Faraji due to her race and nationality (she is Iranian) and due to a claimed disability (PTSD). But in the greater telling of the complaint, full of lurid details, Taylor is cast as a Machiavellian femme fatale—one who had achieved her top-tier position through a yearslong affair with Dixon and who had been dismissive of women who didn’t want to play the boys’-club game. Faraji also asserted that Taylor had maintained a concurrent secret relationship with another FS1 host, Emmanuel Acho, though what bearing this had on her legal claims was not exactly clear. (Acho didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Taylor, in a court filing, denied every allegation, and in a separate statement, a spokesperson for Taylor called her involvement a publicity grab: Including her “in this tawdry complaint,” the statement read, “is a transparent attempt to improperly leverage media attention and public perception to extract financial gain.”
The second lawsuit, filed by former on-air correspondent Julie Stewart-Binks, who worked at FS1 between 2013 and 2017, alleged that Dixon had sexually assaulted her and that the network had afterward declined to renew her contract. (In a filing, Dixon denied “that he ever engaged in any inappropriate behavior” and called the lawsuit “frivolous.”) Taylor appears only briefly, but the suit strongly suggests that her rise at FS1 came at Stewart-Binks’s expense.
Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that the story of Fox Sports has become a story about Taylor and her alleged sex life, with a cavalcade of excited podcasters and social-media chatterers eager to weigh in. Bayless, the accused former star, and Dixon, the accused executive, seemed to barely register in comparison. Though Dixon was alleged to have groped an employee in the first lawsuit, The Athletic reported that he was not placed on leave until three days after the second, in which he was accused of sexual assault. Few insiders seemed to argue with the basic claim that FS1 was a hotbed of misbehavior, run by men. But the true crime, it seemed, in the eyes of the public and some of her former colleagues, was Taylor’s supposed acquiescence.
In early January, ex-NFL player Marcellus Wiley — who co-hosted an earlier iteration of Speak until 2022, when he left the network — claimed in an interview that lawyers were already contacting him about filing his own lawsuit. “Imagine,” he said, “if Charlie is allegedly sleeping with Joy Taylor and Emmanuel Acho is sleeping with Joy Taylor, and there’s somebody who’s not sleeping with Joy Taylor.” He seemed to be saying that it was Taylor who had held all the cards and determined his fate at the network.
Wiley made these comments on a podcast hosted by Jason Whitlock, a former FS1 host and current right-wing provocateur, who two days earlier had held forth on the saga, turning the suits into an opportunity to consider whether women should be allowed on sports television at all. “Joy Taylor is a symbol of this whole feminist movement, this whole Black queens movement, this whole DEI movement,” he said. “This whole sharing everything with women and, ‘Hey, there’s gotta be a woman host on all of these shows.’” Taylor was, in his view, both ballbuster and Jezebel, and he congratulated himself for having kept his distance from the temptations of Taylor’s “peanut-butter skin” and “big pair of cans.” In under 13 minutes of his show, he said “cans” five times. (As in, How does she get that job? “Because she’s got a big pair of cans.”) “I’m trying not to disparage Joy Taylor,” he added.
Sitting in the booth at Gravitas, flanked by the publicist and a woman who worked for her production company, Taylor had her boilerplate at the ready, using it almost every time I asked about the substance of the allegations. It was unclear whether the lawsuits could end up costing her her job or worse. “I know that the public has a lot of interest in this situation,” she said, “but I have to let the legal process play out.” When I asked about the nature of her relationship with Dixon, she said, “I cannot speak on anything related to Fox.”
Since the lawsuits, Taylor’s Instagram had been flooded with hundreds of slut-shaming comments going back months: “Joy Taylor was getting passed around like the company blunt” was one of the more polite posts I could find — that and calling her the Kamala Harris of sports media in the pejorative sense. I asked why she hadn’t deleted the comments or turned them off entirely.
Nearly ten uncomfortable seconds passed before she answered. “It honestly never crossed my mind to,” she said flatly. “Maybe it’s part of my callus.” She had told me that developing “a little bit of a hard shell” was the cost of being an ambitious person in her business.
When I asked her about the comments Whitlock had made, I cleaned them up a bit: What did she think about his claim that she only got her job because she’s a beautiful woman? And how did she feel about him saying that he wasn’t trying to “disparage” her?
She raised her eyebrows, amused, and this time she seemed eager to say at least part of what she really thought. “Oh, I mean, I don’t think being called a beautiful woman is disparaging,” she said slyly. “I think I’m a beautiful woman.”
I agreed. “But he was saying that was the only reason you were there.”
She leaned back, teacup in hand. “Well, I think that if I am so beautiful that my beauty negates my need for any skill or talent or education or résumé or results,” she said, taking a sip, “I must be pretty fucking beautiful.”
In the first words uttered on FS1 when it was launched in 2013, the network promised to “never take ourselves too seriously and, most importantly, never put ourselves above the game nor the athletes.” The channel was designed to compete with ESPN in the growing field of on-air sports debate, which filled non-game hours and was cheaper to produce than live-event coverage. Both ESPN and FS1 had searched for new strategies as the internet had made game results, scores, and replay clips universally accessible, and both had leaned into Crossfire-style debate. The template was the runaway success of ESPN’s First Take with Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith, which some fans loathed for debasing sports talk with trolling and hot takes but which was unmistakably suited to the meme age. While ESPN was headquartered in sleepy Bristol, Connecticut, FS1 was based in L.A. and had the DNA of an entertainment enterprise.
The man most credited with First Take’s winning formula (referred to at the time as “Embrace debate”) was Jamie Horowitz, a longtime ESPN executive. In 2014, Horowitz was tapped to run the Today show but lasted only ten weeks in the job. (It was reported that he’d angered his bosses, who balked at an incipient plan to fire Savannah Guthrie and who suspected he was leaking to “Page Six” that he would soon be promoted and replace them. NBC denied these reports.) In May 2015, FS1 created a new job for Horowitz, president of national networks, and two months later, Dixon, who’d worked with him at ESPN, was his first hire, coming in as executive vice-president of content. Eventually, the pair lured Bayless, now 73, and fellow ESPN marquee talent, Colin Cowherd, 61, then the host of SportsNation, with splashy multimillion-dollar deals and the promise of what Horowitz described to the Los Angeles Times, roughly a year into his tenure, as “raw, fearless talk,” saying that the “Fox culture allows us to talk about sports news in ways that perhaps would be frowned upon at other companies.” The implication seemed to be that it would be a somehow right-leaning answer to ESPN, which was hardly left wing but had made forays into cultural and political coverage that were seen by some viewers as failing to “stick to sports.”
It was strange, though, and arguably audacious, for Horowitz to refer to “the Fox culture” in that way at that moment. By that time, in late 2016, the country had gotten an unflattering view of the corporation’s inner workings thanks to sexual-harassment lawsuits against Fox executives back on the East Coast. That summer, longtime Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson had filed her complaint against chairman Roger Ailes, which within weeks ended his two-decade reign at the network. In the months between Carlson’s suit and Horowitz’s comments, at least half a dozen other women had come forward with accounts of almost cartoonish levels of predation. (Both Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, who was later accused of harassment, would leave with multimillion-dollar exit packages.)
In the end, FS1 would try to outdo ESPN in its provocations. The network’s currency would be shouty, stereotype-driven on-air conflict. Even on its best days, its ratings were — and still are — a fraction of ESPN’s, but its personalities could command outsize attention.
Having an emphatic opinion, and a bold personality, was what Taylor was hired to do at the beginning of 2016. She arrived in L.A. from Miami, where she’d gone to college for broadcast communications and become a sports-radio host. Miami was also where her eldest brother, Jason, who would become a football Hall of Famer, played for the Miami Dolphins.
Taylor had grown up in Pittsburgh in a large blended family. Jason, who had a different biological father, has described their mother, Georgia, struggling as a single mother, working multiple jobs and fighting evictions before Joy was born. By the time Joy arrived, the family had become “very Baptist,” as Joy put it, attending church three-to-five times a week. Her father, Anthony, disdained secular education, and the children were homeschooled; Joy, from the age of 4.
Her passion for sports, she told me, began with her grandmother and two aunts. “I grew up, obviously, in a sports town,” she said, “with rabid female sports fans. I did not know a world where women did not know anything about sports.” She described these elder relatives as “the Golden Girls.” “They were insane about the Steelers, about the Pirates, about the Penguins,” she said. “The game came on, whatever we were doing — it’s time to watch. They knew all the players, they knew the coaches, they knew the plays.”
After college, Taylor’s start in sports radio came as a producer. Jonathan Zaslow, a Miami host who interviewed Taylor for her second job, told me that he was initially skeptical of Taylor, the “little sister” of an NFL star. But she impressed him with her verve. “You could tell right away that she was not intimidated being around men,” he said. After a year and a half at the station, Zaslow and his co-host were effectively fighting over who got to work with Taylor: The co-host, who left, tried to recruit her for an outside gig. Zaslow convinced her instead to co-host the four-hour morning show, five days a week. “She could be really sarcastic or she could be funny or she could be super-critical,” Zaslow said. “We were able to make fun of her, which is super-important if you’ve got a bunch of men who are working with a female that she’s not taking herself too seriously.” Not taking herself too seriously included hosting a dating-and-sex-advice segment called “Just the Tips.”
Taylor credits this period for toughening her up; the incoming messages from listeners were especially effective. “I just got used to, after a while, reading all these horrible things about myself or about the show or about what someone would do to me,” she said. “I hope you die of cancer — you suck. Why are you on air? Your voice is horrible. I bet you’re ugly.” She just had to keep it moving.
Taylor flew to L.A. to audition for a pundit role on the soon-to-be-relaunched FS1 in January 2016. She got the job, though what the exact gig would be was yet to be determined. It would begin in March 2016, only one month after she married former baseball player Richard Giannotti. I asked her about the timing. “It wasn’t a decision that I came to lightly,” she said. “But we ultimately decided it was the right thing to do.”
According to Faraji’s lawsuit, she and Taylor quickly became friends, though the two wouldn’t work together until the fall. Based on her filing, Faraji, whose attorney declined to make her available for this story, seems to have had especially intimate access to private moments and sensitive conversations at FS1, even compared to other hair and makeup artists, who are often witting and unwitting confessors. Taylor, she said, told her that her husband was staying in Miami “and that she was lonely in Los Angeles.” She and Taylor would sometimes go out for margaritas, and an older man, some sort of friend of Taylor’s, would often show up and buy their drinks. Faraji says she didn’t ask any questions until she saw the man in the Fox Sports elevator: It turned out he was Charlie Dixon.
In the summer of 2016, FS1 began preparing to launch its answer to First Take, a show called Undisputed, with Skip Bayless and former NFL player and ESPN analyst Shannon Sharpe, now 56. According to Faraji’s filing, word on the Fox lot was that the network was looking for a woman to moderate the program — a traffic cop for two big personalities. Taylor got the gig. Faraji claims that Bayless was reluctant to sign off on Taylor but that Dixon applied pressure, arranging for a dinner where she allegedly “arrived in provocative clothing and acted in a provocative manner.”
Later that summer, Faraji claims, she shared a dinner table with Taylor, her then-husband Rich Giannotti, Dixon, and Dixon’s wife. She says that during the course of the evening, Giannotti somehow became suspicious that Dixon and Taylor were sleeping together. (Giannotti and Taylor would divorce in 2017. He did not respond to requests for comment, and Taylor would not speak to Faraji’s recollection or the cause of her divorce.)
Undisputed launched in September. In January, Taylor celebrated her birthday at Pearl’s Rooftop in West Hollywood. According to Faraji, Dixon was, “as usual,” “heavily drinking, buying drinks for everyone on a Fox credit card, and blustering that everything purchased was on Fox’s dime.” Faraji alleges that Dixon approached her, touched her lower back, and asked if she wanted a tequila shot. She says she declined but that Dixon grabbed her buttocks. She faked receiving a phone call to escape. When she confided in Taylor, Faraji claims, Taylor told her to “get over it” and said that Dixon could take away both their jobs. (Taylor would not comment on this.)
Taylor continued to rise at the network. In the summer of 2018, she was transferred from Undisputed to The Herd With Colin Cowherd, serving as the affectionate sidekick for more hot takes. That September, she announced her engagement to Earl Watson, a former NBA player. The two split by the end of 2019: Faraji, who was still Taylor’s hairstylist at the time, claims Watson ended the relationship after learning of Taylor’s alleged ongoing entanglement with Dixon and that he threatened to go public with what he knew. Faraji says the threat was defused when Dixon personally paid for the costs of the canceled wedding. (A source with knowledge of the situation says this is untrue and that Taylor herself had been the one to pay the deposits in the first place. Watson did not respond to attempts to reach him.)
It was around February 2020, Faraji alleges, that she began to believe that Taylor was romantically involved with another FS1 host, 34-year-old Emmanuel Acho, then the co-host of Speak for Yourself with Marcellus Wiley. Taylor, she says, wanted Acho to recommend her to be hired as one of his co-hosts. By then, Faraji claims, she’d heard of two other women (unnamed in the complaint) who faced retaliation for refusing executives’ advances. According to the filing, Faraji warned Taylor “that she should probably not sleep with Mr. Dixon and Mr. Acho at the same time, as Mr. Dixon is a very powerful man that may become very angry.” The complaint goes on: “Ms. Taylor told her not to worry about it. She explained that she was also now powerful, and once Mr. Dixon was no longer useful to her, she would follow through on her plan to tell the company that he forced himself on her. She would not allow herself to be forced out by Mr. Dixon like other women talent.”
Taylor got the job on Speak, which would begin in the fall of 2022. Faraji says that although her and Taylor’s friendship had ended the year before, Taylor requested her as her stylist for the new role. By June 2023, however, she claims, Taylor began mocking her accent and soon said she needed a Black hairstylist. (Faraji alleges that this was discrimination based on race and national origin.)
Over the years, Faraji claims, FS1 host Skip Bayless had been subjecting her to inappropriate remarks and touching — “lingering hugs after each haircut, putting his body against her own, pressing against her breasts.” In 2021, the situation had escalated: He’d allegedly offered her $1.5 million to have sex with him. By the spring of 2022, she says, Bayless had become obsessed with the notion that Faraji was sleeping with his co-host, Sharpe, with whom he had an intensifying rivalry. (In Bayless’s official reply to Faraji’s suit, he denied all the allegations. His attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Ultimately, Faraji seems to blame her exit from FS1 on Dixon and Taylor — not Bayless — saying that she was punished for telling people that they were sleeping together. Bayless allegedly told her that he believed Dixon wanted her out — she “knew too much and was talking.” (The filing further claims that Bayless said he believed Dixon “kept his wife on Fox’s payroll to keep her silent about his affairs.”)
Taylor would not discuss any of this. She would, however, speak to questions of power and women in the workplace. When I asked if she felt any obligation toward women in the industry, now that she had a position of relative authority, she said she felt “a massive responsibility.” She described trying to make herself “extremely available” to people coming up in the business, especially young women. “I think reaching back and giving other people opportunities and holding the door open is the price that you pay to walk through,” she said. But what about her lateral relationships? I asked — those with female colleagues. I referred to the fact that Fox seemed to be a challenging environment, where women might pitted against one another. “Maybe we should let them think that we don’t help each other,” she said, “but we do.” She’d been blessed with “an incredible group of close female friends,” she went on, “who work in the business in different capacities who provide a safe space for me to complain, for me to vent, for me to ask for advice.”
A member of that circle, Miami-based sports and travel host Kelly Blanco, told me that Taylor was “the one that’s going to give you sound advice and make you see your worth.” But, she said, she worried that her friend, rather than being hardened as Taylor had described, was too naïve. I asked Blanco if she was referring to Taylor’s relationship with Faraji. At first, she demurred. But then she said, “I think this has proven to her that she can’t be as trusting. And listen, they were friends. And she helped her so many times and championed her as well. Which is why it’s so disheartening to see how things have turned.” She paused. “I think that Joy now knows that she needs to be a better judge of character.”
On the evening of January 27, 2016, six weeks before Taylor arrived at FS1, network host and correspondent Julie Stewart-Binks, according to her lawsuit, drove her Toyota Corolla to meet Charlie Dixon at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, west of Los Angeles. They were going to talk about what seemed to be her big break: an upcoming role as sidekick to Jason Whitlock on his weeklong Super Bowl pop-up show.
Stewart-Binks, who through her attorney declined to speak with me, had been at FS1 since the start in 2013. An earnest Canadian, she had hustled in the sports-media trenches for years before, working unpaid for local networks back home, covering minor-league hockey, anchoring a late-night show in a small city west of Winnipeg. At Fox, she started as an update anchor, reporting the news, and soon covered hockey and soccer as well. According to her complaint, when Jamie Horowitz and Charlie Dixon arrived at the network and steered the ship toward flashier, shock-jock content, she was eager to adapt. She even fired her agent who was, according to the CAA rep Horowitz encouraged her to hire as a replacement, “not on ‘Jamie and Charlie’s team.’”
That night in late January, according to the lawsuit, Dixon had texted Stewart-Binks, asking her to come to the hotel restaurant to “go over expectation [sic] before tomorrow so you know my plan.” The lawsuit does not specify why Dixon, who lives in L.A., was at the hotel, but according to Stewart-Binks’s complaint, Dixon often met colleagues at “informal locations.”
She found Dixon at the bar, she recalled, dressed casually. Very shortly into their conversation, Dixon stunned her by saying, allegedly, “I don’t want you going to the Super Bowl.” He told her he didn’t think she had what it took to succeed on the air. “You’re not funny, interesting, or talented,” he said. He pointed to the bar and remarked, “The only way someone would watch you is if you got on top of this bar and took your top off.” According to Stewart-Binks, he continued coolly, saying, “You’re not hot enough to be a hot girl on TV.” As she sat in shock, Dixon asked her what she hoped to do. She replied that she liked hosting. “You’re not a good host,” Dixon allegedly told her. “Joy Taylor is a good host.” (Taylor wouldn’t begin at the network until March but recalled auditioning for the show that same week.)
Stewart-Binks says Dixon pressured her to have more to drink than her single glass of wine and that she refused. He then abruptly changed course, offering to show her the view from his room. She ignored the “alerts” in her head, she says, and agreed, wanting to be conciliatory.
In Dixon’s room — a standard, not a suite — she claims Dixon led her to the balcony. “Pretty nice view,” he said. “Yeah, great,” she replied, though she couldn’t see anything, only darkness. Dixon then allegedly pushed her against the side of the building, pinning her arms to her side and trying to force his tongue into her mouth, settling for licking her sealed lips instead. As he moved his arm from her upper elbow toward her chest, the complaint says, she broke free, telling him to get off her and running out as fast as she could.
The next day, at a planned meeting about the Super Bowl show, Stewart-Binks says she tried to act normal. Dixon arrived late and said nothing to her; all went ahead as originally planned: Stewart-Binks would join Whitlock’s House Party by the Bay, and the two hosts would attempt to keep a loose, lively vibe going.
The following week, an hour before the show went live, she says a producer came to her with the proposal that she ask New England Patriots star player Rob Gronkowski, nicknamed Gronk, for an on-air lap dance; he’d recently revealed a past gig as a stripper. “Fresh off Dixon’s assault, both physical and verbal, Ms. Stewart-Binks was determined to prove that she was fun and belonged in FS1’s new regime,” her filing reads. On the show, with a stiff smile, she asked Gronk if he wanted to show them “a little Magic Mike.” Everyone laughed nervously, and Gronk dutifully gyrated on her lap. The whole thing lasted approximately eight seconds, but the backlash was enduring. Her own colleague, Katie Nolan, expressed disapproval to GQ a couple hours later: “I think when we’re in sports,” Nolan said, “and there are only so many women, and that’s how a show chooses to use them …” She trailed off, eventually saying she would not have done the same. Columnist Paola Boivin wrote that the clip was “hard to watch” for female sports reporters who “have spent several decades battling” those “who think the sports world has no room for female journalists.” Shortly before filing her lawsuit against FS1, Stewart-Binks rewatched the clip with The Athletic’s Katie Strang and broke out in visible hives. She said through tears, “I will die trying to make up for this moment.”
About two months after the lap-dance incident, in March, her agents told her that her contract wouldn’t be renewed. She alleges that when she finally got a meeting with Horowitz to ask why, he told her, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing for you to do here”: The network, he claimed, would no longer be airing the news updates she’d been hired for.
In July 2016, Stewart-Binks says she was running on a treadmill at a hotel gym when she saw, she says, Taylor hosting news updates on FS1. (Taylor told me that she was hired as a pundit but, before her first official co-hosting job, filled in for other roles.)
In August, Stewart-Binks went out to dinner with two friends, FS1 colleagues. Taylor had also been invited, and to the group’s surprise, she showed up with Dixon. At around 11 p.m., according to Stewart-Binks, Dixon turned to Taylor and said, “We need to go work on your on-air performance,” and the two left.
According to Stewart-Binks, she told several colleagues what had happened to her, and in June of the next year, she received a call from a human-resources rep at Fox. She says she told the rep she had been sexually assaulted by Dixon, but they seemed predominantly interested in whether she had been assaulted by Jamie Horowitz. She urged them to look into Dixon and to contact the colleagues whom she told. (At least some of them were questioned by the company.) Days after, Horowitz was fired. The New York Times and Sports Illustrated reported that the reason was at least one sexual-harassment complaint. Fox did not give a public explanation for his firing but stated that acting “with respect” and professionalism were “nonnegotiable” values for the company. (A spokesperson for Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.) Dixon remained on at FS1.
On January 31, Fox Sports commented on Stewart-Binks’s claims in a statement to The Athletic: “These allegations are from over eight years ago. At the time, we promptly hired a third-party firm to investigate and addressed the matter based on their findings.” Dixon’s administrative leave — unexplained by the network — reportedly began a couple days later.
In February, Whitlock acknowledged on his podcast that Stewart-Binks had told him about that night at the hotel with Dixon around the time it occurred, though he mocked her for considering it assault. He said he thought to himself at the time, “Twenty-eight-years old, you went up into a grown man’s hotel room at night after having drinks with him, and you’re going up there to have more drinks, and it’s under the pretense, ‘I want to see the view from your balcony.’ I’m a grown man, and I’m supposed to be like, ‘Oh yeah, this is the crime of the century, this is O.J. and Nicole, I’m surprised you came out alive’? I can’t do that.” (He also said that he and Stewart-Binks, not producers, had come up with the idea for the on-air lap dance.)
Julie Stewart-Binks’s career has languished since the incident, she says in her complaint. But, she writes, she is “done being silenced, done watching large corporations shield men who assault women, done watching women forced into quasi-consensual sexual relationships, and done with the entrenched patriarchy within the sports industry.”
Shortly after the lawsuits became public, I spoke to two respected on-air sports journalists who both defended Taylor’s professional chops and rejected the idea that she shared blame with Dixon, Bayless, and the rest of the real power brokers for the punishing culture at Fox Sports. One source, a woman who didn’t want to be named because of the heightened scrutiny on women in the business, bristled at the notion that Taylor had been chosen to co-host Speak because of who she was allegedly sleeping with. “When she was hired for that job, she was overqualified and most people thought she was the best hire that they made,” she said. “People want to believe that women in our field are unqualified. This lawsuit just gave them fodder.” Faraji’s choice to include Taylor in the way that she did, the source said, “was pretty fucked.”
The other, a man, told me that as much as the chatterers wanted to make the FS1 allegations into a scandal about Taylor, it was really “a story about what men get away with.” Specifically, he said, “ambitious white dudes who were not cool and were not good athletes and now get to live the life of an athlete by being athletes’ bosses.” He was referring, in part, to Jamie Horowitz. Eight years after being fired from FS1, he’s now running a media company: Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions, which works with ESPN and co-produced a Netflix movie with the Obamas. “Nobody has pointed out that the same guy is back,” the journalist said. “He’s unkillable.”
Understandably, few of the dozens of TV sports insiders I reached out to for this story were willing to speak with me; as cord-cutting shrinks cable news, and as the market has been flooded with an endless stream of podcasts, a steady paycheck in the industry has become scarcer. Only one was willing to go on the record, briefly: Katie Nolan, the former host who spoke to GQ about Stewart-Binks’s lap dance and who worked at the network from 2015 to 2017. She wrote in an email, simply: “Charlie Dixon sucks. On the record.” Others made clear that they simply didn’t think there was any point in coming forward about their experiences in the current climate.
The broadcast sports world was barely dinged by Me Too, even at the movement’s peak. And now the rest of society seems done pretending to give a shit about the sexual tax on women in the workplace. But in the short span of years before people shrugged off the movement, there was a brief public conversation about what it meant for women to consent in a world of constrained options, including at work. What choices did women have if they wanted to rise in fields controlled by men and not fight from the sidelines? What compromises were really the result of coercion? And what did they owe to women who chose differently?
Sports television, as an industry, has always been relatively transparent about what it thinks women are there for: as a foil to wag a finger or laugh at a joke, for decoration or sexual energy. Even if female hosts tried not to define themselves by looks and sexuality, others would do it for them, as a quick survey of some historical lowlights makes clear. In 2008, Erin Andrews, then an ESPN sideline reporter, was simply undressing in her hotel room when an insurance executive secretly recorded her without her knowledge. He was convicted of stalking her but not before he posted a nude video of her online that was seen by millions of people. (In 2012, Andrews moved to Fox Sports.) In 2018, when then FS1 reporter Charissa Thompson, learned her iCloud had been hacked and nude photos of her had been distributed online, Andrews was one of her first calls. (Both women have said that their contracts with Fox Sports were up in February.)
Taylor has had the additional burden of navigating racist stereotypes of Black women as both oversexed and angry. At Gravitas, she told me she was reading bell hooks. Ain’t I a Woman, she said, is “powerful and frustrating, but it’s also informative.” It was helping her to understand, she said, “why Black women are sexualized the way that they are, and dehumanized.” Her solution has seemingly been to take charge of her own image, to put it out there before it can be taken away from her, and to never seem like she’s a victim. Ironically, it seemed it would be other women’s accounts of victimization that would most define her in the public eye.
As we spoke, I was ambivalent about pushing on the question of how she had behaved toward other women at work. “I hesitate to ask you about it,” I said, “because how often do people ask men if they’re nice to their colleagues? And I think that everybody should be nice to their colleagues” — my carefulness was taking me the long way around — “but I think that women are supposed to be really tough and also somehow really sisterly. And that’s another demand being added only to women.”
Taylor nodded. For the first time it felt like I was actually talking to her, not the persona she wanted to perform. “It’s a running joke,” she said. “What would it be like to just go to work? What’s that like? To not think about these things all the time?”
After two weeks of absence — which neither she nor Fox ever elaborated upon — Taylor was back on the air.
Over the years, Taylor had referred, sometimes obliquely, to abuse she’d suffered at home. Last year, on International Women’s Day, she posted a photo on Facebook of herself, apparently as a tween, in a black shift dress. “I had already seen so much abuse and terror by this young age,” she wrote in the caption. “This memory sticks with me because it’s the first time I remember feeling pretty.”
Taylor has also said that her religious childhood was driven by a “hypocrite.” When I asked what she meant, she said bluntly, “My father was very abusive. I was suicidal because of that.”
Home was terrifying, and homeschooling was isolating, she said. She far preferred being out in the world, with people, playing basketball or running track. Sports had been her relief.
In 2001, when Taylor was 14, she and her two younger siblings were just outside the family’s house when Jason and her father got into a scuffle that involved a gun. She told them to look away as their father was dragged into a police car. He was eventually charged with aggravated assault with a firearm. Georgia had by then initiated divorce proceedings against Anthony, and both she and Jason testified at the highly public trial. The prosecutor argued that Anthony was controlling and that Jason had refused to be under his control. He was acquitted for lack of evidence. Taylor still doesn’t speak to him. “I don’t like to wonder,” she told me, “what would be different if I had a father that loved me or loved us. What use is that?”
In the years that followed, Taylor said, she’d had multiple relationships with men who abused her. She’d survived choking and suffocation attempts, being thrown down by the stairs and kicked in the chest. (She first spoke publicly about these events more than ten years ago.) “I’m very good at compartmentalizing,” she told me. “A skill developed early.”
I asked her if the callus she’d talked about, her hard shell, had prepared her for what she was going through now — the lawsuits and the public reaction. “I think that being a public figure, you dare to put yourself in the spotlight,” she said. “We cannot control how others view us or what they believe.” Being a woman, she went on, means “a whole different type of scrutiny and a whole different type of negativity, a whole different type of danger. Unfortunately, while I’d like to sit here and say that there’s some solve for that, I don’t really believe that there is.”
But she had carefully become who she wanted to be — someone who is listened to, who is paid to do what her grandmother, the wife of a railroad worker, did for fun. I wondered what it had felt like for her life in sports — her former refuge — to become what it seems it may have been at FS1: another place where abusive men held the cards. Where she’d been pilloried by the public, told in so many words that she should be ashamed of herself. I wished I could ask her about this and have a chance at a real answer.
This story has been updated to clarify the status of Erin Andrews’s and Charissa Thompson’s contracts.
