Julie Stewart-Binks on a career derailed by alleged sexual assault: ‘What could my life have been?’

Last week, Julie Stewart-Binks sat in an empty lounge on the rooftop of a hotel near her apartment in New York City. She is about to watch a clip from her time as a Fox Sports host and reporter. It is a moment that she thinks about often, but one that she has never wanted to relive in full. She hits play on the video, then her hands jerk back toward her chest, as if bracing for a blow.

In the clip, Stewart-Binks, then a 28-year-old Fox Sports 1 on-air personality, is on the set of a pop-up show – “Jason Whitlock’s House Party By the Bay” – for the 2016 Super Bowl in San Francisco. The set is meant to evoke a Super Bowl party. Red Solo cups. Beers chilling in an ice bucket on the coffee table. Whitlock and the day’s guest – New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski – are behind a desk; Stewart-Binks is on a gray couch flanking them.

The group is discussing Gronkowski’s disclosure that he moonlighted as a stripper in college. Stewart-Binks then says: “If you have a chance to make some more money, using maybe me as an example, do you want to show us a little ‘Magic Mike?’” (A reference to the 2012 movie about male exotic dancers.) Gronkowski, a little surprised, asks Stewart-Binks if she wants a lap dance, to which she replies: “Yeah.” Gronkowski seems to be stalling. He asks about music and remarks: “Where are your friends? I would need, like, a bachelorette party?” Stewart-Binks keeps urging him on, as does Whitlock, and Gronkowski eventually moves from behind the desk, over to the couch. He dances briefly in front of Stewart-Binks, then straddles her and thrusts his hips toward her, grinding on her as the cameras roll. Stewart-Binks, laughing, takes out some crumpled dollar bills and hands them to Gronkowski. The dancing lasts about six seconds.

As she watches the clip, Stewart-Binks’ face reddens and her chest breaks out in hives. She begins to cry. “I will spend my entire life trying to make up for this,” she says, wiping away tears with a shaking hand. “I will die trying to make up for this moment that’s clearly not who I am.”

The Gronkowski segment was the defining moment in Stewart-Binks’ four years at FS1 (2013-16). As the clip spread across the internet, FS1 was derided as a “circus act,” but Stewart-Binks took the brunt of the criticism. She was accused of setting back the efforts of women working in sports journalism and betraying feminism entirely. Some of the criticism came from friends and colleagues.

Now, she wants those critics to know why she participated in the segment, and providing that context requires sharing what she says happened to her in the days beforehand.

On Friday, Stewart-Binks, 37, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Fox and Charlie Dixon, an executive vice president and head of content at Fox Sports and FS1, the company’s sports network. In that lawsuit, she alleges that about a week before the Gronkowski segment she was sexually assaulted by Dixon during a meeting at a hotel that he organized under the auspices of talking about her Super Bowl week duties. Dixon is also a defendant in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by former FS1 hairstylist Noushin Faraji. In Faraji’s complaint, she claimed that “executives and talent were allowed to physically and verbally abuse workers with impunity,” and she alleged that Dixon groped her at a co-worker’s birthday party in January 2017, among other allegations.

Dixon did not respond to text, voice and email messages seeking comment. Fox Sports said in a statement: “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.”

Days after the alleged assault, when producers in San Francisco told her that FS1 wanted a viral moment out of Gronkowski, she said she never considered the implications of the stunt, only what would happen if she refused with Dixon watching from the set. “I was in a really f—ed-up place that I could not tell people about,” she said.

In her complaint, Stewart-Binks said she detailed the allegations against Dixon to a Fox human resources official in 2017 but that Fox “egregiously made the deliberate decision to protect Dixon and allow a sexual predator to remain an executive at Fox for nearly a decade.”

“They knew and didn’t do anything about it,” Stewart-Binks said in an interview earlier this month. “It meant they didn’t care about the damage done to me and how it affected others.” She then added: “This has been accepted for so long. I’m sitting here wanting it to be different.”

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Stewart-Binks grew up in Toronto, and her mother was a broadcast reporter and her father worked in the medical device industry. She played right wing on a boys’ house league hockey team and also trained as a figure skater and a cellist.

She attended Queen’s University and obtained degrees in both drama and physical and health education but developed a passion for broadcasting and later got a master’s degree in international broadcast journalism from what is now known as City St George’s, University of London.

Her entry into sports journalism in Canada was scrappy and unglamorous. She covered Ontario Hockey League games on a volunteer basis, staying at a friend’s house in Kingston, then taking a bus to Niagara, where she’d bunk with her grandmother in a retirement community. Later, as a reporter and anchor for CTV in Regina, Saskatchewan, she drove across the Canadian prairies shooting and editing sports television packages on curling and anchoring the nightly newscasts. To save money, she lived out of a friend’s basement.

In 2013, she was plucked out of relative obscurity by an agent at Octagon (the late John Ferriter) and flown to Los Angeles to meet with Fox Sports executives and screen test for the launch of FS1. She was hired by the fledgling network as an update anchor and went on to host “Fox Soccer Daily.” She also worked as a sideline reporter for Major League Soccer, hosted FS1’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics and covered the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup. She spent 65 days on the road that summer and was tabbed as one of Awful Announcing’s “Rising Stars.”

But, according to her complaint, by early 2016, her allies within FS1 — executives like Scott Ackerson and Rick Jaffe — had departed and a new regime — Dixon and fellow executive Jamie Horowitz — were in place with a new vision for the network.

Stewart-Binks still liked her job. She got to cover soccer and hockey – sports she loved – and work as an anchor and a host. She was part of a tight-knit group that helped launch FS1. But her future was uncertain. The network had until April 1, 2016, to pick up a one-year option in her contract. If it did not, she would lose a high-profile job. She felt she needed to show the Dixon-Horowitz regime that she was a versatile and dynamic talent.

When Whitlock requested her to be a part of his show during the 2016 Super Bowl week, she felt she had an opening to do that. And then Dixon asked her to come to his hotel, writing that he wanted to “go over expectation(s)” before a group meeting the next day, according to her complaint. After receiving that text, Stewart-Binks shared her excitement with a friend about getting face time with her boss and curated her outfit for the meeting – a suede jacket and designer heels – hoping to convey style and professionalism.

The lawsuit sets out in detail how they met at the bar at a hotel in Marina del Rey, Calif. She ordered a single glass of white wine. Dixon asked what she had been told about her role on Whitlock’s show during Super Bowl week. He then told her he didn’t think she should be going to the Super Bowl at all and that she was ill-suited to host and wasn’t funny or interesting or talented enough to draw in viewers.

In an interview, Stewart-Binks said she was shocked and confused by Dixon’s remarks. Why was he denigrating her so strongly, and, just before she went on an important assignment for the network? She tried to stay calm, even when he remarked, according to the complaint, that the only way anyone would be willing to watch her was if she “got up on this bar and took your top off” and then added: “You’re not hot enough to be a hot girl on TV.” She said in her interview with The Athletic that she responded to Dixon: “I didn’t get my master’s degree in ‘hot girl.’”

Stewart-Binks said Dixon’s tone then changed. He stopped criticizing her and asked about her professional aspirations. The complaint states that Dixon then ordered two beers from the bar and urged her to come to his room and drink them, adding that he had a great view from his balcony. She didn’t think it was a good idea, she said in her interview and in the complaint, but she felt she couldn’t say no to her boss.

“You have autonomy over yourself to say ‘no’ and leave. But you don’t, and you say ‘yes’ because he held the power to everything,” Stewart-Binks told The Athletic.

The legal complaint describes Dixon’s shirts – colorful tees with slogans and pictures – laid out on one of the beds in his room. Dixon suggested they step out on the balcony. Once outside, Dixon, according to the complaint, “swiftly pushed her against the wall of the hotel and pinned her arms to her side. With her arms forcefully held down and his body pressed against hers, Dixon tried to force his tongue into her mouth.” Stewart-Binks’ mouth remained shut but Dixon “ignored her, continuing to press against her body and lick her closed mouth. While keeping one of her arms pinned, he moved his other arm from pressing her upper elbow against the wall to her body and towards her chest. Stewart-Binks seized the moment of partial freedom to push him away, say ‘get off of me’ and rapidly leave the hotel room.”

Once in her car, she called the same friend with whom she had earlier shared her excitement about meeting with Dixon. “I remember getting a very upset phone call,” the friend told The Athletic. “It was the overall disappointment of ‘I can’t believe an executive did this.’” Stewart-Binks later called her mother, according to the complaint, and the two women concluded that it would imperil her career if she spoke out about what Dixon had allegedly done.

Stewart-Binks went back to work frightened about the implications of fending off Dixon and also what his remarks about her lack of talent meant for her career going forward. At a meeting the day after the alleged assault, she said Dixon ignored her. She believed her future was “very much hanging in the balance” as she arrived in San Francisco for Super Bowl week. Her anxiety was ramped up by producers there who were hell-bent to “make a moment” that would garner attention, she said.

“I was told … that I was not capable of being able to do a moment like this on television. And that I was not interesting, funny, talented, smart. And so I felt the need to prove that I was all in, and that I was not scared to do something like (the Gronkowski stunt). Had I not (done it), I would have felt like I failed and that I would have confirmed what (Dixon) told me.”

The reaction to her role in the Gronkowski segment surprised and stung her, she said in an interview. People she knew in the industry, some whom she considered friends, were among those voicing their disappointment with her choice to participate. Her co-worker and friend, Katie Nolan, told GQ that she disapproved of the bit. (Nolan later apologized to Stewart-Binks in a podcast and clarified her remarks.) Stewart-Binks recalled receiving a text message from Grant Wahl, the late Sports Illustrated soccer writer she admired, that read: “That’s not who you are.”

Fox promoted the Gronkowski segment on social media and elsewhere. The network got its viral moment. But when the backlash grew strong enough, Fox stopped, and the same men in the production meeting eager to “make a moment” went largely silent. Stewart-Binks’ bosses didn’t address the incident at length until six weeks later; Horowitz said at that time that he was supportive of Stewart-Binks for doing a “fun bit” and thought Gronkowski “maybe … took it a half step too far.”

In her lawsuit, Stewart-Binks said the network instructed her not to comment on the incident, and her agency, CAA, advised her to ride it out. Less than two months after the Super Bowl, Stewart-Binks was informed that Fox would not pick up her contract option with one executive telling her that there was “nothing for her to do here,” according to the complaint.

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According to the complaint, Stewart-Binks was contacted by a Fox human resources official in June 2017 and asked about Horowitz’s behavior when Stewart-Binks worked at Fox Sports. Stewart-Binks didn’t have anything substantive to share about Horowitz, but the complaint states that she disclosed to the HR official what Dixon allegedly said to her in their January 2016 meeting and what allegedly happened in his hotel room afterward.

Horowitz was fired following the probe, but Dixon remained at the company.

After Fox, Stewart-Binks worked as a part-time soccer reporter for ESPN, a rinkside reporter for NHL on TNT, a host for BetRivers Sportsbook Network, did stand-up comedy, was a host for the CBC’s 2024 Olympic coverage, among other jobs. She’s continued to scrap to find work but believes the Gronkowski segment has impacted her ability to get other jobs.

When the Faraji lawsuit against Fox and Dixon was filed, Stewart-Binks received text messages from people she had told about her interactions with Dixon. On page eight of the 42-page complaint, there is a reference to a host who reported Dixon to the company. She believed that Faraji, with whom she worked at FS1, was referencing her. Reading about what Faraji allegedly endured was a “tipping point,” Stewart-Binks said. “I didn’t want to hold onto it anymore.”

Stewart-Binks said she has experienced bouts of self-doubt since leaving Fox Sports, Dixon’s criticism of her abilities still ringing in her ears. “I had a different view of what my life would be like than what it is. And I’m very grateful for everything I have. But sometimes I think … well, what could my life have been had this not happened?”

(Top photo: Hatnim Lee for The Athletic)