Howard Stern is responding to the lawsuit filed against him and wife Beth Stern by their former assistant.
Last month, Leslie Kuhn filed a lawsuit against the couple alleging that she was fired and experienced a “hostile work environment.”
Kuhn claimed that Howard and Beth presented her with confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements before and at the time of her firing. She is seeking “costs of this action” and other relief the Court “deems just.” She also filed an amended complaint seeking the “right to speak freely.”
On Wednesday (April 29), attorneys for Howard and Beth filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. In the motion obtained by People, the attorneys described Kuhn‘s lawsuit as a “thinly veiled attempted shakedown.” The filing also claims that Kuhn “hatched a plan to extract a staggering ‘hush-money’ payment” from her former employers.
The Sterns‘ motion to dismiss further alleges that Kuhn “manufactured a nonexistent ‘dispute’ and filed this pretextual lawsuit founded on a series of bald-faced lies.” They also claim that she “indisputably signed” the non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements, and that she “immediately ran to the press to generate negative, utterly false publicity, hoping the Sterns would simply pay her to make her ‘go away.’”
The motion insists that Howard and Beth never spoke negatively about Kuhn in public and that the “only reason Kuhn‘s termination has become public is because she and her counsel chose to file this sensationalized lawsuit announced her termination to the world and then deliberately fanned media attention.”
“Attempting to cloak herself as a silenced victim, Kuhn pretends she filed this action to ‘protect her reputation’ and defend herself against ‘accusations’ defendants made. Nonsense,” the filing continued. “Kuhn does not and cannot allege that defendants ever disclosed, or even threatened to disclose, any information about her.”
“A plaintiff may not manufacture publicity, claim injury from that publicity and then demand that the Court rescue her from the consequences of her own self-inflicted harm,” the attorneys argued.
In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, the Sterns‘ attorney said, “We are not going to play this out in public. The Sterns are entitled to enforce nondisclosure agreements signed by employees who enter their home and their private life, and they have filed a motion to address the lawsuit and the conduct of Ms. Kuhn and her lawyer.”
Posted To:Beth Stern Howard Stern
Leave a Reply