Julie Roginsky's Quest to End NDAs
Alum, Fox whistleblower, and cofounder of Lift Our Voices, is freeing workers from the silencing effects of nondisclosure agreements
There are many things that Julie Roginsky can’t tell you.
For example, the political consultant, onetime TV commentator, and Lift Our Voices cofounder can’t tell you what circumstances prompted her to file a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and retaliation at Fox News. Roginsky (CAS’95, GRS’95) can’t say how the suit was resolved, or whether her portrayal in the film about Fox News CEO Roger Ailes’ downfall, Bombshell, is accurate.
The reason Roginsky can’t disclose any of the above? Three letters: NDA.
NDAs, or nondisclosure agreements, are legal contracts that forbid individuals from discussing particular information. They’re often intended to prevent employees from revealing confidential information, such as campaign strategies or trade secrets. But they can also be used to silence workers, keeping them from reporting misconduct and harassment. When she settled with Fox News in 2017, Roginsky signed an NDA that limited her ability to tell her story.
What Roginsky can tell you is this: through Lift Our Voices, she’s working damn hard to ensure that NDAs never hurt another American worker again.
A Legal Solution
According to Lift Our Voices (LOV), the nonprofit organization Roginsky cofounded with journalist and fellow Fox whistleblower Gretchen Carlson, about one-third of American workers are bound by NDAs.
Carlson was the first woman to sue Ailes, in 2016. In their respective lawsuits, she and Roginsky alleged workplace retaliation after turning down Ailes’ sexual advances. Both signed NDAs as a term of settlement with Fox. Soon after, several organizations sprang up amid the #MeToo movement that were dedicated to helping survivors of sexual assault and misconduct—but nobody was focused on NDAs, which kneecap survivors. “Even when people blow the whistle about what happened to them, predators know they’ll be protected,” Roginsky says. “The company can say whatever it wants. It’s just the survivors who can’t.”
She and Carlson founded Lift Our Voices in 2019. Its goal: eradicating the concealment clauses in NDAs that prevent people—primarily those from marginalized groups—from speaking about toxic workplace experiences.
LOV has already helped pass NDA bans in Washington State, California, and New Jersey. “State laws can have tremendous impact,” Roginsky says. When Microsoft was forced by law to eliminate NDAs at its Washington headquarters, the company decided to get rid of them nationwide. Apple went further when NDAs were banned in California, eliminating them worldwide.
If you can change the law, you’ll be instrumental in making sure we have a more respectful culture for everybody that lasts well beyond your lifetime. I hope this will change the trajectory for many generations to come.
Plus, LOV has helped pass two pieces of landmark federal legislation. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, signed into law in March 2022, gives survivors the right to file a claim in a court of law, even if their employment contract contains a mandatory arbitration clause. The Speak Out Act, signed into law in December 2022, prohibits the use of predispute NDAs and nondisparagement agreements for both survivors and witnesses of sexual harassment and assault. Other LOV initiatives include mobilizing college student advocates and sponsoring research on workplace discrimination.
For Roginsky, watching lawmakers coalesce behind legislation is immensely gratifying. “Ironically enough, changing laws—even in this hyperpartisan environment—is easier than changing cultures,” she says. “If you can change the law, you’ll be instrumental in making sure we have a more respectful culture for everybody that lasts well beyond your lifetime. I hope this will change the trajectory for many generations to come.”
Dream Job—Until It Wasn’t
Long before founding Lift Our Voices, Roginsky studied political science at CAS. She headed to Capitol Hill as soon as she graduated and soon discovered her true passion: running campaigns. She worked for EMILY’s List, a political action committee dedicated to electing Democratic women to office, then spent several years managing national campaigns in addition to a stint as a Senate press secretary. In 2002, she launched her own political consulting shop, Comprehensive Communications Group.
In 2004, she received a call from a friend asking her to fill in for him on a Fox News show. Thus began regular appearances as a pundit on Fox, MSNBC, and CNBC. But the real goal was a full-time gig at Fox News.
“Regardless of his shortcomings, [Ailes] really was a genius at television,” Roginsky says. “I told my agent that if I’m going to continue to do TV, I want to learn from the best.” Her agent’s response? Laughter. “He said, ‘You’re neither blonde nor a Republican; Roger Ailes will never hire you.’” She fired her agent.
Roginsky talked her way into a meeting with Ailes and joined Fox News as a full-time contributor in 2011. The job was great—until it wasn’t. Six years after being hired, Roginsky filed a lawsuit against the man she had once hoped to learn from. It was the end of her career in television.
The Darkest Day
The aftermath of the lawsuit was chaotic. Roginsky was thrust into the spotlight. She even had to stop dropping her son off at preschool to avoid his picture ending up in tabloids, she says.
The experience sent her reeling. “That was really the first massive setback in a very charmed career,” Roginsky says. Unfortunately, it would get worse before it got better.
Her contract with Fox had allowed her to continue her political consulting work. Throughout 2017, she’d been advising a client running for the New Jersey governorship. Soon after she filed her lawsuit against Ailes and Fox, she says, several young women working on the campaign came to her with allegations of misconduct and mistreatment by high-ranking campaign officials. She reported their accounts to the candidate, Phil Murphy, who would go on to win the governorship. Within 48 hours of that conversation, she claims, he fired her.
Then his attorneys reached out. They told her she was bound by an NDA, which she had assumed only applied to proprietary campaign information. “But it turned out it was so broad that I could not discuss anything at all, with anybody whatsoever,” Roginsky says. She couldn’t tell anyone why she was fired—nor could she warn remaining staffers of predatory behavior. (Murphy challenged her version of events and denied that staffers were forbidden from sharing nonproprietary information.)
About a year later, she received a call from a female staffer who said she’d been sexually assaulted by a campaign aide. That was “the darkest day of my career,” Roginsky says. “Lawyers were constantly threatening me with litigation if I were to break my NDA. I couldn’t tell her that she wasn’t alone, and I couldn’t warn her what would happen if she blew the whistle.”
In 2020, Murphy’s campaign settled with the former staffer, Katie Brennan, over her allegations that the campaign mishandled her assault when she reported it, and then tried to use a confidentiality agreement to silence her. (The aide she accused denied the assault accusations, and Murphy denies any wrongdoing by his campaign.) Under public pressure, the governor also freed Roginsky and other former staffers from NDAs.
The Speak Out Act was inspired by those events. “If that law had been in existence, nobody would have been able to prevent me from telling that survivor what I experienced on that campaign,” Roginsky says. “I call it the Katie Brennan Act.”
The Best Disinfectant
So much of Roginsky’s story is about a woman working fiercely to take back her narrative—but that’s a privilege many don’t have.
Standing up to powerful people—and their lawyers—requires money and connections. Even with those, reparative efforts can fail. The unfair playing field is why many survivors of workplace misconduct never see justice for their abusers.
Through LOV and her podcast, Retaliation, Roginsky has talked with thousands of survivors. “They just want to show up for work, do their job, and go home,” she says. “Imagine having a traumatic incident happen to you and you can’t talk about it with anyone—not even your therapist.”
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” was a phrase often cited at the height of #MeToo. It’s a philosophy she believes in wholeheartedly: the more we can talk about our toxic experiences, the more we can hold perpetrators accountable, she says. And she’ll never stop fighting for everyone’s right to a chance in the sun.
“I have an 11-year-old son. He was four when everything happened to me,” Roginsky says. “He saw that something happened to his mom that really rocked her world, in a very bad way.
“I decided that was not going to be the narrative he was left with,” she says. “The narrative is going to be: something bad happened to my mom, and she wouldn’t stop until she fixed it for everybody else.”