Jennifer Eckhart, Former Fox Business Producer Who Accused Ed Henry of Rape, Dies at 36

Jennifer Eckhart, the former Fox Business associate producer whose 2020 lawsuit against anchor Ed Henry became one of the most closely watched sexual misconduct cases to come out of Fox News, has died. She was 36.

Eckhart was found dead at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida, on Saturday, September 19. Her death was confirmed by a spokesperson for Florida’s Martin County Medical Examiner’s Office, and TMZ later confirmed she died by suicide. Local law enforcement sources indicated she appeared to have died by suicide, though at the time reports emerged, an official cause and manner of death had not yet been publicly finalized.

Her final public post on Instagram came weeks earlier, on June 1, when she made a lighthearted comment about gas prices and mentioned she was working on something new she was excited to share.

From Fox Business to a Lawsuit That Made Headlines

Eckhart worked as an associate producer at Fox Business Network from 2013 to 2020. She rose through the ranks over those seven years before her time at the network came to an abrupt and painful end, one tangled up in one of the biggest workplace misconduct stories to hit Fox News in recent memory.

In July 2020, Eckhart filed a lawsuit alleging that Ed Henry, then a prominent Fox anchor and former chief White House correspondent, had sexually assaulted her. According to her complaint, the relationship began in 2014 when Henry was a White House correspondent and she was 24, and their first sexual encounter took place in his hotel room during a work trip. Eckhart maintained that encounter was not consensual; Henry insisted it was. She later told the court she never said no or physically resisted because she feared what might happen to her career if she did.

The suit also named Fox News itself as a defendant, along with other on-air personalities swept into the broader complaint. The filing, brought jointly with Fox commentator Cathy Areu, accused Henry of forcing himself on Eckhart in the office and later raping her in a hotel room, and alleged that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Howard Kurtz had separately subjected Areu to harassment. Fox had already fired Henry days earlier, in July 2020, following an internal investigation that found he’d engaged in serious misconduct.

Eckhart went public with her story soon after, appearing on CBS This Morning to describe what it was like working under Henry’s influence. She talked about the fear that shaped those years at the network, saying she felt trapped by his perceived power over her future, the sense that he could make or break her career if she spoke up.

A Legal Battle That Stretched On for Years

The case against Fox itself didn’t hold up in court. In March 2025, U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams dismissed Fox News Media as a defendant, ruling that the network could only be held responsible if its leadership had known about Henry’s conduct beforehand and failed to intervene, and the court found no evidence that was the case. The judge also rejected Eckhart’s argument that her 2020 firing was retaliatory, noting Fox’s position that she’d been let go after a string of poor performance reviews. An appeals court upheld that dismissal in April 2025.

Her claims against Henry personally, though, were allowed to proceed, and rather than go to trial, the two sides reached a settlement in 2024, just before the case was set to be heard by a jury.

By then, Henry had moved on to Newsmax, where he continued working as an anchor. He divorced his wife, CNN producer Shirley Hung, with whom he shares two children, and more recently was linked to Alana Stewart. He also pursued his own legal fights in the years following his firing, at one point suing Fox for defamation and separately filing, then dropping, a defamation claim against CNN and NPR.

What stood out most about Eckhart, to those who covered the case over the years, was her willingness to keep talking about it publicly long after the news cycle had moved on. She described feeling voiceless during her years at Fox and said coming forward was the first time she felt she’d reclaimed some control over her own story.

After leaving the network, she tried building a second act in media, launching a podcast in 2021 called “Reinvented” that focused on personal comeback stories, a fitting theme, given what she’d just been through herself.

Friends and former colleagues have described her as someone who, despite everything the lawsuit put her through publicly, kept pushing forward. Her death has reignited conversation online about the toll that years of litigation, public scrutiny, and reliving trauma in a courtroom can take on someone, even long after the immediate headlines fade.

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