Three weeks after Howard Stern’s ex-assistant filed a lawsuit against him and wife Beth Stern for $2.5 million in damages, the shock jock has responded.
The SiriusXM host filed to dismiss the lawsuit on Wednesday, dubbing it a “shakedown” and “transparent sham” in court documents obtained by Page Six.
The 72-year-old is “not going to play this out in public,” his lawyer Ilene Farkas told the Hollywood Reporter.
“The Sterns are entitled to enforce non-disclosure agreements signed by employees who enter their home and their private life,” the statement continued.
Howard’s former employee, notably, has requested that two confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements — which she claimed she didn’t sign — be deemed unenforceable so she can respond to “accusations made against her” and “protect her reputation and future employment prospects.”
Leslie Kuhn, who started working with Howard in 2022 as an office manager and ultimately became his executive assistant, was terminated earlier this year.
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Howard, in his response Wednesday, shared past e-mails in an effort to prove Kuhn knowingly signed the agreements — evidence he claims to have shown his ex-employee and her attorney before her lawsuit dropped.
“The reason Kuhn filed this lawsuit was to pressure the Stern Parties into making an outlandish payment to make her go away,” Howard’s filing reads. “The sole reason Kuhn’s termination has become a matter of public record is because Kuhn and her counsel chose to publicize it by filing this lawsuit.”
He claimed to have told Kuhn in writing that he did not have any intention of talking about her firing, as well as no plans to give anything but a neutral references to future employers.
“There was no smear campaign, no actual or threatened disclosure and no reputational attack,” the docs read. “None.”
A rep for Howard and Beth did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
Earlier this month, we the news of Kuhn suing the couple over an allegedly hostile work environment.
She detailed the “immense pressure” of managing Howard and Beth’s Hamptons home — as well as helping the latter run an “extensive at-home feline rescue and fostering operations” — in court documents obtained by Page Six.
The lawsuit came three years after several of Howard’s ex-staffers discussed the “frightening” financial reality of working for him in Vice TV’s “Dark Side of the 2000s Shock Jocks” docuseries.
Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling, who worked on the “Howard Stern Show” between 1983 to 2001, told viewers in 2023 that employees “weren’t getting paid well,” despite the host “making countless millions of dollars.”
Steve Grillo, who didn’t get paid until six years into his internship, also blasted his “horrible” former boss for “making a million dollars an hour” while he had “to go work at a nightclub in order to survive.”
