Does Fox News still have a sexual harassment problem in its workplaces? 

That's a question some are raising  with the news that another Fox News on-air personality, Britt McHenry, has sued her employer, its executives and her former co-host for sexual harassment and for retaliating after she complained.

Just-filed lawsuits are filled with allegations not yet confirmed or proven in court. Fox News, in a company statement, dismissed McHenry's lawsuit and said the company fully investigated her allegations at the time and took appropriate action. 

Nevertheless, the lawsuit against the top-rated cable news channel  is getting attention unwelcome to Fox at this moment.

It comes just as a major movie about Fox News, "Bombshell," is about to hit theaters. It's already picking up awards nominations for its story of how some of Fox's female personalities, including Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, set out to expose the network's hostile work environment of sexual harassment and how the Fox News maestro, the late Roger Ailes, allowed it to thrive.

It also follows a seven-part Showtime TV mini-series this year, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," that also covered the Fox sexual harassment scandals that brought Ailes' TV career to an ignominious end. He died in 2017.

But this culture of sexual harassment was supposed to be in the past at America's leading conservative news network. Now comes McHenry and her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, to assert: No, it's not.

"The real bombshell is that it hasn’t been fixed at all," says Bloom. "Fox continues to be a sanctuary for sexual harassers, the culture has not changed.

"They give lip service to the idea that they have improved but they have not," Bloom says. "This is my fifth client I'm representing against Fox News. Nothing has changed."

McHenry is the former co-host of a Fox Nation show called "Un-PC" with George Murdoch (no relation to the Murdoch family that owns Fox), which ran from December 2018 to February 2019.

Murdoch, she alleges in her lawsuit, "crudely sexually harassed" her through "sexually inappropriate comments to her in person, and also via text message." When McHenry told the network, Fox "punished the victim and rewarded the harasser" by "stripping her of professional opportunities while simultaneously promoting" Murdoch, the complaint says.

And all this allegedly happened recently, notes Robert Thompson, head of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University and a veteran media watcher.

"The 'Un-PC' show has only been around since 2018 so this is alleged to have happened after Ailes, when everything was supposed to be cleaned up," Thompson says. "Was it? That's the big question. We have no data but it's a story worth following."

It's not clear yet, he says, whether Fox made any changes in the wake of the Ailes scandals.

"Did they put major things in place and they weren’t effective? Were the (changes) not enough and they should have known that? Were they halfhearted? Or were they really good efforts and they just forgot that human beings are so capable of just being horrible and stupid? We don't have enough facts."

Regardless, what happens at Fox doesn't just stay at Fox, President Donald Trump's favorite news network. It's too powerful to ignore, even if its audience is only a fraction of the U.S. population or even if the viewing audiences of any of the major broadcast news networks, Thompson says.

"Fox News remains after all that (scandal), after Showtime made a mini-series and now "Bombshell," Fox News still cruises at number 1 (among cable-news networks), Thompson says. "It seems to have lost none of the loyalty of its viewers. Many people argue that it's a very, very powerful force in the way government and journalism and other civic things happen in this country.

"So whenever we see new developments, it’s worth paying attention, even though we have very little information" about McHenry's allegations at this point, he said.

Whatever the truth of McHenry's assertions, Fox still has reasons to be concerned they are being talked about, Thompson says, if for nothing else that they might have to pay to make them go away. In the McHenry lawsuit, Bloom asserts that Fox has already paid out more than $100 million in damages for sexual harassment lawsuits. Also, advertisers, already easily unnerved by controversial Fox pundits, could pull out, even temporarily.

Murdoch's attorney, Tom Clare, said his client denies the allegations in the lawsuit and will pursue defamation counterclaims. "He looks forward to having a public forum in the court system to clear his name from the smear campaign that has been waged against him in the media," Clare said in a statement provided to USA TODAY.

And Gretchen Carlson, whose settlement with Fox News included a non-disclosure agreement, announced a new organization aimed at banning non-disclosure agreements. 

"I am legally prohibited from discussing what really happened to me," Carlson said in a speech at The Hollywood Reporter's 2019 Women in Entertainment event Wednesday. "That silence can feel suffocating....Buying silence instead of stopping harassment is immoral and unjust...I'm going to make sure that stops once and for all.

"This is the next fight in the #MeToo movement."