Howard Stern has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by his former executive assistant seeking $2.5 million in damages from him and his wife, Beth.
The SiriusXM host called the lawsuit a “shakedown” and a “transparent fraud” in court documents obtained by Page Six on Wednesday.
The 72-year-old “is not going to play this out in public,” said his lawyer, Eileen Farkas.
“Mr. and Mrs. Stern have the right to enforce non-disclosure agreements signed by employees who enter their homes and private lives,” the statement continued.
Notably, Ms. Howard’s former employees requested that two confidentiality and confidentiality agreements (which she claims she did not sign) be deemed unenforceable in response to “the accusations made against her” and to “protect her reputation and future employment prospects.”
Mr. Kuhn began working for Mr. Howard in 2022 as his office manager and eventually became his executive assistant, but was fired earlier this year.
In his response Wednesday, Howard shared past emails to prove that Kuhn knowingly signed the contract. It claims to have shown evidence to a former employee and her attorney before Kuhn’s case was dropped.
“Mr. Kuhn filed this lawsuit in order to pressure the Stern parties into paying exorbitant amounts to get her to leave,” Howard’s filing states. “The only reason Ms. Kuhn’s termination became a matter of public record is because Ms. Kuhn and her attorneys chose to make it public by filing this lawsuit.”
He claimed that he told Mr. Kuhn in writing that he did not intend to discuss Mr. Kuhn’s termination and would not provide anything other than a neutral reference to future employers.
“There was no defamation, no actual exposure, threat of exposure, or reputational attack. There was nothing,” the document says, alleging that Kuhn only made the allegations in hopes of receiving “hush money.”
Mr. Kuhn’s attorney, John J. Leonard, issued a statement to Page Six on Thursday about his “firm opposition” to the application, arguing that it poses no “factual or legal threat to Mr. Kuhn’s claims.”
The lawyer added, “With the sudden revelation of yet another NDA allegation at the eleventh hour, we expect the litigation to only expand, rather than shrink as intended.”
The Hollywood Reporter first reported that Howard contested the lawsuit.
Earlier this month, Page Six broke the news that Kuhn was suing the couple for a hostile work environment.
In court documents obtained by Page Six, she detailed the “incredible pressure” of managing Howard and Beth’s Hamptons home and helping Howard and Beth run “an extensive cat rescue and foster operation in their home.”
The lawsuit comes three years after several of Mr. Howard’s former staffers discussed the “horrible” financial realities of working for him in the Vice TV documentary series “The Dark Side of 2000s Shock Jock.”
Jackie “The Jokeman” Martling, who worked on “The Howard Stern Show” from 1983 to 2001, told viewers in 2023 that employees “were not well paid,” even though the host was “making untold millions of dollars.”
Steve Grillo, who didn’t get paid until the sixth year of his internship, also blamed his “terrible” former boss for “making $1 million an hour” even though he “had to work in nightclubs to survive.”
