Glenn Beck Files Countersuit Against Tomi Lahren As Feud With ‘TheBlaze’ Heats Up

Glenn Beck and his media company TheBlaze filed a 35-page countersuit against Tomi Lahren today in Dallas County court.

The legal filing accusing Lahren of breach of contact came in response to a wrongful termination complaint filed by Lahren earlier this month.

“The countersuit states that Lahren was never fired from the network. Instead, the company says the network decided to bench her from air after a slew of bad behavior including Lahren’s mistreating of staff, and making public appearances without prior approval,” LawNewz explained.

TheBlaze maintains that it has been encountering difficulties with Tomi Lahren for at least a year because she was allegedly acting like a diva.

As an aside, TV studios can be edgy venues, but in employment disputes generally, it is worth noting that both sides tend to dredge up incidents that happened in the past and impose their own spin on them. Moreover, in high-profile scenarios, a lawsuit or countersuit may sometimes be crafted more for public relations purposes.

Lahren was pulled off the air after her controversial comments about abortion but is still receiving her full salary and presumably will continue to do so until her TheBlaze contract expires on September 30, so technically she hasn’t been let go. Lahren apparently more-or-less argues that the attempt to muzzle or silence her is equivalent to a firing.

As alluded to above, the feisty conservative commentator, 24, famously and abruptly lost her TheBlaze TV gig when she revealed her pro-choice leanings on The View, which created a social media firestorm. Apparently, this is a flip-flop from her earlier pro-life pronouncements and which evidently led to her sidelining by the Beck channel, with pay.

“I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well,” Lahren told The View ladies on March 17, suggesting that pro-lifers are hypocrites. Previously, she deemed pro-choicers as “straight-up baby killers.” Beck shortly thereafter suspended production on her show on an indefinite basis, which would now appear to be permanent.

Last week, Lahren told ABC Nightline (which Beck claims is a contract violation in and of itself) the following about her status with TheBlaze.

“My job is my life. This is my life. Without that, I feel lost…When your outlet is taken away from you and you don’t understand why and you’re so disappointed and you’re so blindsided, it hurts…I get up in the morning, I don’t have a job to go to. I don’t get to sit down in my chair and deliver my ‘Final Thoughts.’ I don’t have a dressing room, so I’m terminated; I”m fired…the way I look at things, I’m not doing what I was contracted to do, which was produce a television show–a political talk show. I no longer get to do that…something has been stripped from me, and that’s my ability to work, that’s my ability to have a voice, and that’s been taken from me, wrongfully…”

Beck’s countersuit claims that the media network is relying on a “pay or play” clause in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, graduate’s TheBlaze contract which allows the channel to stop airing Tomi’s show and keep her from appearing on any network as long as the checks continue to clear.

In effect, this prevents Lahren from jumping to another media platform to continue her high-profile political commentary in the near term. TheBlaze denies giving Tomi Lahren the boot for switching over to the pro-choice side, but noted that her statements on The View “effectively called many of TheBlaze’s employees, viewers, and readers hypocrites.”

“Her comments were shocking and disappointing because they demonstrated Lahren was uninformed
and unprepared to speak on those issues,” page 10 of the Beck/TheBlaze response claims.

The countersuit also petitions the court for ant order banning Tomi Lahren from speaking in public without TheBlaze‘s approval, which given the bad blood, is unlikely to be granted anytime soon. In addition, Beck’s media company wants the court to block Tomi Lahren from trash-talking TheBlaze or its staff.

Courts generally grant a temporary injunction only upon a finding of what’s called in the eyes of the law irreparable harm, which is a high bar to clear. It remains to be seen if Beck and TheBlaze can convince a judge to go along with that contention.

As the Inquisitr previously reported, Tomi Lahren and Glenn Beck are also at loggerheads over access to her Facebook page and 4 million-plus followers. Beck’s legal filing insists that TheBlaze owns the page but Lahren can still add content as long as she abides by contract provisions.

A South Dakota native, the former One America News Network anchor essentially became an overnight sensation in July 2015, when a video of her calling out President Obama for lack of leadership in fighting terrorism following the Chattanooga murder of four U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy sailor went viral.

Lahren’s two-year employment agreement that went into effect on September 1, 2015 required her to host 230, one-hour TV shows and produce regular digital commentaries for TheBlaze website. The contract includes a non-compete clause.

Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze network reportedly lost a significant amount of market share and traffic to its web portal once Beck went full-on #NeverTrump. Tomi Lahren is a President Trump supporter.

[Featured Image by Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images]