Even though pretty much everyone on the planet spent the days before his firing screaming about how much he deserved to be fired, it looks like former Fox News film critic may be suing his former employers for wrongful termination. That in itself seems weird enough, since pretty much everyone thought he had it coming, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg in a bizarre story being reported over at the New York Daily News.
They say Friedman was fired not because he encouraged people to run out and illegally download one of his employers' own movies, while that same employer at the same time chided other writers for doing the same. Instead they say he was fired as part of some big conspiracy spearheaded by Scientology. No I am not joking.
The story from Friedman’s side goes a little something like this: Roger Friedman went to the funeral of Isaac Hayes. Apparently at some point he wrote an anti-Scientology column and while in town for Isaac’s funeral got in some sort of altercation with John Travolta’s wife Kelly Preston who, wasn’t happy about his editorializing. Friedman says that Preston then later called his bosses and tried to get him fired. Friedman’s bosses refused. From then it gets a little unclear, if they refused then where’s his case? It’s hard to draw a line from that to his later firing and frankly Friedman sounds as if he’s every bit as deluded about what he did as everyone thought he was.
He does have one really good point here and if I were him, that’s what I’d build his case on, not this ridiculous Scientology conspiracy. Apparently, as suspected back when we first wrote about this, Friedman’s piece was read and approved by four different Fox News editors, or at least that’s what his attorney claims. Those who’ve been following the story will recall that at the time, Fox tried to distance from the story and paint Friedman as some sort of rogue, loosely associated freelance reporter whom they had no control over. That never made any sense, everyone knew it didn’t make any sense, and now here we stand.
Except even if that’s true, I don’t see how that excuses Friedman. Yes those editors approved the piece, yes they bear some responsibility and yeah, maybe they should have been fired. Friedman still wrote it, and he still deserved to get his ass canned too. Enjoy the unemployment line Roger. Maybe the Pirate Bay will hire you.
Friedman’s Tom Cruise conspiracy theory isn’t even the only thing going on here. Friedman’s attorney Martin Garbus is further claiming that the leak of Wolverine onto the internet 30 days early, the leak which Friedman used for his illegal downloading, was actually all the fault of Rupert Murdoch to begin with. “Apparently, someone made another copy for themselves,” he says. That’s right, they’re claiming Rupert Murdoch pirated his company’s movie.
