March 15, 2019
Rudabeh (Rudi) Bakhtiar made her name as one of the startling beauties hired to present the news on the fledgling Fox
News Network. As with many of the other statuesque women, she has filed suit against male staff at Fox for sexual harassment.
Rudi is back in journalism, but not back on camera. She is now working for the Reuters news agency in Washington, DC, as a producer.
Bakhtiar, now 52, is the grandniece of Shahpour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister under the monarchy. Rudi’s great aunt was Empress Soraya, the second wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
While she was born in Fresno, California, the family moved back to Iran when she was six and remained there until the revolution, when she was 17, so most of her education was in Iran. She received her bachelor’s in science from UCLA and planned to become a dentist, but at the last moment shifted from dental school to architecture at the Harvard.
But instead of designing buildings, she joined CNN in 1996 and worked there almost a decade before resigning to move home to California to help care for her ailing father. After his death, she joined Fox News in 2006. But she soon complained of sexual harassment by the Washington bureau chief and was fired. She was one of the first, if not the first, Fox News staffer, to go to court complaining of sexual harassment. This was a decade before the epidemic of suits by female journalists against Fox.
In the end, Fox settled by paying her $670,000 and legal fees.
She has never married.