IT’S TIME FOR FOX TO HAVE A SERIOUS NEWS CONFERENCE ABOUT CHARLIE DIXON

Another former employee, Julie Stewart-Binks, accuses a sports content boss of sexual assault, meaning the Super Bowl TV network has a crisis concerning Dixon, Skip Bayless and — yes — Rob Gronkowski

Whatever Lachlan Murdoch does next week at the Super Bowl, no one cares about “record pricing” for Fox advertising. The company CEO and executive chair should call a serious news conference and invite global throngs of media.

He can discuss Charlie Dixon, one of the sports network’s major content bosses.

Another former Fox employee, Julie Stewart-Binks, says the executive vice president sexually assaulted her in 2016 and filed a lawsuit Friday in Los Angeles. Add her to a list that includes Noushin Faraji, a former Fox hairstylist, who says Dixon used “his position to sexually harass women” while former talk host Skip Bayless offered her $1.5 million for sex and gave “lingering hugs and kisses on the cheek while putting his body against hers and pressing against her breasts.” Faraji is suing Dixon, Bayless and others on 14 counts and accuses Dixon of “rubbing her body and groping her buttocks” in 2017.

In Hollywood, Dixon might be a horrible movie waiting to happen. Yet Fox evidently believes it can heave $375 million at Tom Brady and do what it wants. Murdoch and Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks are tossing a party in New Orleans, with at least 10 commercials selling for $8 million. First, they might want to explain whether they have creeps in the house. Media want corporate answers about Dixon and Bayless — and we hear nothing from the corner of Pico Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars.

“These allegations are from over eight years ago. At the time, we promptly hired a third-party firm to investigate and addressed the matter based on their findings,” Fox Sports told The Athletic, which broke the Stewart-Binks news.

A third-party firm? A friend of the Murdochs? And addressed the matter by doing what: pointing Dixon back to Bayless’ show?

To hear Stewart-Binks, she joined Dixon at a hotel bar in Marina del Rey to chat about a Super Bowl pop-up program. Only in television do basic meetings turn into madness, with Dixon allegedly telling her: “You’re not funny, interesting or talented” and claiming she was “not capable of handling big moments on TV.” He pointed at the bar, she said, and told her, “The only way someone would watch you is if you got on top of this bar and took your top off. … You’re not hot enough to be a hot girl on TV.”

Oddly, Stewart-Binks didn’t go home. When Dixon invited her to his room, she said, he “swiftly pushed her against the wall and pinned her arms to her side. … With her arms forcefully held down and his body pressed against hers, Dixon tried to force his tongue into her mouth.” Then he continued “to press against her body and lick her closed mouth. While keeping one of her arms pinned, he moved his other arm from pressing her upper elbow against the wall to her body and towards her chest.”

Finally, she ran off. But with her contract about to expire, she waited to contact human resources. Stewart-Binks went to work at the Super Bowl in San Francisco and was asked by a show’s producers for a favor: Rob Gronkowski, a stripper in college before he became an NFL hero, needed “a viral moment.” Someone handed dollar bills to Stewart-Binks, who said she was on a couch when Gronkowski straddled her and moved his hips.

Gronk, as he often is called, will join Brady to cover the Super Bowl. “Ordinarily, Ms. Stewart-Binks would have considered the implications of such a performance. However, fresh off Dixon’s assault, both physical and verbal, Ms. Stewart-Binks was determined to prove that she was fun and belonged in FS1’s new regime,” the complaint says. “She had to show Dixon and Fox that she had what it took to be a fun, interesting personality capable of handling big moments on TV.”

It didn’t work. Her contract wasn’t renewed.

Said Shanks, after dismissing a male executive in the same period: “Everyone at Fox Sports, no matter what role we play, or what business, function or show we contribute to — should act with respect and adhere to professional conduct at all times. These values are non-negotiable.”

Turns out human resources didn’t help Stewart-Binks, when the network “egregiously made the deliberate decision to protect Dixon and allow a sexual predator to remain an executive at Fox for nearly a decade,” her complaint states.

Shanks, of course, is known for investing in a newspaper in Ojai, his hometown near Los Angeles. He told a podcast: “Towns with newspapers, they function more properly … there’s less corruption. Everything is better in a town when there’s local journalism.” What’s best for Ojai isn’t what is best for America. When the Qatar government asked Fox to cover up a human rights crisis, Shanks was the sports boss who greased the censorship skids in World Cup soccer coverage.

The place reeks. Yet we must watch as part of a possible record Super Bowl audience — more than 123.4 million viewers, established last year. Murdoch and Shanks cannot hide, yet recently, they were painful in asking an executive to defend Brady’s role of running the Las Vegas Raiders and performing in the booth. There is no defense for an absence of integrity, yet Brad Zager told The Athletic: “To me, the questioning of someone’s integrity to say there is a conflict of interest is ridiculous and that’s a shame. … Is there a conflict of interest when Kirk Herbstreit calls Ohio State in the national championship game? Was there a conflict of interest of Joe Davis calling the Dodgers in the World Series?”

No. Herbstreit doesn’t run Ohio State. Davis doesn’t run the Dodgers.

Brady runs the Raiders, one of 32 franchises in the NFL.

Someone needs to speak up. That would be you, Lachlan Murdoch. Otherwise, another woman might file another lawsuit Monday.

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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.