Messages sent to Mr. Ailes's lawyers seeking comment were not returned.
Female staff members told of problems with other supervisors as well. One current employee said that she was with a male supervisor in a closed-door, one-on-one meeting in 2009 when she asked to work on an assignment. He turned to her and said, "Sure," then conditioned it on oral sex. The woman said she laughed it off, thinking that she would face retaliation and be demoted if she told him that the comment was inappropriate.
This woman also said that meetings were filled with sexual innuendo and that supervisors had routinely asked her about her sex life. She said that she was at a happy hour outside the office last year and an executive approached her and whispered in her ear that the full-length zipper on the back of her dress was quite provocative.
Almost all the women said they were reluctant to go to the human resources department with their complaints for fear that they would be fired. Some of the women said they went to their parents instead with their complaints.
Other women, however, said the environment was not as bad as recent news suggested. Ashana Clark, who worked as a makeup artist for Fox News from 2003 to 2014, said in an interview that the company held sexual harassment training sessions at which employees were instructed not to make sexual jokes or references. "After that," she said, "you didn't see a lot of it."
She also said many of the women she worked with "loved Roger Ailes" and were "very grateful to him."
Several former Fox News employees said that people were afraid to speak up but that many women viewed the behavior there as par for the course in the broadcasting industry, where appearance is so highly valued.
"There is a culture where, not that you accept it, you just deal with it," one former employee said.
Ms. Bakhtiar, who now works as a producer for Reuters, said she was risking a lawsuit to speak out because her experience "ruined my life" and also because she said she believed that "this environment has to change." Two former colleagues of hers confirmed to The Times that she had told them of her experience at the time.
After her encounter over coffee with Mr. Wilson, Ms. Bakhtiar said, she informed a manager, Bill Shine, of the incident, and Mr. Shine urged her to make a formal complaint. (Mr. Shine is part of the interim leadership team that 21st Century Fox says will be leading Fox News until it names a new chairman.)
She initially resisted filing a complaint and told her managers: "I know what happens to women. We're expected to shut up about it." But she said she did as she was told.
Ms. Bakhtiar had landed the temporary Washington role at Fox News, she said, before one of her proudest accomplishments — gaining entry to Iran for a summit meeting between the Iranian and Iraqi leaders. (She is of Persian descent, speaks fluent Farsi and spent parts of her childhood living in Iran, and had relatives high up during the last shah's reign).
She said that things changed after she rejected Mr. Wilson's advances, and got worse after she filed her complaint, which was followed by Fox's decision to exercise an option terminating her contract a few weeks later.
"Rudi, we're letting you go," she said Mr. Ailes told her.
"I said, 'You know very well why I'm getting let go, and it has nothing to do with my abilities. You guys came to me and sought me out,'" Ms. Bakhtiar said. "I said, 'This is all about what happened with Brian. You know it, and I know it.' He kept on saying, 'Oh, no, no, no.'"
Ms. Bakhtiar said that Mr. Ailes, referring to a senior news executive, John Moody, told her, "Moody doesn't think you're a good reporter."
In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Moody said, "My lack of confidence in her reporting predated any knowledge that I had of her claims of sexual harassment."
But in Ms. Bakhtiar's view, it was because she had spoken up.
"Once they got my H.R. statement, I was finished, finished — 10 years in the business," Ms. Bakhtiar said.
Mr. Wilson became bureau chief and stayed at the network for two more years, but then left.
Ms. Bakhtiar said she received moral support from colleagues, including the anchor Megyn Kelly.
Ms. Bakhtiar retained a lawyer, the Atlanta litigator L. Lin Wood, who, she said, thought she had a strong case. During mediation, as it became clear that a settlement was getting close, she said Mr. Wood encouraged her not to settle. But she said she did not want to make it into a public legal fight. "I thought, if this gets out, I'll never get another job in this business because nobody likes it when a girl cries sexual harassment."
She accepted a settlement. But as her agent looked for new jobs, he determined that her best route was to go to local news and work her way back up, she said. She could not bring herself to do it. "It took a couple of years for me to bounce back," she said.
Ms. Bakhtiar eventually became a senior adviser at Voice of America's Persian-language service and more recently has served as a producer for Reuters. She is currently working on a documentary about Kurdish pesh merga forces.
When The Times contacted Fox News on Thursday about Ms. Bakhtiar's story, the network contacted her old lawyer, Mr. Wood, she said, to warn her that she was in breach of her agreement. She decided to go forward anyway.
"What are they going to do? Come after me for money? Garnish my wages? It'll make a bigger story out of it," she said. "I just feel like I shut up because I didn't want to hurt my career," she said. "It's awful what happened to me, and to other people, with a nod from management."
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