Two of the security advisers Fox News hired to protect its crew in Ukraine say the network and its star correspondent, Benjamin Hall, ignored repeated warnings before a 2022 Russian strike that killed two of Hall’s colleagues. Their accounts are at the center of a two-year NPR investigation published Sunday.
The parents of one of the dead, a 24-year-old Ukrainian producer named Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, are suing Fox and Hall in New York. Fox’s main defense is a release form her father signed two weeks after she was killed.
What happened to the Fox News crew in Ukraine?
On March 14, 2022, weeks into Russia’s invasion, Hall, veteran Fox videographer Pierre Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova drove out of central Kyiv with two Ukrainian soldiers. Their plan, Hall wrote in his memoir, was to film defensive trenches inside the city limits. The soldiers wouldn’t let them, so the escorts suggested continuing to Horenka, a village just outside Kyiv.
On the way back, a Russian strike hit their car. Zakrzewski, Kuvshynova and the two soldiers were killed. Hall survived but lost his right leg below the knee and most of his left foot, and was badly injured in one eye. He’s since become one of Fox’s most celebrated figures.
What do the security advisers say?
According to NPR, the warnings were specific. A day earlier, on March 13, American filmmaker Brent Renaud was killed in nearby Irpin, and Irpin’s mayor told journalists to stay out. That night, according to the plaintiffs’ filings, Fox’s daily planning call ended with a clear instruction: stay within Kyiv’s city limits.
The suit alleges that on March 14, Hall chose to leave behind Fox’s security adviser on the trip, Duncan “Jock” Gordon, because the soldiers’ car had only three open seats and Kuvshynova was the only one who spoke Ukrainian. A February 2026 court filing says Gordon told Hall not to go past the checkpoint at the city limits. NPR couldn’t reach Gordon. Kuvshynova’s father says a Ukrainian post commander told him he’d warned Hall not to go farther.
If you took Benji out of the equation, this never would have happened.
Aaron King, a former Fox News high-risk security adviser, to NPR
The other adviser, Shane Thomson, has joined the family’s lawsuit. He alleges Fox scapegoated him afterward. A former Fox international producer also said in a sworn affidavit that he’d filed an internal complaint years earlier that Hall had put colleagues in danger in Syria. Fox says that producer had left the network three years before the Ukraine trip and has no knowledge of it.
What does Fox News say?
Fox and Hall declined to comment to NPR, citing the litigation. Fox pointed to a 2024 statement: “While we understand the grief and continue to mourn the loss of both Pierre Zakrzewski and Sasha Kuvshynova, we will respectfully defend against the inaccurate claims within this lawsuit.” It said the safety of its journalists “has always been our number one priority.”
In his memoir, Hall wrote that Russian forces were “at least thirty miles away.” In a court filing, Fox’s own lawyers wrote that Hall “believed it was safer than it actually was and that he … was wrong. That is certainly true.” Hall says in his filing that Zakrzewski would have handled security communications that day.
Where do the lawsuits stand?
- Kuvshynova’s parents sued Fox and Hall in New York in March 2024. On March 28, 2022, two weeks after her death, her father signed a document as part of a payment for her wages, funeral costs and a sum meant to approximate life insurance. Fox argues that release is “the beginning and the end of the case.”
- A New York judge disagreed for now. She noted the family was grieving while a nuclear-armed country invaded their nation, and let the case move to discovery, which means Fox may have to hand over internal records. Fox has appealed.
- Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, filed a separate suit in London last year, alleging Fox failed to keep her husband safe.
The BeezLoop Take
War reporting kills people even when everyone does everything right. Nobody should pretend otherwise, and it’s not our place to decide who’s legally at fault. A court will do that.
But one part of this doesn’t need a trial. Fox’s lead defense isn’t that its crew followed the rules. It’s that a Ukrainian father, grieving, during an invasion, signed a form two weeks after his daughter was killed. He’d only been able to identify her by her clothes. Whatever Fox thinks happened on that road, leaning on that signature is a choice, and it’s a bad one for a network that has built a hero story around the man who survived.
Fox’s own lawyers have already conceded Hall was wrong about how safe it was. The open question is what the network’s internal records show about who knew the risk that day, and who signed off. Discovery is how the families find out. Why is Fox fighting so hard to keep them from getting there?
More media coverage on BeezLoop: The BBC deleted its own nail polish article, and the White House cut CNN from Air Force One.
Sources: NPR investigation · NPR Weekend Edition · NPR (2024 lawsuit filing) · Fox News
