She died covering war for Fox News. Her parents blame the network — and a star reporter
AFP via Getty Images, Paula Bronstein for NPR and family photos/Collage by Mark Harris for NPR
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NPR Ukraine producers Polina Lytvynova and Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this story.
When the Fox News Channel hosted hundreds of advertisers and industry executives at the ornate Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan two years ago, the network centered attention on a tragic yet heroic figure: the war correspondent Benjamin Hall.
“From Ukraine to the Middle East, and here at home, the dedicated journalists of Fox News are trying to inform Americans, even in the most perilous of circumstances,” Hall proclaimed.
Hall knows peril all too well. In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a strike by Russian forces hit the car in which Hall’s team had been traveling outside Kyiv.
Hall had nearly died. He lost his right leg below the knee, most of his left foot and part of an eye.
Two years after the attack, Hall stood center stage on prostheses, in a suit that ended just above his knees. He entered to a standing ovation.
Hall is interviewed about his book, Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make It Home, on Fox & Friends on March 10, 2023.
Seth Wenig/AP
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Seth Wenig/AP
“These stories, they need eyes on the ground,” Hall said. “They need a human perspective. They need us to bear witness.”
But at what cost?
Though gravely injured, Hall was the lucky one. The strike killed all four people who traveled with Hall that day:
The two Ukrainian soldiers who served as guides. Pierre Zakrzewski, a beloved Fox war videographer. And Oleksandra Kuvshynova, known as Sasha. The 24-year-old Ukrainian had just joined the team as a producer and interpreter.
Fox has described the deaths as tragic and honored the fallen. Yet two multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the network blame it for what happened.
One of those lawsuits has been filed by Kuvshynova’s parents, who also squarely blame Hall. In their first joint interview about the tragedy, they tell NPR they are speaking out to honor their daughter’s life and document what they contend is the injustice of her death.
Andriy Kuvshynov and Iryna Mamaysur hold a portrait of their daughter, Oleksandra Kuvshynova, in 2024.
Paula Bronstein for NPR
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Paula Bronstein for NPR
Two high-risk security advisers who worked for Fox News in Ukraine bolster the family’s claims. In separate interviews with NPR about what happened, they say Fox News and its star correspondent ignored repeated and urgent warnings to stay away from the danger zone outside the city limits of Kyiv.
“If you took Benji out of the equation, this never would have happened,” Aaron King, one of those security advisers, said. The other adviser, Shane Thomson, has joined the Kuvshynovs’ lawsuit, alleging Fox scapegoated him for the tragedy.
This story is based on 15 interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of legal documents, as well as Fox’s own broadcasts. Fox News, citing the ongoing litigation, declined NPR’s repeated and detailed requests for interviews with Fox officials, news executives and lawyers. The network also did not make Hall available for interviews for this story. It additionally declined to respond to specific questions raised for this story.
Shane Thomson was a high-risk security contractor for Fox News during the beginning of the war in Ukraine. He has joined a lawsuit against the network.
Sam McQueen for NPR
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Sam McQueen for NPR
Yet one of the most revealing witnesses to Hall’s character is Hall himself. He wrote a memoir, published a year after the attack, in which he acknowledged increasingly embracing risk as his career and ambitions progressed. The same year, he also presented his story in a Fox documentary.
Fox and its founder, Rupert Murdoch, have faced controversies, scandals and litigation before. Often, accusations center on the network’s right-wing ideology, Murdoch’s own political agenda or their relentless pursuit of profits.
This is different.
Two words define the underlying allegations in the Kuvshynovs’ wrongful death lawsuit against Fox and Hall: ambition and negligence.
Fox calls the deaths tragic but rejects responsibility
Covering any armed conflict by definition involves peril. Hazards are often ambiguous; the boundaries of battle zones are fluid. Combat journalists for many news organizations, including NPR, have been killed.
But the Kuvshynovs and their legal team say what happened to their daughter was preventable — and foreseen. “This was a very avoidable danger that they were specifically warned about, as to [the] exact time and place that they could not go,” charges Stephen Humphreys, a lawyer for the Kuvshynovs and Thomson.
American lawyer Stephen Humphreys is representing Kuvshynova’s parents in their lawsuit against Fox News. He is seen in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2024.
Paula Bronstein for NPR
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Paula Bronstein for NPR
In court statements in the Kuvshynovs’ suit, Fox acknowledges the tragedy of the deaths of Kuvshynova and Zakrzewski. But the network counters the plaintiffs’ claims on technical and legal grounds.
In declining comment for this story, Fox pointed NPR to a statement released in March 2024, when the lawsuit was filed.
“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,” Fox said.
“The safety of our journalists has always been our number one priority and we are immensely grateful to the Fox News journalists who have covered the war in Ukraine and we remain committed to reporting from the region,” the statement continues.
Hall: “I learned that I could control my fear”
AFP via Getty Images and family photos/Collage by Mark Harris for NPR
It wasn’t clear that Hall would get to Kyiv in early 2022.
A dual British-U.S. citizen, Hall was inspired by his globe-trotting family’s past. He wrote in his memoir that at the outset of World War II, his dad’s family was in the Philippines. Japanese forces took Hall’s grandfather prisoner and executed his grandmother and other relatives. U.S. troops rescued Hall’s father, then just a boy.
In chronicling combat, Hall wrote, “I saw a lot of death, had guns pressed against my head, dreamed horrific dreams — all of it an echo of what my father endured in Manila.”
In his 20s, Hall pinged from one hot spot to another, freelancing for outlets like Vice and Esquire, and Fox.
The first time Hall saw a man die was in Misrata, Libya, in 2011. He had a choice, he recounted in the memoir, titled Saved: He could turn away or, perhaps, “invade the dignity of those moments in order to ‘get the story.'”
“I did not have the time to consider all the moral angles. I could either keep filming, or stop filming, and I chose to keep filming,” Hall wrote. He added that he had just escaped being killed too.
Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst attends the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25.
Paul Morigi/Getty Images
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Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Back in London, Hall registered that he had undergone a profound transformation. “I learned that I could control my fear, even bury it, and keep moving forward into danger,” Hall wrote. “I learned that the hellishness of Misrata was not enough to stop me from going to combat zones.
“And I learned that my normal civilized life would never be the same again. No — this was who I was now.”
Years later, his colleague Trey Yingst would call Hall “the gold standard” for war zone reporting for the network.
But there was at least one early red flag. In a sworn affidavit for the Kuvshynovs’ lawsuit, former Fox News international producer Phil Ittner said he had previously lodged a formal internal complaint that Hall’s behavior in Syria had placed colleagues in danger.
“Ben Hall was addicted to the adrenaline rush of taking risks,” Ittner wrote in the affidavit. “I worried that he put his career promotion ahead of the safety of the crew working with him.” He called for Hall to be pulled from the field. Instead, Ittner wrote in the affidavit, Fox never responded. No known consequences ensued. (In its legal filings, Fox responded that Ittner has no knowledge of events in Ukraine as he had been forced out of the network three years earlier.)
In 2015, Hall promised his girlfriend, Alicia Meller, that he would find a safer path as they started a family. They soon married. He also took a full-time job in Fox’s London bureau, which still entailed covering conflict and strife. But in 2021, Hall moved to Washington, D.C., to cover the U.S. State Department.
Benjamin Hall hosts Fox News Sunday on May 12, 2024.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
“I made that final decision to pull back from the front lines,” Hall wrote. “It was much harder than I imagined it would be to make this professional change in my life; the pull of distant wars never weakened or went away. But I understood new paths were opening for me.”
That new path lasted roughly four months.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine. Hall got a call from a Fox News executive: Would he go overseas and cover the war? As he wrote, “I understood my obligations to Alicia and my family, and I knew I had to stop putting myself in dangerous situations.”
Still, off he went.
From D.C. to Lviv
Four days after the Russians invaded, Hall arrived in the city of Lviv. It was an arduous drive from Poland; he was swimming against the tide as long columns of motorists were fleeing Ukraine.
He started reporting and hosting a show that aired nightly on Fox. The major action, however, was hundreds of miles to the east.
Fox had established news coverage from Kyiv with a team of journalists; now it was pulling producers out as the risk increased. Only a skeleton crew remained.
Firefighters put out a fire after a bombing of the eastern Ukrainian town of Chuhuiv on Feb. 24, 2022, as Russian armed forces invaded Ukraine.
Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
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Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
Yet Fox summoned all its journalists in Lviv for a Zoom call, Hall wrote in Saved. Executives hoped to send another correspondent to Kyiv.
“All of us wanted to go, including me,” Hall wrote. He was the one invited.
Hall’s wife urged him not to go, he wrote. He assured her he’d be fine.
Fox had a team of high-risk security contractors to keep its journalists safe. Such security advisers typically have military backgrounds. They provide guidance, muscle and medical aid. They can also serve as a brake on journalists who put their hunger for a story ahead of their own well-being.
Aaron King was one of Fox’s high-risk security advisers. He says that like Hall’s wife — and like another Fox safety contractor — he told Hall not to go to Kyiv.
“It wasn’t in his best interest to go down there,” King said. “And I asked him what he believed that he would achieve that other teams haven’t already achieved at this point in time.”
King says it was like all battle zone assignments — balancing the risks versus the possible reward.
“He kind of processed what I’d spoken to him about, for about 10 seconds, kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Ah, I’ll go anyway,'” King said. “And that was the last I seen of Benjamin.”
In his book, Hall presented the pull to Kyiv as inescapable.
“I could not say no to the offer to go to Kyiv and continue anchoring the show from there,” he wrote in Saved. “It was, in a way, the culmination of all that I had worked on and all the risks I’d taken before. It was the big one, the war that might change the world—change the course of history. This was who I was and what I had prepared to do.”
Sasha Kuvshynova: A life filled with promise
Kuvshynova in 2021.
Kuvshynov family
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Kuvshynov family
Among the people Hall would encounter once he arrived in Kyiv was Sasha Kuvshynova, Fox’s new Gen Z fixer.
Her Facebook page bears a motto in English: “if you never try you will never know.”
Her other social media accounts brim with life too: music and film festivals, her photographic shoots, travel to Tuscany, pictures of her as a child, her cat, Zephyr. She posted about her pride that her father, trained as a physicist, taught her math.
Her accounts turned grim starting in February 2022, after the invasion by Russia. After a Russian strike on the primary television tower in Kyiv, she posted on Instagram: “Glory to Ukraine!”
Kuvshynova’s mother, Iryna Mamaysur, and her father, Andriy Kuvshynov, spoke with pride laced with sorrow during hourslong interviews by video conference from NPR’s Kyiv bureau, sometimes interrupted by air raid sirens. Their words were interpreted by two NPR Ukrainian producers present.
Kuvshynova’s parents say she was remarkable from her youngest years. (Under Ukrainian naming conventions, Kuvshynova took the surname of her father, with an added “a” to reflect her gender.) She learned to read by 3, mastered English by 11 and showed flair as an interpreter early on, her mother said.
As a teen, Kuvshynova briefly aided foreign reporters during the popular uprising in 2014 against Ukraine’s then pro-Russian president, who ultimately fled.
That’s when she met Zakrzewski, the Fox video journalist, and discovered how to blend her interests into a single passion: to tell Ukraine’s story.
When Fox approached her in early 2022 to aid its reporting on the coming war, she embraced the offer eagerly.
“I will tell you that I was very glad,” her father said. “I thought that getting into such a level of a global, vital company [would be a good experience]. Fascinating material, interesting people.”
“She was excited,” her mother recalled. “She said, ‘I have already found my profession.'”
From Lviv to Kyiv
Sergyi Badylevych kisses his young child as his wife, Natalia Badylevych, stands nearby in an underground metro station used as bomb shelter in Kyiv on March 2, 2022.
Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
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Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
Hall arrived in the Ukrainian capital on March 2.
The Fox crew stayed at the InterContinental Kyiv, a luxury hotel in the historical heart of the Ukrainian capital. Other networks holed up there too. He encountered the familiar faces of Yingst and Zakrzewski, a crackerjack visual journalist with a big heart, a mischievous streak and a salt-and-pepper walrus mustache.
Kuvshynova had also moved into the hotel. As a “fixer” for Fox, she was in touch with people in the Ukrainian military and the government and scouted possible sites and scenes to film. She knew the language, and she knew her way around. It was home.
Kuvshynova would send her parents reassuring texts frequently. She let them know, for example, when she had returned from outings near battle zones.
“She said, ‘Mom, don’t worry. We have security on these crews who are very experienced,'” said her mother, Iryna Mamaysur.
And she joked, given the protective gear they all wore, that she was “a very fashionable lady who outfits our team.”
Toward the end of each day, the team would hold what it called “evening prayers,” based on a British military practice. The crew would break down its intentions for the next day and map out the logistics with Fox producers and security consultants. Senior producers in London and Jerusalem and even executives in New York City would participate in the call.
A senior network executive or security official was supposed to sign off on each assignment, particularly if it involved going near the front, Thomson, the security adviser, wrote in his sworn affidavit.
Thomson also alleged in the affidavit that the staff — “overstressed and overworked” before Hall’s arrival — began “working to the point of exhaustion.” The presence of an additional correspondent put an additional burden on Kuvshynova in particular, he alleged.
Initially, Hall wrote, he continued to host the live show from a hotel room balcony in the freezing winter morning.
But he wanted to do more.
“You’ve got to try and get the pictures”
Ukrainian service members look for and collect unexploded shells after fighting against a Russian raiding group in Kyiv on Feb. 26, 2022.
Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
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Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
Even in a war zone — especially in a war zone — television news stories are based on one thing.
“Inevitably, you’ve got to try and get the pictures,” said Jon Williams, who oversaw international coverage at the BBC and ABC News and later led the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ.
“What’s happening on the streets of Tehran or in Dubai or in Doha, when you can see buildings going up in flames — you have the images. You can tell the story. And there is a compelling reason to try and get the images.”
In recent decades, there have been more armed conflicts to cover. And press groups and media outlets have put a far-greater emphasis on journalists’ safety and careful planning of assignments. Many reporters, including those at NPR, are required to go through what’s called “hostile environment training” before heading off to cover conflict.
Williams heads up the Rory Peck Trust, which provides funds and training to aid the security of freelance journalists who are reporting in perilous zones. It also provides support for families of those reporters who are injured or killed in such circumstances.
Williams said the danger of combat reporting can never be eliminated. Shortly after the attack on the Fox crew in 2022, CNN’s Ben Wedeman and his colleagues were almost struck while filming a report in Bucha, a northwest suburb of Kyiv.
CNN’s Ben Wedeman ducks for cover while reporting in Ukraine in 2022.
CNN/Screenshot by NPR
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CNN/Screenshot by NPR
“In these vast open spaces, the Russians seem far away,” Wedeman narrated. “They’re not.”
In 2022 alone — the year of the incident — 28 journalists were killed in conflict zones around the world, according to UNESCO.
Broadly speaking, Williams offered this caution: “When correspondents or crews begin not to recognize the risks that they’re facing and become too comfortable with risk, then it’s time to take them out.”
A fateful assignment
People cross a destroyed bridge as they evacuate Irpin, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, during heavy shelling and bombing on March 5, 2022.
Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
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Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
In her last publicly available Facebook post, Kuvshynova paid homage to people fleeing Kyiv on planks beneath the remains of a bombed-out bridge on the city’s northwest side. She posted in Ukrainian and English.
Irpin. Evacuation of the civilians. March 5, 2022.
Under the sound of shelling, soldiers and volunteers are helping to move thousands of people under the blown-up (by Russians) bridge.
“We have been here for three hours, since the morning. Fortunately, the night was finally quiet” holding back tears [a] local tells me.
The evacuation of the population lasts [a] 3rd day. About 200 tanks and armored personnel carriers of the occupiers have been accumulated near Irpin.
Russian troops blew up an evacuation train that was going to pick up people. The railway tracks were also blown up.
Currently, the Zhytomyr highway, Bucha – Irpin – [H]ostomel, Makariv and the north of Vyshhorod district remain the most dangerous in the Kyiv region.
That area northwest of Kyiv would be where Kuvshynova lost her life.
On March 12, high-risk security adviser Shane Thomson set out with Fox’s Trey Yingst toward that same area but stopped short of it at a checkpoint in the northwest suburbs.
They were near Ukrainian forces and a string of foxholes, with other soldiers a kilometer ahead of them engaging with the Russians, he says.
“We were semi-safe,” Thomson recalls.
And then they weren’t.
A Ukrainian serviceman walks toward the front line in Irpin on March 12, 2022.
Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
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Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
“The trigger point for me was close fire,” Thomson says. “We had mortars coming over. We took cover, and then we evacuated back.”
Despite the dangers, a number of TV networks had already aired dramatic footage from that region. Fox wanted more images of those refugees fleeing Irpin, a northwest Kyiv suburb, and Thomson says he understood why.
“Just behind them, you got a shot of the city, where it’s a, it’s smoke. They can hear gunfire. They can hear explosions. They wanted the atmospherics at the time,” Thomson told NPR.
But the risks were real. A British Army veteran serving with Ukrainian troops, Dale Sutton, had texted the high-risk advisers that it was too dangerous to bring journalists to Irpin, Thomson told NPR, a key claim in his affidavit. Russian forces were in the area; some even pretended to be news crews.
Sutton affirmed Thomson’s account in an interview with NPR. “It’s an absolute no-go area. It’s beyond hot,” Sutton recalled telling Thomson and King. “You’ve got no business being here.”
A rocket trail in the sky over Irpin is seen on March 12, 2022.
Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
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Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
Thomson alleges in his lawsuit that tensions mounted between Fox’s journalists and their security advisers. King, who consulted with them from Lviv, told NPR the same thing. (NPR could not reach Duncan “Jock” Gordon, a third Fox security contractor who was present in Kyiv, for comment, despite numerous attempts.)
At evening prayers, Thomson told NPR, he vetoed the proposed trip toward Irpin. He alleges Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott was on the call. Fox says that he has no evidence that Scott directed the movements of the network’s team in Ukraine.
The next day, March 13, Russians scattered across the area. They overtook the nearby town of Bucha and half of Irpin. There, they shot dead the American documentarian Brent Renaud and wounded his colleague. The mayor of Irpin issued a public warning to journalists: Stay out. It’s too dangerous.
Given all that, the message at evening prayers on the night of the 13th was clear-cut, according to the plaintiffs’ filings: Stay within Kyiv city limits. In his affidavit, Thomson said the nearby suburbs were out of bounds.
American documentarian Brent Renaud attends the Peabody Awards ceremony in 2015. He was killed while reporting in Ukraine on March 13, 2022.
Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Peabody Awards
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Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Peabody Awards
“There was no way we were going there,” Thomson told NPR. “No way. Not after the credible intel, what we had and everything what we had before. It was all on point. There’s nothing, no gray areas.”
It’s not clear exactly how the team hatched its alternative plan. According to Thomson, Kuvshynova proposed filming footage at the perimeter line that Ukrainian defense forces were building in Kyiv along the highway to Irpin.
“This represented a sort of a compromise with the pressure to go to Irpin … without leaving the Kyiv city limits or going outside established defense positions,” Thomson said in his sworn affidavit.
In the interviews and the lawsuit, the Kuvshynovs and Thomson allege that this outing occurred at Hall’s direction, and they say they believe it occurred with the support of Fox executives tracking events from New York.
In her lawsuit filed in the U.K., Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, similarly alleges that it was clear by March 13 that Irpin was not safe and that Fox failed to heed or recognize the warning signs. She says it was the network’s job to exercise care for her husband’s safety.
In his own court filing in the Kuvshynov case, Hall says Zakrzewski would have been responsible for communicating with Fox about security and logistical concerns for March 14. Hall adds that he does not know of anyone in New York being consulted on March 14.
The assignment was simple, Hall wrote in his memoir: “Pierre and I decided to visit the defensive trenches being dug in Kyiv and find a story there.”
What happened on March 14
The next day, Zakrzewski, Hall and Kuvshynova boarded a white van at the hotel. They planned to travel up the highway to a checkpoint set up by Ukrainian forces just inside the city limits.
In Saved, Hall recounts a careful approach:
“Pierre and I knew how we would cover the elaborate trench systems the Ukrainians were building within Kyiv as a defense against Russian military units like the Wagner Group, ruthless mercenaries dispatched by Putin to fight his wars across the globe,” Hall wrote. “Our explicit intention was to avoid the front lines, stay clear of active fighting, remain within the city’s borders, and only report on the trenches inside Kyiv.”
Security adviser Jock Gordon was with them. Thomson stayed behind. By Thomson’s account in his affidavit, the initial driver assigned to drive the crew refused, citing the danger. The team pulled in a replacement.
They were escorted by two Ukrainian soldiers in a separate car. In Saved, Hall wrote that those soldiers had been arranged by a Ukrainian army press liaison at Kuvshynova’s request. Her parents’ lawsuit contends the military did not sign off on the work; the soldiers were freelancing as security guards to make some extra money on the side.
When they arrived at the trenches, the team could see Ukrainian soldiers conducting target practice, but they weren’t allowed to film.
“I tried to negotiate with the soldiers through Sasha, but they were adamant,” Hall wrote in his memoir. “Our plan to report on the strategic trench system was not going to happen.”
But they didn’t have to go back empty-handed. Their escorts — the two troops — suggested they continue on to the nearby suburb of Horenka, Hall said in a court filing last year. The village “had been recently destroyed by Russian forces, where [the same Ukrainian soldiers escorting the Fox team] had taken a crew from the New York Times only the day before,” Hall wrote.
The area was, Hall wrote in Saved, “abandoned except for some Ukrainian troops. The Russian forces, we understood, would be at least thirty miles away and not pushing in our direction.”
A crucial dispute
A man stands near a house destroyed in Russian artillery shelling in the Kyiv suburb of Horenka on March 6, 2022.
Efrem Lukatsky/AP
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Efrem Lukatsky/AP
In a footnote in a recent legal filing, Fox’s attorneys wrote that “the gist of that statement was that Hall believed it was safer than it actually was and that he — and the Ukrainian soldiers who drove the team out — was wrong. That is certainly true.”
The Kuvshynovs and Thomson reject that. Their attorneys argued that the reasonable conclusion is that Hall’s claim was “at all times, patently and knowingly false.”
And their lawsuit against Fox and Hall alleges one more thing about that trip up the highway.
The white van the journalists traveled in had the word “press” in big letters on its hood and sides — a possible target for Russian forces. The two Ukrainian soldiers wanted everyone to go in their smaller car. But there were only three seats available.
According to the lawsuit, Hall said the Fox team should leave behind Gordon — the security consultant charged with keeping them safe that day — in favor of Kuvshynova, the only one who could speak Ukrainian.
“According to Jock,” a February 2026 court filing for the Kuvshynovs states, “before he was left behind, the security adviser gave Ben Hall specific instructions not to go anywhere else, not to go to any location that had not been vetted with a proper security analysis, or go beyond the [checkpoint] inside the Kyiv city limits where the crew intended to film.” (NPR could not reach Gordon for comment.)
Thomson says Gordon urged Zakrzewski to turn on a livestream that would display his location to Fox colleagues in New York and London. An image shared in a Fox WhatsApp group chat that day, referred to in court filings and reviewed by NPR, shows Zakrzewski had done just that as the team traveled in the soldiers’ car, past the checkpoint and the city limits and into Kyiv’s contested northwest suburbs.
An attack “out of nowhere”
How far they pushed is a matter of contention in the litigation. Regardless, when the team finished getting footage of destruction, it turned back toward Kyiv.
The attack came on a suburban stretch of road near some light industrial warehouses, including an auto repair shop.
“The first missile came out of nowhere, lands about 30 feet in front of us. Immediately, Pierre shouts, ‘Reverse the car! Reverse the car!'” Hall told Fox’s Sean Hannity in March 2023. “The car got stuck. We couldn’t go back, and Pierre shouted, ‘Get out of the car! Everyone, get out of the car!’ And the next second, the second bomb hits right in front of the left of the car. And that one, I went black.”
“I was in a dark place. I couldn’t feel or see. I’d taken shrapnel in the eye and the matchbox-sized shrapnel in my neck. And I was — I was out. I was out dead,” Hall told Hannity.
In his memoir, Hall credited two people with convincing him to get out of the car before yet another attack would destroy it: Zakrzewski, who Hall said flung the car door open and ordered him to get out, and his young daughter Honor, whose disembodied voice he heard urging him on: Daddy, you’ve got to get out of the car. Hall, by his account, dragged himself to a nearby vehicle and a soldier with Ukrainian special forces got out and pulled him to safety.
Zakrzewski “escaped the car but suffered a penetrating wound to his left upper leg from which he bled to death at the side of the road,” according to his widow’s lawsuit.
Kuvshynova and the two soldiers never made it out of the car.
The search
Later that day, with no trace of the team, Thomson and Gordon — the two security advisers in Kyiv — began a desperate search. They checked with Ukrainian military and civil authorities, hospitals and morgues. Journalists and security consultants for competing news outlets pitched in too.
Finally, Thomson said, a doctor called, asking him whether one of the missing was British. His patient was severely wounded and had a U.K. passport. It was Hall.
Doctors in Kyiv amputated Hall’s right leg, but he needed far more intensive care — and soon. He was spirited out of Kyiv with maneuvers right out of a spy novel.
They included a special rescue squad from the private group Save Our Allies operating amid curfews, a voyage out of the war zone on the train of the prime minister of Poland and an airlift to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin secured the approval of then-U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for the airlift.
But what about the others? To find Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova, Thomson again enlisted security contractors for other news organizations. They spoke to sources in Ukrainian military and intelligence agencies. The international journalists in Kyiv pulled together, with CNN’s Clarissa Ward aiding Fox’s Yingst in the search, according to people at both networks. All came up short.
“We tried to locate their [geolocating] devices, satellite phones, their iPhones, and we just couldn’t do it,” Thomson recalled. The last point identified was the site where they were struck.
Finally, a call came from the Kyiv city morgue. He rushed there to identify Zakrzewski. Fox ordered Thomson to drive the body to Poland.
Michelle Ross-Stanton (right), Pierre Zakrzewski’s widow, is consoled outside the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in Dublin on March 29, 2022.
Damien Storan/PA Images via Reuters
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Damien Storan/PA Images via Reuters
In his affidavit, Thomson said it was an onerous, dangerous and emotionally crushing burden.
In Poland, Thomson met Ross-Stanton, Zakrzewski’s widow. Fox employees also were there. They signaled him not to answer questions, Thomson said in the affidavit, effectively ordering him “to hide the truth from my friend’s grieving widow.” They toasted Zakrzewski, a citizen of France and Ireland, with a bottle of Irish whiskey over his coffin, Ross-Stanton says.
A family’s unease turns to grief
The Kuvshynovs’ lawsuit against Fox and Hall can be divided into two parts: what happened that led to their daughter’s death, and how they say they were treated afterward.
They began to worry when they didn’t get the usual reassuring message from her after her trip up the highway. Fox has not addressed what it did in the days immediately following Sasha Kuvshynova’s death.
Iryna Mamaysur and Andriy Kuvshynov hold a photo of Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova in Kyiv.
Paula Bronstein for NPR
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Paula Bronstein for NPR
According to the Kuvshynovs’ allegations, there are many things the network did not do.
Fox executives didn’t immediately call to tell them what it knew and what it did not.
They didn’t send someone who spoke Ukrainian to serve as an interpreter and guide them through the terrible hours and days that followed.
They didn’t offer immediate comfort and condolences to demonstrate how much Kuvshynova was valued as a colleague.
“We were not informed about anything about the search for Sasha, about any investigations,” her father, Andriy Kuvshynov, told NPR. “They didn’t tell us. And it’s not clear if they knew that — what had happened — why they didn’t tell us.”
In fact, Kuvshynova’s parents said, no one reached out on the day of the attack.
The next day, they said, they got a call from someone on Fox’s team in Kyiv encouraging them to pick up their daughter’s belongings.
Kuvshynova visiting Italy in 2021.
Kuvshynov family
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Kuvshynov family
Kuvshynov told NPR he took that as an ominous turn. He didn’t go. The man called back, but still the father didn’t go.
The next day, Kuvshynova’s boyfriend — Sviatoslav Yurash — brought them her suitcase from the InterContinental.
It was Yurash, a member of parliament, who told them their daughter had been killed, Kuvshynov said in his sworn statement. (Yurash backed up the broad strokes of this account in his interview with NPR.)
The two men bundled into a car to retrace the path of the news team. They first were stopped at the checkpoint where the Fox crew had intended to film the trenches.
A Ukrainian army post commander there said he had seen the Fox team and had warned Hall not to go farther, according to Kuvshynov’s statement. The journalists had proceeded anyway.
Kuvshynov said he and Yurash continued, retracing the Fox team’s path up the highway. At the southern tip of Hostomel, on the boundary line of Irpin, the two men came upon “the burned wreck” of the car, Kuvshynov said in his affidavit.
Hall wrote in his court declaration that the strike occurred in Horenka, which is closer to Kyiv than Hostomel. His accounts in the memoir, on television and in his declaration make no mention of Hostomel.
Regardless, “Everything there was ruined, destroyed — that is, erased from the face of the earth,” Kuvshynov told NPR. His daughter’s body wasn’t there.
The following day — 48 hours after the deadly strike — the Kuvshynovs were told their daughter was at the morgue, Kuvshynov wrote in his affidavit. He said they could identify her only from her clothes “as the body had turned to ashes.” They refused to accept it as the truth for weeks, until DNA tests confirmed the results.
In the ensuing days, Yurash’s social media posts mourned Kuvshynova’s death and railed at the Russians.
“She was murdered,” he wrote in English. “Couldn’t help but come. Couldn’t help but search. Couldn’t help but find. Couldn’t help but hate like never hated before. Justice will be had.”
An offer from Fox
A priest prays over Kuvshynova’s coffin during a funeral service at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv on March 20, 2022.
Efrem Lukatsky/AP
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Efrem Lukatsky/AP
On March 17, the day after Kuvshynov viewed his daughter’s remains at the morgue, a Fox News human resources executive sent him an offer to pay her wages and benefits, funeral expenses and “an additional cash sum meant to approximate life insurance proceeds that would have been payable had she been a full-time employee,” Fox’s legal team wrote in court filings.
Considering Kuvshynova was not a permanent employee, the payment was meant “as a show of sympathy and goodwill,” the network said. Indeed, Fox’s court filings state it paid the family more than what was contractually required.
Kuvshynov said his daughter had not been paid by Fox at all at the time of her death. He figured, Kuvshynov said in his affidavit, that he was simply agreeing to receive standard compensation for her work.
“I did not know the extent Fox was at fault,” Kuvshynov wrote in his affidavit. “I did not intend or contemplate that the payment offered by Fox three days after Sasha was killed, and one day after we were officially informed of her death, covered any such wrongdoing by Fox.”
He said he never would have agreed to that. His wife, he said, had taken to bed, bereaved and unaware that Fox had sought this resolution.
A week later, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott sent a condolence note by email to the Kuvshynovs in English and Ukrainian.
“There can be no pain greater for a parent, than losing a child. I know Sasha was an absolutely exceptional young woman,” Scott wrote. “I’ve heard from so many of our reporters and producers about how talented she was, and how much she impressed them with her work and her passion.”
“Please know that we will not forget your daughter or her sacrifice,” Scott concluded. “We will honor Sasha in our work, celebrate her in our thoughts, and remember her in our prayers.”
On the same day, Fox posted a tribute to Kuvshynova on its website.
Fox News/Screenshot by NPR
On March 27, Fox sent the paperwork. Kuvshynov signed the document the next day — exactly two weeks after his daughter’s death. In its court filings, Fox argued that it cannot be held legally responsible because Kuvshynov signed that document: “The valid contract is the beginning and the end of the case.”
Fox’s legal team also argued it had no legal duty to disclose any facts to the Kuvshynovs and therefore did not commit fraud in presenting the settlement.
According to the Kuvshynovs, Hall called them once. The gulf was too great: The mourning Ukrainians could not understand what the grief-choked reporter was saying in English.
Hall returned to Kyiv in November 2023 with Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox News’ parent company. He is the network’s controlling owner, along with his father, Rupert.
Hall had secured a one-on-one interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who awarded Hall the Order of Merit, III class, for his “outstanding personal contribution to strengthening … support for Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity.” Hall also met his rescuers to thank them.
Hall and Murdoch did not contact the Kuvshynovs during their visit. (A corporate spokesperson declined all comment on Murdoch’s behalf.)
Kuvshynov said he learned of the details of Kuvshynova’s death only from Thomson, the security consultant, and Humphreys, the lawyer — not Fox. (Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Humphreys has frequented Kyiv, documenting potential Russian war crimes and teaching courses at law schools there. Humphreys said that’s how he came across the case.)
They filed suit in March 2024.
Shane Thomson, the high-risk security adviser who warned Hall, Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova not to go beyond the Kyiv city limits, joined the grieving parents in their lawsuit against Fox and Hall.
Shane Thomson says he has struggled to find work and suffered bouts of depression since 2022.
Sam McQueen for NPR
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Sam McQueen for NPR
He says after the attack, some Fox employees insinuated that Thomson abused alcohol — he denies drinking — and that led to the deaths and debacle. He said in his affidavit that SEPAR, the security consulting firm that had hired him to work for Fox, fired him several months after the attack without telling him why. (SEPAR did not return NPR’s calls and emails seeking comment.)
He blames Fox for his loss of a subsequent job. And he told NPR he was so distraught he later tried to take his own life.
Former Fox security consultant Aaron King affirmed this and said Thomson did not abuse alcohol.
In court documents, Fox’s legal team noted that Thomson does not have concrete examples of specific claims being made about him. And the network argued it cannot be responsible for what is said unofficially about Thomson.
Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, last year filed a parallel civil lawsuit in London, where the couple lived, alleging that Fox did not properly secure the news crew’s safety. Ross-Stanton told NPR that she cannot discuss the incident because of the litigation. (She first expressed her concerns in an interview published in a November 2022 story by Jeremy Barr, then of The Washington Post.) According to the Post, she was seeking more than $11 million in compensation for the failure to protect Zakrzewski from harm and to insure him adequately.
A long shot
A news ticker displays headlines at the Fox News headquarters in New York City in April 2023.
Nickolai Hammar/NPR
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Nickolai Hammar/NPR
The lawsuit on behalf of the Kuvshynovs and Thomson raises questions of what evidence is relevant and whether U.S. law applies to an incident in a war zone thousands of miles away.
The suit alleges that Fox’s actions rise to the level of corporate negligence under the Ukrainian civil code. The company argues that its New York-based executives cannot be held to account under Ukrainian law — in part because, it says, a key element of the relevant law didn’t even exist until a year after the incident.
The odds that the Kuvshynovs will win their lawsuit appear long. They are up against a media empire. And the case has experienced setbacks.
In December, Judge Mary V. Rosado dropped Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott as defendants from the case. Rosado also dismissed HarperCollins, the Murdoch-owned publisher that issued Hall’s memoir, Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make It Home. The judge additionally rejected two of the counts filed by Thomson.
But some of his counts remain, including accusations of tortious interference and infliction of emotional distress. And Rosado ruled that the case can proceed to the discovery phase. That means the Kuvshynovs’ legal team can review Fox News’ internal correspondence, footage, materials and other evidence.
In stark terms, the judge rejected Fox’s argument for dismissal.
In her order, Rosado said it would be “a grave injustice” to deny the Kuvshynovs the ability to investigate whether Fox was telling them the truth. She noted that they were not represented by an attorney when they signed the agreement with Fox.
“The circumstances under which Kuvshynova died were allegedly misrepresented to the Kuvshynovs, who, given the circumstances of grieving the loss of a daughter while navigating a calamitous invasion by a large nuclear-armed country, did not have the ability to investigate whether the Fox Defendants’ representation of events was accurate,” Rosado continued.
And the Kuvshynovs’ lawyer, Humphreys, believes he has an unimpeachable source to use against Fox and Hall: Hall’s own words. While his memoir’s publisher is no longer on the hook, the Kuvshynovs’ attorney is still using the book to help make their case.
Benjamin Hall hosts Fox News Sunday on May 12, 2024.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
On first encounter, Humphreys seems an unlikely choice to take on topflight white-shoe defense firms hired by the United States’ most profitable news channel. He has represented clients against the University of Georgia — the campus from which he earned his law degree — and against the state’s larger public university system.
Yet Humphreys is not unfamiliar with the corridors of power. He once worked in Washington, D.C., as an aide and speechwriter to then-U.S. Sen. Wyche Fowler, who remembers Humphreys as quick to try to right perceived injustices.
“He is persistent and he is tenacious,” Fowler says now.
Fox is appealing Judge Rosado’s ruling. It is also seeking to have Thomson’s remaining allegations thrown out. (A new judge is overseeing the case since Rosado’s retirement this year.)
As life moves on, ghosts remain
A photo of Zakrzewski is displayed in the hearse following his funeral at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in Dublin on March 29, 2022.
Damien Storan/PA Images via Reuters
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Damien Storan/PA Images via Reuters
The suit against Fox filed by Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, is still winding its way through the British legal system. While she said she cannot comment on her case, Ross-Stanton told NPR that she held a celebration for what would have been Zakrzewski’s 60th birthday in August.
Ross-Stanton — a veteran reporter herself — is aiding the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office with research and investigation. The office has initiated a formal judicial investigation of war crimes in the fatal strike, working with Irish and Ukrainian authorities.
In Ukraine, the prosecutor general’s office told NPR that national police are still conducting a pretrial investigation into the deaths of Kuvshynova and Zakrzewski in advance of possible criminal proceedings against Russian forces.
The day after Kuvshynova died, her former boyfriend, Yurash, signed papers to join the Ukrainian armed forces, he said. He is now an army sergeant while remaining in parliament. In the intervening years, Yurash has married and had a baby. He has commissioned a sculpture in Kuvshynova’s honor.
Flowers and candles rest on the headstone for Kuvshynova.
Kuvshynov family
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Kuvshynov family
Weeks after her death, another friend of Kuvshynova, Oleksii Horbach, paid tribute in an online memorial.
“I asked her repeatedly, ‘Why, Oleksandra, do you have to do this?'” Horbach said, in remarks interpreted by NPR. “And she told me once, ‘It is impossible to climb any peak without risk.’ That’s why she wanted to be a war correspondent, to be useful, to be in the center of events.”
Kuvshynova’s mission — to tell the world about what was happening to her country — remains admirable, her friends say.
But her parents argue that those she worked for, and trusted, failed to protect her.
“Fox treated us shamefully because they didn’t consider us and didn’t respect us,” said Kuvshynova’s mother, Iryna Mamaysur. “Something went wrong.”
“This world has lost Oleksandra Kuvshynova — a musician, a poet, an athlete, a photographer and the best daughter. It lost my love.”
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