She Lived in Their Mansion. Then She Was Fired. Now She Wants $2.5 Million From Howard and Beth Stern.
It started with a job offer. It ended with a lawsuit worth $2.5 million. And somewhere in the middle, there were cats, a 20,000-square-foot Southampton mansion, and a non-disclosure agreement that may or may not have ever been signed.
Leslie Kuhn was hired by SiriusXM in 2022 as an office manager for The Howard Stern Show. She was later promoted to executive assistant — and eventually, she moved into the Stern estate in Southampton. According to court documents, she was tasked with managing the mansion’s staff, handling payroll, scheduling, and overseeing general household operations, including Beth Stern’s at-home cat rescue and fostering program.
Then, less than two years after moving in, she was let go — terminated for cause, according to the Sterns — under circumstances she disputes entirely in her complaint filed in New York court.
Kuhn is asking for $2.5 million in damages and a court order voiding her NDA — which she claims she never actually signed.
Howard’s legal team fired back immediately. In a motion to dismiss filed in late April, his attorneys alleged that Kuhn had attempted to extract a hush-money payment from Stern and his production company before filing the lawsuit. They called the whole thing a shakedown.
His lawyer’s public statement was curt and deliberate: “We are not going to play this out in public. The Sterns are entitled to enforce non-disclosure agreements signed by employees who enter their home and their private life.”
As a fan, I’ll be honest — this one is complicated. On one hand, you have a woman claiming she was put in an impossible position: living and working inside someone’s personal home, managing everything from payroll to cat rescues, then getting dropped. That’s a lot of exposure. On the other hand, Howard’s camp says this is an attempted payday, not a real workplace grievance.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle — as it usually is in these situations. But one thing is clear: when you invite someone into your home AND your professional life at the same time, the lines get blurry fast. And blurry lines have a way of ending up in front of a judge.
The case is ongoing. One thing’s for sure — the Howard Stern universe has never had a dull moment, and 2026 is not about to change that.
