BONUS WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Which came first? The bedbug or O'Reilly?

Here's another item for the "news to make your skin crawl" file. In New York City, the offices of Fox News are waging a new kind of battle. It's not about ratings, bias, or credibility; it's against bedbugs. A veteran employee for the company is suing Fox after experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder as result of the pest infestation.

From Reuters:

Jane Clark, 37, a 12-year veteran of Fox News, a unit of News Corp, said she complained to human resources after being bitten three times between October 2007 and April 2008. She said she was ridiculed and the office was not treated for months.

Beacon Capital Partners, which owns the tower in midtown Manhattan, said in a statement that it had not been made aware of the problem and that it was the responsibility of tenants to manage infestations.

Clark, who says she's been diagnosed with PTSD and can no longer work, has filed a separate workers compensation claim with News Corp, and the company is paying her medical bills and lost wages. A News Corp spokeswoman declined to comment because News Corp was not named in the lawsuit.

She said she believed a colleague who used her workstation on weekends, and who no longer works for Fox News, brought the infestation to the office. Clark's home was never infested.

Clark says she suffers nightmares and keeps a flashlight at her bedside so she can check for bugs during the night.

The suit names the owner and manager of the office tower in Manhattan where Fox employees worked. She has filed a separate workers compensation claim against Fox, Reuters reports.

In his March 18, 2008 article, "Bedbugs at Fox News," Jacques Steinberg reports, "In an interview on [March 17, 2008] Warren Vandeveer, senior vice president for operations and engineering at Fox News, said the cable channel had realized it had a problem a few weeks ago, when an employee “caught a bug and showed it to us.” An exterminator determined that the incursion was limited to a “very small area in the newsroom.” But the source of the bugs was not determined until the exterminator inspected the homes of about 20 employees. Mr. Vandeveer said the exterminator later described one employee’s home as having “the worst infestation he had seen in 25 years in the business.”

And this from the Web site, Gothamist:

Fox swears the bed bugs have been “totally eradicated,” but the annoying thing about bed bugs is their tenacious ability to survive for months between feedings, and in some cases they can live up to a year before sucking blood again. The bed begs have clearly refused to let New Yorkers rest, but their sudden infiltration of Dick Cheney's favorite news source can mean only one thing: Al Qaeda training.

UPDATE: A tipster tells Gawker that the employee who caused the bedbug infestation has been terminated; he's described as "a satellite desk guy who was greasy and gross." Is that even legal? If New Yorkers can now be fired for a bedbug infestation, then the bedbugs have already won.