Bill O’Reilly predicted Wednesday that Tucker Carlson is going to make a fortune now that he’s able to pursue an independent career without having to answer to a larger corporate structure.
O’Reilly, who hosted his own show on Fox News, “The O’Reilly Factor,” until parting ways with the network in 2017, said during an interview with WMAL’s Larry O’Connor on April 26 that the cable channel did Carlson “a favor” in firing him.
“I mean, my life is so much better now than it was six years ago when I had to deal with all this stuff,” O’Reilly said. “They did him a favor. He’s gonna make a lot of money.”
“Carlson is a talented broadcaster,” he added. “He’s got a big following. He’ll go into the independent news or analysis industry, which I started six years ago. Ironically, it was to the week six years ago that I left Fox News. And he’ll make a bloody fortune. Because he’s interesting to listen to.”
The 53-year-old host of the popular primetime show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” parted ways with the cable news network on Monday despite consistently garnering one of the network’s largest audience bases.
O’Reilly, sharing his view on Carlson’s Fox News exit, said “litigation” and several pending lawsuits against the host were the reason for his sudden departure.
“Litigation was the reason,” O’Reilly indicated. “There are a number of lawsuits pending and then more coming, where Mr. Carlson is going to be involved, particularly the one where he had a spy in his organization and she taped him and his staff and filed a suit in Manhattan. And the lawyer representing her, I understand, is, you know, saying, ‘Well, if you don’t pay us a lot of money, we’re gonna release the tapes.'”
O’Reilly was referring to Abby Grossberg, who was the head of booking for Carlson for several months. Grossberg has filed a lawsuit that alleged Carlson fostered a hostile work environment among his staff. She further claimed that she was subjected to vulgar comments while she worked in the Fox News office in New York.
“It’s an industry now,” O’Reilly said. “What happens is you’re an employee, you don’t like where you’re working, you set up a taping apparatus to try to get anything, and then you hire a lawyer, and they come in and claim whatever they want to claim. So this is happening every hour on the hour all across the United States. There are lawyers lined up to do this. Most of these cases are settled and nobody even knows about them. But this one is very high profile.”
Lawsuit Details
The lawsuit (pdf), filed in the U.S. Southern District of New York on March 20, said that the “toxic work dynamic” fostered by Carlson had impacted Grossberg’s health severely, “such that she could barely eat and lost nearly 10 pounds in less than two weeks.”
Carlson hasn’t issued a public response to her lawsuit, but Fox News categorically denied her allegations to media outlets after it was filed. A Fox News spokesperson previously told news outlets that the company “will continue to vigorously defend Fox against Ms. Grossberg’s unmeritorious legal claims, which are riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees.”
Meanwhile, a statement obtained by The Spectator reported that lawyers for Grossberg said that she never met Carlson in person while she worked on his show. The lawyers characterized their client’s not meeting with Carlson in person as routine. They said it’s because he would film his program from his studios in Florida and Maine, where he owns homes.
“Like many on the [‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’] staff, Abby never met Tucker Carlson in person because he taped the show from his personal studios in Maine and Florida, and he did not visit Fox’s New York HQ during her time there,” Kimberly A. Catala, a Grossberg attorney, told the outlet.
A spokesperson for the law firm told The Epoch Times that the entirety of Catala’s comment to The Spectator was accurate.
Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this report.