Donald Trump Jr.’s divorce from his longtime wife Vanessa is not the only tenuous situation he has a stake in. After leaving Vanessa, he got together with the now-former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, whose recent departure from Fox has exploded into a tide of controversy.
John Singer, identified by The Daily Beast as Guilfoyle’s employment counsel, has now lashed out against claims that his client was dismissed because she perpetrated workplace harassment.
“Fox News was a hotbed of sexual harassment and retaliation under Ailes, but executives at Fox News have worked over the past two years to improve the workplace culture … Guilfoyle, according to several sources, failed to adapt to the new culture.” https://t.co/J8zJV91Oru
— Eugene Scott (@Eugene_Scott) July 27, 2018
The claims emerged in a report this past Friday from HuffPost, which outlined allegations that she was “showing personal photographs of male genitalia to colleagues (and identifying whose genitals they were), regularly discussing sexual matters at work and engaging in emotionally abusive behavior toward hair and makeup artists and support staff” in the time before she was dismissed.
Singer commented in response:
‘Any accusations of Kimberly engaging in inappropriate work-place conduct are unequivocally baseless… It’s utterly preposterous that there are those who are nefariously and greedily twisting innocent conversations amongst close friends into much more than what it actually was for financial gain.’
Multiple unnamed sources described by The Daily Beast as close to the situation insist that disgruntled individuals twisted Guilfoyle reporting “personal photographs of male genitalia” as harassment into something more. Guilfoyle allegedly identified the subject of the photos as a “stalker.”
Her employment counsel John Singer added that:
‘Kimberly has happily moved onto the next chapter of her life and hopes others will do the same.’
In the wake of her departure from Fox, she continues to face controversy, however. One source claimed that “the same turns of phrases used by Fox with Kimberly Guilfoyle in the separation agreement appear word for word in the [HuffPost] article,” although reporter Yashar Ali disputed that claim.
Not sure who said this to @swin24 @LachCartwright but none of my sources for my story had access to any agreements and as I noted in my story, I’ve been collecting my reporting before there was any agreement. When @maxwelltani called me, he did not ask about this. pic.twitter.com/5CtZTjc4ZH
— Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) July 28, 2018
Fox News, for their part, has dismissed allegations of having maintained dirt on Guilfoyle or having fired her because of harassment allegations. Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti commented:
‘Fox News in no way, shape, or form has said anything about Kimberly other than the statement issued by the network [last] Friday. To suggest anything otherwise is absolutely false, downright malicious, and defamatory.’
The network has infamously bungled sexual harassment issues in the past. The now deceased former network chairman Roger Ailes carried on with sexual harassment of associates for years before finally coming down in 2016 thanks to a cascade of reports led by former Fox personality Gretchen Carlson and reporter Gabriel Sherman.
He, for the record, served as an adviser to the Donald Trump presidential campaign after he left Fox. More recently, his former associate Bill Shine, who went down thanks to his role in covering up Ailes’ harassment, came on board at the White House as a communications official.
In the time since the Ailes situation became public, other Fox personalities including Bill O’Reilly have gone down thanks to publicized allegations of sexual harassment. Fox originally renewed his contract with knowledge of the harassment before being pressured into dropping him after the allegations were made public.
Through these issues, as The Daily Beast describes, Fox remains “a workplace where intense backbiting, palace intrigue, and high-profile feuds run rampant.”
Featured Image via Youtube screenshot
