I don't know which is more disturbing about this story. The thought of Brit Hume actually having sex, or that he may be getting one of the hot blondes, half his age, at Fox News. The alleged object of his affection is one Megyn Kendall, who's been a correspondent at Fox since 2004....
Of the half-dozen sources who relayed the allegation to Radar, none could claim first-hand knowledge, and several Fox insiders said they believed it to be false. Still, the whispers have grown so loud that Hume and Kendall have been forced to deny them repeatedly to curious colleagues. (One Fox source said Hume seemed genuinely amused and somewhat flattered to be linked by gossip to the attractive and much younger Kendall.) A Fox spokesperson also flatly denied it, and suggested it was being "shopped around" by enemies of the network.
Is "Fox Security" going to investigate? Before they get that crack squad on the case, there are other signs that give this rumor just a little creedence....
Megyn Kendall just recently divorced her husband, and has changed back to her maiden name, Megyn Kelly, on-air. As for Brit Hume, he & his wife (Kim Hume) worked together at FNC. She was Fox's D.C. bureau chief, but not any longer. Marital problems between the two may have been responsible for her leaving her position with the network a few months ago, according to the NY Daily News....
The buzz out of Washington is that she and the anchorman had been tattletaling on each other to the chairman and CEO of Fox Television Stations.
"They'd been calling Roger [Ailes] in New York separately," reports our source. "They'd complain to him about each other."
A Fox spokeswoman denied that either Hume has bothered Ailes. "Nothing could be further from the truth," she said. But another source told us that the couple, who together weathered the suicide of Brit Hume's son, Sandy, in 1998, often argued in front of staffers.
"Brit's not the easiest guy to get along with," said the source. "You disagree with him, and it's an argument. It's his way or the highway. [Kim] is a tough cookie, but he speaks down to her in front of other people."
Then there's former Fox News publicist Paul Schur....
Last month, Schur, who worked with both Hume and Kendall in Fox's Washington bureau until he left the network in August, anonymously edited the gossip into Kendall's Wikipedia entry, inserting this claim: "There are many rumors that Kendall has a very 'special' relationship with managing editor Brit Hume, the reason for her plum assignments at Fox News." Radar was alerted to the Wikipedia entry by an anonymous e-mail sent in late December. Wikipedia keeps track of the IP address of each user who changes an entry; when Radar became suspicious that Schur was behind the change to Kendall's entry, a reporter sent him an e-mail with a link to a website maintained by a Radar staffer. When Schur visited the site, his computer's IP address was logged by the site's tracking software, and it matched the IP address of the Wikipedia user that inserted the rumor in Kendall's entry. (The offending sentence has since been deleted.)
And then you can read whatever you want into this....
When, in a July interview with FishbowlDC, she was asked to name her favorite working journalist, she said, "Brit Hume. The man truly knows everything about everything." Later, in the same Q&A, Kendall was asked which of the seven deadly sins she most resembled. She answered, "Lust."
I think my head is going to explode.
