For most of the last two weeks, we’ve been led to believe that Kimberly Guilfoyle left Fox News to join the pro-Trump super PAC America First on her own. But as News Corpse mentioned last week, that narrative is now in serious doubt. HuffPost’s Yashar Ali reported that Fox News announced her departure with a terse one-sentence statement announcing that it had “parted ways” with Guilfoyle after 11-plus years.
Well, Ali did some digging—and what he discovered is absolutely chilling. According to Ali’s sources, Guilfoyle had a long history of grossly inappropriate behavior.
Six sources said Guilfoyle’s behavior included 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.
Guilfoyle received multiple warnings from Fox News’ HR department—including from HR chief Kevin Lord. But they all went unheeded. Matters came to a head last year when a personal assistant whom Guilfoyle shared with Eric Bolling came forward with complaints that Guilfoyle was emotionally abusive and shared way too much for comfort about her sex life. Fox News launched an internal investigation soon afterward. Around the same time, HuffPost started doing some digging of its own.
The internal probe showed that Guilfoyle simply would not or could not accept that things had changed at 1211 Avenue of the Americas since Roger Ailes was pushed out in 2016. In the face of regulatory pressure on both sides of the Atlantic, Fox News has tried to make some effort to clean up its workplace culture.
Guilfoyle was already on thin ice for her efforts to strong-arm her female colleagues into supporting Ailes when the ground was shifting out from under him. Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan, who is co-chairman of parent company 21st Century Fox along with his father, almost pushed Guilfoyle out soon after Ailes got dumped.
Apparently the revelations from the HR investigation were so egregious that earlier this year, Guilfoyle was given an ultimatum—resign by the end of July or be fired. However, they wanted to give her enough time to find another job to break her fall. It turns out she knew she was a goner long before word got out that she was dating Donald Trump Jr.
Reading about Guilfoyle’s behavior sent a chill down my spine. She has a teenage son, and Donald Jr. has five kids. Anyone who acts in the manner spelled out in the HuffPost and Fox News investigations, regardless of sex, has no business being around children. Period, full stop. This is particularly personal for me, having been married for three years to a woman whom I later found out had acted so badly around her own kids that she could only see them on supervised visits.
Someone needs to stage an intervention, if they haven’t done so already. Guilfoyle needs to be told—not asked—to get help and clean up her act, especially if she wants to be around her son and Junior’s kids. And if I were Vanessa Trump, Junior’s soon-to-be ex-wife, I would tell Junior that unless Guilfoyle changes her ways, Junior has a choice to make—her or the kids.
This says a lot about Trump’s vetting. As close as Trump is to the Murdochs, it’s inconceivable that this wouldn’t have come to light had she been properly vetted. Then again, we’re talking about a guy who tapped a Nazi enabler to share the top spot on the White House org chart.