Five months after re-joining Fox News, Bob Beckel has been fired, again, from the network.
“Bob Beckel was terminated today for making an insensitive remark to an African-American employee,” a Fox News spokesperson says.
Beckel made the remark Tuesday to an African-American IT employee who came to service his computer, according to attorney Douglas Widgor, who is representing the employee, and more than 20 other Fox employees. “Mr. Beckel stormed out of his office, telling our client that he was leaving his office because he is Black,” according to Wigdor. “After our client lodged a complaint about Mr. Beckel’s racist behavior, Mr. Beckel, in front of Chief Human Resource Officer Kevin Lord, attempted to intimidate our client and persuade him to withdraw his complaint,” Wigdor said.
In response, a Fox News spokesperson said, “As Mr. Wigdor knows, Fox News made the decision to terminate Mr. Beckel after a prompt and thorough investigation. His client raised the complaint to Kevin Lord, EVP Human Resources, on Tuesday evening via email and within 7 minutes Mr. Lord responded and began the investigation. Today, Fox News delivered that message to Mr. Beckel and facilitated an apology from Mr. Beckel to the employee minutes after he was terminated. No one tried to persuade Mr. Wigdor’s client to withdraw his complaint.”
In the wake of the sexual and racial harassment accusations and lawsuits against the company over the last 9 months, Lord, who is also new to the company, has asked employees to speak up or use a hotline to report any signs of potentially bad workplace behavior.
Beckel was one of the original co-hosts of The Five when it launched in 2011. In 2015, after weeks of absences, FNC let him go. “We tried to work with Bob for months, but we couldn’t hold The Five hostage to one man’s personal issues,” said former Fox News evp Bill Shine, who himself departed the network earlier this month. “He took tremendous advantage of our generosity,” Shine said in June, 2015.
After leaving Fox, Beckel had a brief stint as a CNN contributor. In an appearance on that network in Nov. 2015, Beckel talked about his life as a “raging drunk.”
“I’ve been shot, I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been in two car accidents where everybody else died except me,” he said at the time. Beckel also admitted that former Fox News Channel CEO Roger Ailes, who died yesterday, “saved me a long time ago and I never have a bad word to say about him.” Yesterday, after news of Ailes’ death, Beckel tweeted:
15 yrs ago I was out of work after fake scandal Roger Ailes gave me work a great man with a big heart may he now Rest In Peace
— Robert G Beckel (@RobertGBeckel) May 18, 2017