Fox News Has Fired Ed Henry for ‘Willful Sexual Misconduct in the Workplace’

By A.J. Katz 

Fox News has fired America’s Newsroom co-anchor Ed Henry for “willful sexual misconduct in the workplace.”

Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott and president and executive editor Jay Wallace announced this morning in a memo to staff shown below.

Last Thursday, the network received a complaint about Henry from a former employee’s attorney about “willful sexual misconduct in the workplace” years ago. TVNewser can confirm that the attorney is high-profile anti-discrimination litigator Douglas Wigdor of Wigdor LLP, himself no stranger to going up against powerful media entities.

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Fox News then hired outside counsel to investigate the allegation.

Henry was suspended and removed from his on-air duties that day, and he’s now officially out from the network.

You may recall that Henry was taken off the air in May 2016, following a tabloid reports of an extra-marital affair. The late Roger Ailes said the tabloid stories raised “serious questions about Ed’s lack of judgement, especially given his position as a journalist.” At the time, it was thought Henry would be dismissed, but he returned in August 2016. Ironically, fewer than two months after Henry’s suspension, it would be Ailes under the microscope as Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him. Ailes left Fox News in late July 2016.

Henry joined Fox News in 2011 after 7 years at CNN, and he most recently served as the co-anchor of America’s Newsroom, alongside Sandra Smith, since Jan. 20 of this year. Prior to that assignment, Henry was a co-host of the network’s opinion program Fox & Friends Weekend from 2017-2019, making him the rare Fox Newser to host both a news hour and an opinion program on the network.

Henry was FNC’s chief national correspondent, and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association from 2012-2013. He also contributed to the network’s major breaking news events and led noteworthy interviews with elected officials, including his 2018 interview with then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. The interview fetched Henry the 2019 Merriman Smith Memorial Award for excellence in presidential news coverage.

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