On Friday, Fox News’ Bob Beckel, co-host of “The Five,” was fired after an African-American employee accused him of making a racist remark when he came to fix Beckel’s computer.
According to Douglas H. Wigdor, the lawyer who is handling a class-action racial discrimination suit against Fox News and who is representing the employee, Beckel became agitated when an African-American IT employee arrived to fix his computer and announced that “he was leaving his office because he is black,” NBC reports.
— Former Fox News Chief Roger Ailes dead at 77 —
To make matters worse, Wigdor claimed that Fox tried to get his client to drop the complaint during a meeting with Fox News’s new executive vice president for human resources, Kevin Lord. Wigdor said that Beckel “attempted to intimidate our client and persuade him to withdraw his complaint.”
“No one tried to persuade Mr. Wigdor’s client to withdraw his complaint,” the network said in a statement responding the allegations, going on to note that Lord had responded to the complaint within seven minutes of receiving it.
Although Beckel did not respond to requests for comment on the story, he did reportedly reach out to the employee and offer an apology shortly after learning that he was being dismissed.