“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Fox News chief anchor Shepard “Shep” Smith said during a speech at his college alma mater in 2017. He was referring to his status as a gay conservative growing up in the traditional American South, but it turns out the Republican journalist may have some skeletons in his closet after all.
Smith, an enduring critic of the Trump administration, may need to take some time off from attacking the president to focus on some of his personal problems. Big League Politics published an interview on Friday with a man who alleges that Smith sexually assaulted him in 2004, despite attempts to stop the reporter’s repeated advances.
#MeToo meltdown
The man, identified in the report as John Doe #1, remembered meeting up with Smith at the now-defunct Nation bar in Manhattan. The venue was a regular hangout for Smith at the time, a place where he would play Golden Tee and chat with friends when he wasn’t reporting for Fox News.
“I wake up, and Shepard is on top of me, like, in a towel or a bathrobe. And he’s got his tongue down my throat and his hands all over me. Completely uninvited. I mean, I gave him no signal. There was nothing,” John Doe #1 said.
Smith’s accuser was certain that he didn’t give the news anchor any signals warranting the aggressive sexual behavior. He said he “volunteered to sleep in the spare” bedroom. “I never invited myself to his bedroom,” John Doe #1 confirmed.
Even after the anonymous victim verbalized his displeasure with Smith’s advances, the journalist could not be deterred. “I pushed him off. I was like, ‘Dude what are you doing?’ And he’s like, ‘what you don’t like it?’ There was like this, kind of like, ‘No!,’ and he kept going, he kept pushing. Like, pushing his hands on all these spots,” John Doe said, calling the experience “definitely shocking.”
“He was just on top of me,” the man continued, noting that “[Smith] finally stopped, but it took a lot of — it wasn’t just an immediate no, and then everything was like, so sorry.”
John Doe recalls having to rebuff Smith’s advances “three or four more times” after the initial encounter, including when he had nearly made his way out the door and Smith grabbed him, allegedly putting his tongue down the man’s throat a final time.
Fox future in question?
Fox News has so far refused to answer inquiries from Big League Politics regarding their employee’s alleged behavior. Meanwhile, an online petition has been circulated demanding Smith’s immediate resignation pending a complete investigation.
“Fox News has been fast to suspend allies of President Trump, such as Judge Jeanine for merely expressing her opinion on [Minnesota Rep.] Ilhan Omar,” the petition explains. “In order for Fox News to not show hypocrisy and treat Anti-Trump Shep Smith like others, we believe Shep Smith should be immediately suspended to investigate the claim against him.”
Smith has been an outspoken critic of President Trump throughout his administration, even excusing unprofessional behavior from his colleagues in the news business if it meant embarrassing the president. The Shepard Smith Reporting host even went so far as to bash fellow Fox News anchors who work for the network’s opinion programming and support the president. “I wouldn’t work there,” Smith said during a March 2018 interview. “I don’t want to sit around and yell at each other and talk about your philosophy and my philosophy. That sounds horrible to me,” he remarked.
However, Mr. Smith may not be able to recite the news in any capacity if anything comes of the recent accusations leveled against him. Only time will tell, but if the experience of former Fox News alumni who have been similarly accused of sexual assault is any indication, Smith’s time is running out.
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