A text message sent by Tucker Carlson to one of the producers of his show, where he described a video of a group of Trump supporters assaulting an “Antifa kid,” triggered an internal investigation into the former primetime host’s conduct and eventually led to his firing from Fox News last month, the New York Times reported.
File Photo: Tucker Carlson attends the final round of the Bedminster Invitational LIV Golf ... [+]
In the message, Carlson described a video he saw of three Trump supporters attacking a person and said he thought it was “dishonorable obviously” and that was “not how white men fight,” according to the New York Times report.
Carlson then wrote that he “suddenly” found himself “rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him…I could taste it.”
Later in the text, the former Fox News host lamented feeling this way saying he was “becoming something I don’t want to be,” and he didn’t want to “gloat over” the suffering of the “Antifa creep.”
According to the Times, the discovery of the incendiary text message “set off a panic” among Fox’s leadership a day before Dominion’s defamation trial against the company was set to begin.
The text message in question was part of the redacted court filings—where the former Fox host calls Trump a “demonic force” and a “destroyer—in the Dominion case and Fox executives were concerned that it could be made public if Carlson took a stand during the trial.
The discovery of the text led to Fox hiring an outside law firm to probe Carlson’s conduct and ultimately ended with his ouster from the network, the Times report added.