A text message from Tucker Carlson that sparked panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of his billion-dollar libel trial showed the most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views on violence and race.
The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to the dismissal of Mr. Carlson.
In the message, sent to one of his producers in the hours after violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Mr. Carlson how he recently watched video of a group of men — Trump supporters, he said — violently attacking “an Antifa kid.”
It was “at least three to one,” he wrote.
And then he expressed a sense of dismay that the attackers, like him, were white.
“Pumping on someone like that is, of course, dishonorable,” he wrote.
“White men don’t fight like that,” he said. But he said he just wanted the group to kill the person he described as the Antifa boy.
For years, Mr. Carlson espoused views on his show that reinforced the ideology of white nationalism. But the text message revealed more about his views on racial superiority.
The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was scheduled to defend itself against Dominion Voting Systems before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the witness stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise wider questions about the company.
The day after the discovery, the board told Fox executives it would bring in an outside law firm to investigate Mr. Carlson’s conduct.
The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson, leading the company’s management to conclude that he was more of a problem than an asset and to leave, according to several people with knowledge of the decision . In other posts, he had spoken of women in crude and misogynistic terms, including a senior Fox executive. Word of the fight also played a role in the company’s decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a libel suit.
A representative for Mr Carlson said he had no comment.
The text is part of redacted court documents and its contents were previously unreported. The content of the text was revealed in interviews with several people close to the defamation case against Fox. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified as they discussed a message protected by a court order. In public filings it remains hidden behind a block of black text.
Mr. Carlson’s posts were collected as part of the libel lawsuit brought by Dominion against Fox, which accused the network of knowingly spreading untruths about election fraud. Many of the posts shared in the case, including those from Fox executives and hosts, were made public. But others, such as the one between Mr. Carlson and one of his producers in the hours after January 6, 2021, remain redacted.
In that text, Mr. Carlson expressed his own emotions as he watched video of the violent confrontation, which he says took place on the streets of Washington. Mr. Carlson did not describe the race of the man who was attacked.
“I found myself supporting the mob against the man, hoping they would hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the child. I could taste it,” he wrote. “Then somewhere deep in my head an alarm went off: this is not good for me. I become something I don’t want to be.”
After all, he wrote, “Someone probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he were killed.”
“If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than him?” He wrote.
The text message only came to the attention of Fox’s board of directors and even some senior executives last month, on the Sunday before the trial was due to begin, according to two people familiar with Fox’s internal deliberations. At the time, Fox negotiators were discussing an out-of-court settlement ahead of the swearing-in of what was shaping up to become a diverse jury.
The next day, the board told Fox leadership of its plan to have the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz investigate Mr. Carlson. That revelation opened up the possibility that there could be an ongoing investigation into what was behind Mr. Carlson’s posts, at the same time as a lawsuit, and as he served as top host in prime time.
Fox has not commented on Mr Carlson’s ouster last week, apart from an initial statement announcing that they “agreed to part ways” and “thanked him for his service”. It did not respond on Tuesday to a request for comment on the contents of Mr Carlson’s redacted message.
It remains unclear how the text previously escaped more scrutiny, as Fox’s legal team was aware of this and other offensive texts written by Mr. Carlson. Fox’s lawyers had drafted the text as part of the discovery process and were involved in editing. Mr. Carlson was even asked about it during a statement, according to several people who read the unredacted transcripts of his statement.
It was not guaranteed that the text would have been revealed in open court. Dominion’s lawyers had still not decided whether to introduce the text to the jury, according to people familiar with their plans. The two sides disagreed over whether the Dominion attorneys could have presented such a redacted notice at trial if they decided to do so, a decision that would ultimately have fallen to the judge. The difference was disputed after Fox struck an 11-hour deal on April 18 to pay Dominion $787.5 million and avoid litigation.
How Fox executives and the board handled the case in the months before the trial was due to begin is expected to be addressed in lawsuits against the company in Delaware.
Although Mr. Carlson’s show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” played only a small part in the Dominion case, his personal lyrics received a lot of attention.
The text about the fight came on top of a damaging string of messages that had been publicly revealed prior to the trial, which were shocking in their own right. In a letter to one of his producers after the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Carlson the president he defended on his show as a “demonic force” and a “destroyer”.
A recurring theme of his show during its six years of prime time on Fox News was the displacement of white Americans by people of color. Mr. Carlson often framed topics in the news as part of a larger battle between “us” and “them,” with immigrants and other marginalized groups steadily and surely taking from whites what was long theirs: political and cultural power in the States .
He attacked black social justice activists and portrayed immigrants from Central America as a scourge on the nation. He said in 2018 that immigrants are making the country “dirtier.”
In the aftermath of a mass shooting in El Paso at the hands of a gunman who cited white supremacist beliefs in his manifesto, Mr. Carlson on his show that white supremacy was “not a real problem,” likening it to a conspiracy theory.
On Monday, The New York Times and other news organizations urged the judge overseeing the Dominion case to release some of the redacted messages.
