When you think of a really hot, steamy office romance, the last place on your mind somewhere around “hot dog factory” is “cable news studio”.
People are constantly yelling, scripts need rewriting, the men have full makeup, and there’s cameras everywhere. It has all the raw sex appeal of drag night at Hamburger Mary’s.
god I love when Judge Jeanine has a guest
But somehow, people in cable news just can’t resist each other.
I’m not talking about greasy Matt Lauer hitting the “close door” button on his desk as soon as an intern walks in.
I mean people who actually appear on camera together getting it on behind the scenes, proving the whole thing is an entertainment product along the lines of the Lifetime Movie of the Week.
“oh yeah, we met on the set of ‘Skipped Lunch‘…”
A shock article hit the NY Post last week that longtime Fox anchor Sean Hannity and his wife are divorced after quite a long marriage.
The weirdness was not the divorce itself, it was the timing.
First of all, it was discovered Hannity and his wife had been legally divorced for over a year.
A year?
The mere whiff of anyone on the right even googling “divorce attorney” would create an inevitable landslide of “moral turpitude” media response.
Where was TMZ on all this?
Or hell, even Larry Flynt?!
look, if you had to bang it out with Rick Perry, you deserve the reward
The real kicker was this: Hannity and his wife were separated for four years and not one leak or slip up?
When asked for comment, Hannity and Rhodes issued a joint statement to Page Six, which reads, “Sean and Jill are committed to working together for the best interests of their children. Amicable agreements were entered into over four years ago between Sean and Jill.
Woof…that was really under the radar.
One friend of the former couple, who lived together on Long Island, said their split “is very amicable. Sean and Jill remain on very good terms and still have family dinners, and attend tennis tournaments for their children. Sean is still close with members of Jill’s family.”
The friend said neither Hannity — the host of “Hannity” on Fox News and of the nationally syndicated talk radio show “The Sean Hannity Show” — nor Rhodes were involved with other people and that “Sean is basically a workaholic.”
Well that’s the way to do it I suppose, if you have to. Keep it nice for the kids, don’t rip apart a family, everyone kind of does their own thing but knows how to be together.
Then Vanity Fair dropped an even bigger bombshell in a messy, confusing piece:
Apparently Ainsley got divorced last year and she and Hannity showed up together at a Fox News coworker’s wedding this year via helicopter:
Hannity’s helicopter arrival, a Trumpian piece of theater, was what one former Fox executive remembered most about the event. “Hannity emerged from the chopper with [Fox & Friends host] Ainsley Earhardt, and they made this grand entrance together,” the former executive recalled. “People were like, Wow, okay.”
Look, I’ve hitched a lot of rides with friends and attended weddings with them, doesn’t mean we shtupped.
So what other evidence is it that they’re together? Have they been inappropriate around their colleagues?
It was as if Hannity and Earhardt were the first couple of Fox News—which they are. Four current and former Fox News staffers told me that Hannity and Earhardt are dating—and have been for quite some time. Hannity and Earhardt aren’t acknowledging their relationship to colleagues, but two Hannity friends told me they have observed them together in social situations where they’ve acted like a couple. “I knew they were involved. I saw it when we were all together,” a Fox staffer told me. “It wasn’t even that hidden,” a Hannity friend said.
So one gossipy staffer (a really messy gay *cough* Shep *cough*) guesses they’re together because of…body language? Psychic abilities?
Doesn’t quite seem like Hannity walked out of Ainsley’s dressing room with lipstick on his collar, holding his tennis shoes.
“raw sexual energy” doesn’t even begin to describe this fit
Our DJ Yung Hedda Hopper of a staffer goes on to spill:
According to the staffer, Earhardt has been hosting Fox & Friends during the coronavirus from a remote studio in the basement of Hannity’s Long Island mansion.
Oh my god, he’s keeping her in the basement!
Quarantine’s been hard on many news anchors, most notably CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who in the span of a couple of weeks in isolation allegedly got coronavirus, started having hallucinations of the Governor of New York (his brother) as a ballerina, got into a fight with a neighbor, and appeared nude in his wife’s workout livestream.
the ass no one’s been waiting for
But back to Fox – can our staffer squeeze any more juice out of this Hannity-Aisnley lemon?
Earhardt also uses Hannity’s lawyer as her television agent, two sources said.
“They share an agent…AND EACH OTHER’S BED.”
Of course the evidence is thin, and it’s not like the two are macking on camera or anything.
When asked to comment, Hannity refused to comment. Ainsley went a little further in her denial:
Through a Fox News spokesperson, Earhardt said, “Right now I am focused on raising my daughter. As anyone at Fox News will tell you, Sean is a wonderful person and whomever he chooses to date will be extremely fortunate.” In a followup statement, she said: “I am not dating anyone.”
now kiss
So who knows. Maybe they went on a couple dates and then realized it wasn’t for them.
Then, the article somehow veers into a weird “Trump hates Fox now” diatribe that has literally nothing to do with the fact that two of the anchors are potentially dating.
Hannity’s future at Fox has been a question. In the past Hannity has vented about the Murdochs’ lack of loyalty to Trump. I reported last year that Hannity told Trump the Murdochs hate Trump and that Hannity was “the only one holding Fox together.” At the time Hannity told people he intended to leave Fox after his contract expired. But according to a source, he has re-upped with Fox until 2024.
How under word count do you have to be to weave this in about two anchors going to a wedding together?
If the rumor’s true then they’d unfortunately be the second cable news team in cahoots, the first being the infamous Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.
sorry folks, Jan and Wayne Skylar did it better
And that realization makes this all the more upsetting.
Besides Scarborough probably killing his intern my biggest cudgel against Joe and Mika was they both flagrantly stepped out on their spouses for each other and it was creepy and you could tell they had weird on-camera interactions and now this whole Hannity-Ainsley (Hainsley?) ordeal is going to be held in the same light – even though it’s miles different.
Doesn’t change the bottom line, though.
Can’t all these people just find someone outside of work, away from a news desk?
