Tucker Carlson’s Racist Texts, ‘Creepy Comments’ and Trash-Talk Videos: Somebody’s Got the Knives Out, But Who?

Who’s trying to trash Tucker Carlson?

Bad looks for the disgraced Fox host have been leaking all week, from video clips of offensive banter and “creepy comments” captured between show tapings, as Media Matters put it, to his now-infamous “not how white men fight” remark made in a text exchange with a producer.

The text was reported late Tuesday by the New York Times, which cited people with access to un-redacted copies of text messages and other communication presented in the Fox News vs. Dominion case discovery. The videos, meanwhile, have been dribbled out on the left-leaning nonprofit media watchdog site – and prolific Carlson critic – Media Matters, with the special headline tag FOXLEAKS.

The knives may be out, but the assassins are still in hiding – and this whodunit has more suspects than a game of “Clue.”

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said on her Sirius XM show that she knows exactly who’s doing the leaking, and named names: Kelly accused Fox public relations Senior Executive Vice Irena Briganti of being behind the “mysterious out-takes,” calling it “an orchestrated hit-job. And not a subtle one … I know it’s Irena Briganti … she hates [Tucker Carlson’s] guts … You will be destroyed to settle some angry, bitter PR hack’s personal vendetta against you.”

“This is completely false and an outright lie,” a Fox News spokesperson told TheWrap, responding to Kelly’s allegation.

Gawker, at the height of its powers in 2008, referred to Briganti as “the most vindictive flack in the media world.” Destroying what remains of Carlson’s reputation would certainly fit the Roger Ailes-era playbook under which Briganti was trained – in which Carlson is now seen as a competitor.

But Fox didn’t wake up last month and pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million only to turn around and publish damning Tucker Carlsonisms – the idea was to avoid just such an embarrassment. As the Times reported, Carlson’s “how white men fight” statement, then still safely redacted, had “set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox” on the eve of trial that led to the settlement just as the jury was being seated.

People close to the settlement situation who spoke with TheWrap agreed that neither Fox News, as a company, nor Dominion had any incentive to release the damning text message, to which each had access after Fox produced them – and guided the redactions – at the demands of Dominion. Fox had paid handsomely to avoid any further bad press, and Dominion’s check has already cleared. Meddling with legal materials and defying court orders after-the-fact could jeopardize the legal underpinnings of their agreement.

Access to the redacted files was so limited, not even top-level communications executives involved with the case were allowed to view them. Another possibility would be the producer with whom Carlson had the exchange; that person is not identified in court documents or the Times’ story.

As for the videos, anyone inside of Fox News with basic login credentials could obtain the out-take footage, presuming they knew where to look – or had perhaps been collecting them for a rainy day. Had the video files been exported, Fox would be able to trace their origin, and whoever transferred them to Media Matters probably knew this; the crude nature of the video clips suggest at least some may have been captured by a phone pointed at a screen.

And then there’s the AI theory – that at least some of the footage has been deepfaked. One in particular, in which Carlson refers to a woman as “yummy” before backtracking and then cursing at “Media Matters for America” – literally predicting that the nonprofit would use the comment he’d just made against him – has an uncanny look that people close to the situation have been privately questioning as a possible AI creation.

Media Matters collection of out-take footage so far includes Carlson slamming his own network’s website, calling his fans “postmenopausal,” and ranting viciously about Dominion’s lawyer after sitting with him for a 10-hour deposition, saying “the hate I felt for that guy” was “unhealthy.”

“I never feel that way,” he says in the footage released Wednesday. “I don’t want to feel that way. I think it’s wrong. It’s bad. It’s totally bad for you to feel that way. But that guy, he triggered the shit out of me. ‘Where are you now? Where do you live?’ The amount of times I had, ‘First of all, fuck you,’ on my lips.”

There’s also a pre-taping exchange he has with Piers Morgan, which seems normal enough until Carlson inexplicably shifts to whether he should bring up “sexual techniques.” The reality of this exchange, and some of the others posted by Media Matters, were corroborated by the clothes Carlson wore – then appeared in during the on-air segments.

There are still days left in the week – could more damning materials be on the way? With Media Matters branding the posts “FOXLEAKS” and producing one per day so far, it’s a safe bet that whoever is feeding them has plenty of other samples to choose from.

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The Tucker Carlson Text That Got Him Fired From Fox: ‘I Found Myself Rooting for the Mob’