Recently ousted Fox News host Geraldo Rivera says that his “toxic relationship” with one of his co-hosts on The Five was a motivating factor behind his exit.
During an appearance with The View, Rivera said that after he was taken off the program, he decided to retire from the network altogether.
He explained that he still had time left on his contract, but he decided “if you fired me from the number one show, then I’m going to quit. And that’s basically what happened.”
“Which one?” Joy Behar asked. “Does it rhyme with Smeshie Shwatters,” another co-host added, clearly referring to Jesse Watters.
Rivera wouldn’t reveal who it was, beyond referring to the person as “he,” making clear it was not Jeanine Pirro, and urging the hosts to “check the Internet.”
Rivera also had a tense relationship with Fox News star Greg Gutfeld. The two media stars recently had a dustup on Twitter over Tucker Carlson’s exit from the network.
Later in the segment, Sara Haines circled back to Rivera’s “tox relationship” comments and asked if that was the reason he was axed from The Five.
“Sure, and also I thought that it was very unfair that I was not judged objectively in our disputes but rather he was always favored and I was the one — I was suspended, you know, three times,” he said. “My appearances, I had two, three appearances scheduled weekly, then biweekly, then monthly, then they kind of disappeared. They were canceled in the last day right before I was supposed to go on, so I was really ticked off.”
When the conversation shifted to Carlson’s new Twitter venture, Rivera revealed how he felt towards the conservative firebrand.
“I think that he is an excellent writer. I think that he was very charismatic in his presentation. He was number one for a reason, was a pretty good show. Then he drifted into this murky area where a swampy area where, you know, these conspiracy theories and it’s not just generates a whole bunch of different mucky kind of conspiracies,” Rivera told the panelists.
He added, “Fox is a tremendous platform. And once you lose that platform, you’re kind of screaming in the wilderness and competing with a lot of other people who have podcasts and so forth. So will he be the same character? I don’t know.”
“I don’t like to be unkind, but that what he did, just as I would never vote for Donald Trump, I will never forgive Tucker for what he did about January 6th,” Rivera concluded.
Geraldo has not been relevant for a very long time. He was never prepared—-just winged it and viewers were more versed than he. Often he did not really know what he was talking about nor was he knowledgeable of news updates on topics.
Among a well-versed and informed panel, Geraldo was a clunky misfit.
I would be MUCH MORE! interested in learning what ever caused him to be on TV in the first place.