Scandals That Led To Tucker Carlson's Massive Downfall From Fame
Former Fox News firebrand Tucker Carlson has tried to take his career to some strange and unexpected places. During an October 2025 appearance on "The Shawn Ryan Show," Carlson thought back to the time he tried to be a CIA agent and failed. Although he had aspired to join the federal agency as a college senior, he wasn't accepted because he had used cocaine within the last 12 months of submitting his application, which took him out of consideration.
After that rejection, Carlson's father, Richard, urged him to forge a career in journalism because "they [would] take anybody," per Columbia Journalism Review. And so, Carlson's career in the industry began. At one point in his journalistic career, he did a disastrous stint on "Dancing With The Stars." Unfortunately, it only took one cringeworthy cha-cha-cha performance with Elena Grinenko for him to get voted off the competition in 2006. Then, in 2008, Carlson's career at MSNBC came to an abrupt end because his show had a bad case of low ratings. For better or worse, all roads led him to Fox News.
There, he became a prominent figure in the conservative movement. However, his fall from grace began shortly after he made it to the top. In March 2021, the Fox News anchor was named in Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network. The complaint alleged that Carlson's show had perpetuated the false narrative that their voting machines were rigged against Donald Trump in the 2020 elections, even though Carlson had expressed skepticism about that claim in texts. Yet that wasn't the most eyebrow-raising aspect of the lawsuit's discovery — or his career.
His text messages led some of his supporters to question his beliefs
Tucker Carlson has sung Donald Trump's praises time and time again. Yet his text messages from 2020 and 2021, which were made public amid Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox News, painted a completely different picture. According to The New York Times, the seemingly staunch ally of the president had poked fun at all his business duds while texting his producer. "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights," he wrote in a text from January 2021. "I truly can't wait. ... I hate him passionately."
Shortly after the January 6th riots at the Capitol took place, Carlson texted his producer that he believed that Trump would lose most of his influence over his supporters after his first term ended. "He's a demonic force, a destroyer," Carlson wrote. "But he's not going to destroy us. I've been thinking about this every day for four years." While he was debating people for a Turning Point USA event in October 2025, someone asked him about the texts.
After beating around the bush for a bit and getting flustered, the Fox News anchor revealed that those messages were the result of a gripe that lasted months. According to him, he had listened to someone in the White House who told him that dead people had voted in the 2020 elections. It was only after he made that bold claim on television that he realized it wasn't true. While that experience may have been infuriating and humiliating for Carlson, those texts ultimately weren't a good look for him.
His messy exit from Fox News affected his public standing
In April 2023, Fox News announced that Tucker Carlson was out of a job after 14 years with the network. Soon, we learned that the real reason the Fox News anchor was nixed from the network was pretty complicated. According to a report by The New York Times, network executives had started to seriously weigh the risks of keeping Carlson on board after his texts from January 2021 were revealed as part of Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit discovery.
In a message shared with his producer, the famed journalist described how he had seen a group of Donald Trump supporters physically attack an "antifa kid." After looking at the scene, his thoughts were not that of concern or horror, but to think, "It's not how white men fight." However, he soon had a twisted change of heart. "Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him," he wrote. "I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it."
Although Carlson acknowledged that he did not like that train of thought, the network apparently found the disturbing text to be too alarming to ignore. But that wasn't the only reported reason why Carlson was booted. According to Vanity Fair, Carlson had a bad habit of bad-mouthing higher-ups at Fox News. That reportedly proved to be a giant problem for the network because the TV personality had numerous loyal people working on his team who shared in his beliefs. Ultimately, the executives believed that Carlson might have been getting far too powerful for their comfort.
He was accused of perpetuating a toxic work environment
One of the many Fox News star feuds you probably didn't know about revolved around Tucker Carlson. In March 2023, Abby Grossberg, a former producer on Carlson's show, sued the network, the famed personality himself, and numerous parties for a variety of reasons. Speaking to Time in May 2023, Grossberg recalled how it only took her one day on the job to realize that the home of Carlson's show was a toxic place. During an initial stroll around his team office, she noticed several photos of Nancy Pelosi in a bikini. Elsewhere, a senior producer proudly displayed a mirror on his desk with the word "c***" written on it.
Notably, according to Vanity Fair, Carlson himself had used that derogatory term for women to describe Irena Briganti, the woman who helmed public relations at Fox News. In Grossberg's Time interview, she said that Carlson's employees had started shunning her from work matters when she brought up her concerns about the content of the host's show and his workplace environment. In an interview with NPR, the former Fox News producer recalled how a supervisor had dismissed her complaints surrounding sexism and harassment by saying, "We're just following Tucker's tone. That's Tucker's tone.'" Grossberg added: "And I do really believe that it all trickles down from the top." Additionally, in 2020, Fox News segment host Cathy Areu filed a lawsuit alleging that Carlson had prevented her from making more appearances on his show because she had turned down his sexual advance in 2018. While Areu's lawsuit was dismissed in 2021, Fox News ultimately settled with Grossberg for $12 million.
He faced conservative backlash for hosting a controversial podcaster
In October 2025, Tucker Carlson made the highly controversial decision to invite Nick Fuentes onto his talk show. Fuentes is a known white supremacist and Holocaust denier who has a long history of making misogynistic, racist, and antisemitic remarks. So, it's only natural that Carlson became the subject of widespread backlash for platforming the controversial podcaster. Speaking at a Republican Jewish Coalition, Texas Senator Ted Cruz stated that Carlson was a "coward" and "complicit in that evil" for publicly chatting with Fuentes without condemning him for his past antisemitic comments (per The Washington Post).
Even the United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, took to X to condemn Carlson, sniping, "Giving a platform to & getting advice about Christianity from Fuentes is like asking Hannibal Lector for recipes." Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro gave a particularly scathing take on X, labeling the famed Fox News anchor an "intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend." Shapiro asserted that his gripe wasn't that Carlson had interviewed Fuentes but the fact that he had "decided to normalize and fluff" someone with his controversial background.
Amidst all the chaos, reporters asked Donald Trump for his views on the matter. After saying he appreciated Carlson's kind words for him over the years, the president stated that people should decide whether or not they want to consume his content because he had the right to interview whomever he wanted. As for Carlson, he later told Shawn Ryan that although he did not agree with Fuentes' racist and antisemitic views, he still felt that his controversial guest had some valid viewpoints about the government.
His most inflammatory comments have chipped away at his reputation
Over the years, several Fox News personalities have been fired for their inappropriate behavior. Yet Tucker Carlson has repeatedly gotten away with making several wild and offensive public remarks. As reported by the BBC, in December 2018, several big companies like Samsung, Pfizer's Robitussin, and Jaguar's Land Rover pulled their ads from Carlson's Fox News show after he remarked that immigrants would make America "poorer and dirtier and more divided." Then, in July 2019, Carlson told his viewers that the fact that someone like Ilhan Omar — who, in his view, vehemently hates America — could join Congress was a testament to the country's broken immigration system.
The former Fox News anchor, who is richer than you realize, unsurprisingly also had some strange takes on the January 6th riots at the Capitol. After looking at previously unseen footage from that day, Carlson told his loyal viewers that the people who stormed the building "were not insurrectionists," calling them "sightseers, per the Associated Press. CNN reported that Carlson had also said that the riot was "mostly peaceful chaos." That claim proved to be too far-fetched for Republican Senators Thom Tillis and Kevin Cramer, who expressed their disdain for it to CNN.
It doesn't stop there. In March 2019, Media Matters created a compilation of all the misogynistic remarks that Carlson had made during his many appearances on "Bubba the Love Sponge" between 2006 and 2011. In addition to claiming that women were "extremely primitive," he had also stated that they liked being ordered to "be quiet and kind of do what [they're] told." Carlson also made demeaning remarks about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Alexis Stewart.
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