Geraldo Rivera Now Says He's Out at Fox

UPDATE Jun 29, 2023 6:40 PM CDT

Geraldo Rivera updated his status at Fox News on Thursday, possibly for the last time. After announcing last week that he had quit his gig on The Five, the 23-year employee posted a video on Twitter saying he was fired from that show, then decided to quit the network altogether, Variety reports. He earlier had said he planned to remain at Fox as a correspondent. Rivera said he's scheduled Friday on Fox & Friends, which he said could be the last time he appears on the network. Fox News made no immediate comment.

Jun 21, 2023 5:20 PM CDT

Geraldo Rivera has quit as one of the lonely liberal voices on Fox News' popular political combat show The Five, saying Wednesday that "a growing tension that goes beyond editorial differences" made it no longer worth it to him. The last scheduled appearance on The Five for the television veteran, whose 80th birthday is on July 4, is next week. "It has been a rocky ride but it has also been an exhilarating adventure that spanned quite a few years," he said in an interview with the AP on Wednesday. "I hope it's not my last adventure."

Rivera said that it was his choice to leave The Five, but that Fox management "didn't race after me to say, 'Geraldo, please come back.'" There was no immediate comment from Fox. Despite airing in the late afternoon instead of prime time, The Five has become Fox's most-watched program, with an average of more than 3 million viewers last year. Its conceit is simple—five people, four of them conservative and one liberal—kick around the issues of the day. Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, Dana Perino, and Jeanine Pirro are the regular conservatives. Rivera has rotated as the liberal voice with Jessica Tarlov and Harold Ford Jr., a former congressman from Tennessee.

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"I don't want the friction. The Five is too intimate a place and it gets too personal," Rivera said. He said he planned to remain as a "correspondent at large" at Fox, with a contract that expires in January 2025. He said he'd been suspended a handful of times, most recently in early May. He had tweeted shortly after Fox fired Tucker Carlson on April 24 that he found Carlson's theories about the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection to be "bulls---," leading Gutfeld to respond via tweet, "You're a class act Geraldo, a real man of the people." Carlson had played down the violence on Jan. 6, calling people who invaded the Capitol "sightseers." (More Geraldo Rivera stories.)