Britt McHenry, a former Fox host and ESPN reporter best known for a towing-yard tirade, says she’s taken a job with the Trump administration.
McHenry posted on social media Wednesday to confirm that she’d been hired as a “press advisor” for the U.S. Department of State. Her announcement, which was first reported by Barrett Media, included vague details about what her duties will be. She said she would be developing "strategies to address media concerns and enhance public understanding of State Department initiatives" on her updated LinkedIn page. But McHenry did say she’s "beyond excited" about working for Marco Rubio.
It's unclear what part of McHenry's résumé makes her a good fit for the State Department. The tiny and harmful secretary of state has gotten recent attention for hiring folks who’ve been caught on video being assholes. If that's an attribute Rubio's indeed after, McHenry made an unbeatable audition tape more than a decade ago. In fact, should McHenry somehow go on to broker an end to the Iran fiasco, negotiate a truce in the Ukraine war, and formulate some sort of McHenry Doctrine that ushers in an era of world peace, here’s betting that her obituary would still lead off with what a loathsome bully she was in the spring of 2015 at a Northern Virginia towing yard.
McHenry, who was covering the NFL for ESPN at the time, had apparently partied hard at a Chinese restaurant in Arlington and left her car in the eatery's parking lot overnight. She learned the next day that the vehicle had been confiscated by a local outfit called Advanced Towing. While reclaiming the auto, McHenry feuded with an attendant on the tower’s property. Turns out she was standing directly beneath a security camera, and a tape of the encounter was edited and posted online. It finds McHenry praising her own intelligence, professional standing, and dental hygiene while insulting the attendant in all of the above categories. The cruelty in McHenry's voice while delivering a climactic closing couplet to the lot lady—"I'm on television and you're in a fucking trailer, honey," she said, followed by, "Lose some weight, baby girl!"—was such that she made a tow truck company employee seem sympathetic. McHenry, meanwhile, was certified as a mean girl for life.
McHenry had produced some big stories for ESPN, the biggest of which was a 2014 report that supernova QB Robert Griffin III had "alienated" others in the Washington Football Team locker room. WFT brass and even many of her media colleagues publicly pooh-poohed McHenry’s much-circulated report, though history has been kind to her scoop. Neither that nor any other of her ESPN work, however, captured the public’s attention quite like the tow-lot tumult; every news organization from TMZ on up ran the clip. McHenry issued a worthless apology, claiming the hateful cad on the video "is not who I am," but ESPN suspended her nonetheless. Her standing in Bristol never really seemed to recover. She lost her ESPN job for good in 2017, as part of a mass layoff of about 100 staffers.
McHenry was barely out the door at ESPN when she began making a brazen play for a job at Fox. To improve her chances of ending up there, she solidified her already stout public persona as a self-deluded asshole. McHenry, for example, argued that ESPN actually got rid of her because she was “openly conservative.” She later claimed, "I was demoted because I was white [and] I made too much." She also authored a comically cliched column for her personal Tumblr, allegedly timed for Independence Day, headlined “Colin Kaepernick can’t 'truly celebrate' America.” In her shameless shitpiece, McHenry listed what she described as "the litany of offensive statements and/or remarks he’s made about law enforcement officers."
"My admiration will always go towards the men and women who have walked away from their loved ones, through fields of IEDs, and into the dangerous unknown," McHenry wrote. "It will never go to the athlete who takes a knee after losing his starting job."
Around the same time, she told the great Dan Steinberg, then of the Washington Post, how much she admired the "fearlessness" of Fox mainstay Sean Hannity, while also whining that the media was too liberal "across the board."
Her cynical and obvious ploy, of course, worked fabulously. Fox hired her in 2018 and put her alongside a presenter cut from the same cloth, Tomi Lahren, to help launch its then-new streaming platform, Fox Nation. McHenry was given a chat show called Un-PC.
Her run at the network of her dreams turned nightmarish quick. Within months of Un-PC’s debut, McHenry accused co-host, former pro wrestler George Murdoch, a.k.a. Tyrus, of sexual harassment. Fox brass took Murdoch off the show, and claimed to have hired law firms to conduct an investigation of McHenry’s allegations. No report about its findings was ever released, but Fox imposed no sanctions on Murdoch; instead, they gave him his own show, Nuff Said With Tyrus. McHenry filed a federal civil lawsuit against Murdoch and network officials, saying that Fox retaliated against her for calling out the alleged abuser. HuffPost reported on lewd text messages she received from Murdoch, including one saying, "Just pull your boobs out now why don’t you," and another in which he threatened he would “send [McHenry] another dick pic."
McHenry and Fox settled the suit in 2021. Terms were not disclosed, but she was gone from Fox when the settlement was announced. Tyrus is still with the network as Greg Gutfeld’s sidekick.
McHenry has been relatively invisible in the last several years. She survived a cancerous brain tumor. Upon regaining her health, McHenry got back to spewing predictable agitprop (“Why Is Bad Bunny Performing at the Super Bowl?”) on various right-wing outlets. She’s still got the right stuff for Fox, but she can’t go back there. At the State Department, McHenry will be just one of an incredible number of that network’s former personalities now working inside the Trump administration.
The State Department has not yet issued any official announcement of McHenry’s hiring. Defector Media reached out to the agency's press office asking for confirmation, but has not gotten a response.
The Post, in a profile written during her transition from sports reporter to Fox personality, reported that McHenry “hopes that she gets to a point where her successes eclipse" the renown she got for unleashing so much hate on a towing clerk. That didn’t happen at Fox and, McHenry Doctrine or no, that's not going to happen with this pivot to diplomacy either.
