While filling in for Tucker Carlson on Thursday, August 11, 2022, Fox host Brian Kilmeade displayed a doctored photo of federal magistrate Bruce Reinhart “having his feet massaged by convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell and holding Oreo cookies and alcohol” on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” airplane.
Reinhart is the magistrate judge who signed the FBI search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, where Trump stashed highly classified government documents, apparently including some relating to nuclear weapons and U.S. intelligence assets, including names of spies on America’s payroll, according to some news reports.
The FBI, with total justification, went there to get that stuff back after Trump refused to hand it over.
I’ll skip over the fact that Reinhart is getting death threats, has been doxxed, and angry Trump supporters are even menacing his children (see story here). This garbage, sadly, is what we’ve come to expect from Trumpers and the political right in general.
After showing Fox viewers the doctored photo (below), Kilmeade bantered with Sean Hannity as follows:
“Sean, can you relate to that?” Kilmeade asked Hannity.
″I think that’s actually a picture of Jeffrey Epstein with somebody putting his head on there,” Hannity replied. “I’m guessing. I don’t know.”
“Who knows?” Kilmeade said.
Hannity replied, “I’ll let you determine that in the morning.” [Carlson’s show broadcasts in the evening, so he’s referring to the next morning.)
The following day, Kilmeade tweeted,
Keep in mind this was a tweet, not an on-air retraction, so would’ve been seen only by Fox viewers who follow Kilmeade on Twitter, not everyone who saw the broadcast. As far as that goes, “So far, Kilmeade has not apologized on air to the viewers who saw the image and possibly believed it to be authentic,” Huffington Post said (read their story, and see caustic responses from some Twitter users, here).
Judge Reinhart probably will decide he has better things to do, but if I were him, I’d have a top-notch libel lawyer review this.
Hannity’s intervention might save Fox from potential liability, but Kilmeade looks vulnerable. A court probably would rule Judge Reinhart is a public figure, which means he’d have to prove actual malice, but this sure looks malicious. Defending himself by saying he didn’t know the photo was fake wouldn’t save Kilmeade, because all Reinhart has to prove is that he was reckless.
Even if this isn’t actionable, it sure as hell is unethical journalism. Nor is it legitimate political commentary; it’s gutter crawling. And calling something a “joke” doesn’t negate its defamatory nature.
I don’t know if this segment, which certainly was premeditated, was reviewed by Fox’s lawyers before being aired, but I strongly suspect it was. (If a producer let this go on the air without a legal review, the Murdochs should fire him/her for their own self-preservation.)
Neither Kilmeade nor Hannnity are lawyers (Hannity didn’t even graduate from college), but they chose their words carefully, and their lines appear rehearsed. If these guys didn’t cross the line, they crawled right up to it, which leads me to believe there were meetings attended by writers and lawyers before this was put out there. And Hannity is no voice of conscience; he was an accomplice in this, although he covered his ass better.
Free speech goes only so far. When you falsely depict someone as cavorting with a convicted sex predator, that’s libel per se. Judge Reinhart should not take this from these guys; but, more importantly, this is a vicious attack on our legal system, and by suing them he’d be defending that system for all of us.
As America’s conservatives race farther out of control, it becomes increasingly vital to draw lines in the sand, hold people to account, and impose consequences for bad behavior. Judge Reinhart will be doing all of us a favor by taking legal action on this, and if he does, I’ll be cheering for him all the way.
