When A FOX 5 Reporter Was Arrested For Child Molestation And Remained On The Murdoch Payroll

There's been a lot of outrage in the news tabloids this week that the Brooklyn Tech teacher accused of sexually abusing students hasn't been fired already from his teaching job.

The Brooklyn Tech teacher currently resides in Rikers Island, so it's not like he's teaching his classes at this moment, but the usual teacher trolls want him fired immediately because taking time to investigate any allegations made against a teacher takes too long and any teacher accused of doing anything needs to be fired from their teaching job immediately, truth of the accusations or allegations be damned.

Ironically, back in 2010 FOX 5 reporter Charles Leaf was arrested for allegedly molesting a little girl and was NOT immediately fired by the NY Post's parent company, News Corp (which also owned FOX 5.)

Now if Leaf had been a teacher, the NY Post would have tried him in the court of public opinion immediately, declared him guilty before his criminal trial and called for his firing within hours of his arrest.

But that's not what News Corporation officials did at the time.

Nope - instead they suspended him, pending further investigation into the matter.

Here's my blog post at the time noting that if Leaf had been a teacher, he wouldn't have gotten the same treatment from News Corp:

Saturday, October 9, 2010

But If He Were A Teacher, They'd Say Fire Him

An employee of Rupert Murdoch's Fox 5 TV station has been arrested on child molestation charges:

Acclaimed Fox 5 reporter Charles Leaf was suspended Friday after he was accused of molesting a 4-year-girl inside his New Jersey home.

The 40-year-old Leaf was arrested Thursday at his Wyckoff home on charges of aggravated sexual assault on a minor and endangering the welfare of children, authorities said.

"Fox 5 management is aware of the matter and that Charles Leaf has been suspended pending further investigation," said a station spokeswoman.

Notice how Fox 5 management has NOT fired the employee, but is rather suspending him first and conducting an investigation next to make sure the charges are true BEFORE they fire him.

That's a kind of due process and it makes reasonable sense to, you know, look into charges before you fire somebody.

And Fox is treating Leaf like this even though when he called in sick to work on Thursday, the day he was arrested, he never mentioned the arrest.

He simply asked "for a day off to deal with family issues."

Now if Charles Leaf were a teacher, the very same Murdoch media machine would be clamoring for his immediate dismissal sans investigation.

Allegations would be reason enough to fire him.

An actual arrest would be "proof" that he needed to be fired.

Even though every once in a while, the police arrest somebody on molestation charges who is actually, uh, innocent - even in the school system that the New York tabloids like to disparage so much.

Take this man:

After days of falsely being portrayed as a child rapist, a Brooklyn school custodian broke down in tears yesterday as the charges against him were dismissed.

"Just kill me," a distraught Francis Evelyn, 58, muttered to family members who tried to soothe him as he left Brooklyn Criminal Court.

Evelyn had been led out of Public School 91 in Wingate in handcuffs on Monday and spent two days in jail at Rikers Island after an 8-year-old girl said he had repeatedly molested her in a basement bathroom between Feb. 1 and March 9.

But the Trinidad native knew he was innocent.

"I went through hell," Evelyn later told Channel 7 news.

He said he would never forget being in jail - his first time ever behind bars, the station reported.

"They were threatening me, and tell me they're going to take me out, they're gonna cut my throat," he said. "It's their sister, their niece. It was hell."

His niece Hazel Smith told the Daily News her uncle was devastated.

"He's been stripped. You don't strip a good man. It's like my uncle, he was raped also," she said. "He has neighbors, he has kids. He's good inside his heart."

But she said the family held no malice for the accuser.

"She has something going on with her life and my uncle had to pay the price for it," Smith said. "I hope the child gets the help she needs."

Questions about the case quickly surfaced after sources said the second-grader had been abused in the past and had recently accused another student.

Tuesday night, prosecutors rushed to court to request that Evelyn be released on his own recognizance after initially asking for $150,000 bail.

"People are dismissing the charges due to insufficient evidence," prosecutor Roger McCreedy told Judge William Garnett yesterday as Evelyn clasped his hands and bowed his head.

"Dismissed and sealed," Garnett responded.

School officials reinstated Evelyn to his job a few hours later.

PS 91's widely respected principal, Solomon Long, has been yanked from the post he held for 16 years for allegedly failing to report an abuse charge the child previously made against another person.

Long remains exiled at a district office, pending an investigation. The principals union is calling for him to be returned to his post.

For his part, Evelyn has one wish for his future.

"I want my name to be cleared," Evelyn told Channel 7. "I want to walk the street with my head up."

In the Murdoch world, Evelyn's name would never be cleared.

It seems only if you're a Murdoch employee, like Charles Leaf (or Bill O'Reilly, for that matter), are you given the benefit of an investigation before they tarnish your reputation for life and call for your immediate firing.

The Leaf case has another parallel to the Brooklyn Tech case - like the Brooklyn Tech teacher who had been accused of beating a boy a few years before he was hired as a teacher by the DOE (though he was not convicted of any crime in the alleged incident), FOX 5 reporter Charles Leaf had a allegations of violence in his past:

POSTSCRIPT: Leaf sounds like a typical Murdoch creep. According to the DailyNews, this isn't the first time he has found trouble:

Known for his aggressive style, Leaf, an ex-Marine, began working for Fox 5 in 2006 and has won two Emmy awards, according to his profile on myfoxny.com.

Leaf previously worked as a TV reporter in several cities, including Denver, Detroit and Mobile, Ala.

It's not the first time Leaf's conduct has become the subject of unsavory headlines.

In November 1999, Leaf, then a reporter in Mobile, Ala., was sued by a local councilwoman who alleged that the newsman attacked her while trying to interview her for a story.

Frela Wojciechowski said in the suit that Leaf pursued her to her car after a meeting and slammed the door on her arms and legs when she refused to talk.

Leaf abruptly left the station, WPMI. The suit was later settled, and no criminal charges were filed.

I wanted to write this post about Charles Leaf (who has since been convicted of molestation and been sentenced to prison) and the Brooklyn Tech teacher to point out the hypocrisy of the tabloids in the Tech case, particularly the hypocrisy of the people at the NY Post.

When it's a teacher accused of sex crimes, they go after him with both barrels.

When it's an employee in a subsidiary news outlet of the NY Post's parent company News Corporation, they're completely silent - even as the accused was not immediately fired or dropped from the payroll.

7% Of FOX 5 NY On Air Personalities Have Been Accused Or Convicted Of Sex Crimes In Past Four Years (UPDATED - 2:00 PM)

I posted earlier about former Fox 5 NY reporter Charles Leaf getting sentenced to 26 years in prison on child molestation charges.

In the post, I wondered about the following:

Why isn't Campbell Brown screaming about the Leaf case and wondering aloud how many other Fox News employees are pedophiles?

Now Leaf is the only convicted pedophile that I know of at Rupert Murdoch's FOX News and and FOX affiliates, but he is not the only accused sex criminal at the company.

Let's not forget Ray Kelly's son, Greg, a FOX 5 anchor who was accused of rape, though police and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance declined to file charges against him.

The NY Times wrote up the story on Greg Kelly this way:

Manhattan prosecutors have decided not to file rape charges against a son of Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly after a two-week investigation of a woman’s accusation that he had attacked her late last year inside the Lower Manhattan law office where she worked, prosecutors said in a letter on Tuesday. 

The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., concluded its inquiry into the accusation leveled against Mr. Kelly’s son Greg Kelly, a local television anchor, concluding that “the facts established during our investigation do not fit the definition of sexual assault crimes,” according to a brief letter to Mr. Kelly’s lawyer, Andrew M. Lankler. “Therefore, no criminal charges are appropriate.” 

...

The accusations came to light after the woman, who is in her late 20s or early 30s and whose name was not released, walked into the 13th Precinct station house on Jan. 24. She told the police that she had met Mr. Kelly, 43, on the street and had gone for drinks with him at the South Street Seaport a few days later, on Oct. 8. Afterward, she said, they returned to her office and he raped her. 

Police detectives initially interviewed the woman in the hours after she walked into the station house last month, law enforcement officials said at the time. But within hours, the Police Department had turned the investigation over to Mr. Vance’s office because of the conflict presented by the department’s looking into a sexual assault accusation against the commissioner’s son, who from the outset denied the accusations through Mr. Lankler. 

After the allegations became public, Mr. Kelly, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserves, took a leave from his position as an anchor of “Good Day New York” on the Fox station WNYW (Channel 5). 

OK, so here we have two FOX 5 on air employees accused of sex crimes in the last four years, one of whom was convicted on charges, the other not charged.

The FOX 5 NY news site lists 28 current on air personalities - including Greg Kelly, who still has his job despite the rape accusation.

2 out of 28 is 7% - which means 7% of the on air personalities at FOX 5 NY have been accused or convicted of sex crimes in the past four years.

Let's imagine that 7% of teachers working in NYCDOE schools were accused or convicted of sex crimes in the past four years (that would be about 5,600 teachers.)

How do you think Rupert Murdoch's FOX 5 NY affiliate would handle that story?

How would Murdoch's tabloids, the NY Post or the Wall Street Journal, handle that story?

What would frequent FOX News guest Campbell Brown say about those kinds of statistics?

And yet, here we have 7% of the on air personalities at FOX 5 NY accused or convicted of sex crimes in the last four years, one of whom has been imprisoned for child molestation, and we get silence from the FOXies over the sleaze at their station.

Silence too from professional teacher troll Campbell Brown.

It's amazing when you think about, really, because similar statistics for teachers would send both the FOXies and professional teacher trolls like Brown apoplectic about the dangers of teachers, but the reality is, you're far more endangered by FOX 5 NY on air personalities than you are by teachers.

And yeah, I know I'm stretching the Kelly sex crime thing and stretching the stats too - there have been more than 28 on air FOX 5 NY personalities in the past four years.

But this is just the kind of "stretching" that Murdoch media entities engage in when smearing teachers and the teaching profession. 

And the point I want to make in this post still stands regardless - you're far more endangered by FOX 5 NY on air personalities than NYC teachers.

The statistics bear this out.

UPDATED - 2:00 PM: The Daily News reports Greg Kelly is as sleazy as ever:

There is a time and a place for most things — but admiring your co-worker's body live on TV is neither of those.

An excited Greg Kelly could not contain his enthusiasm when colleague Anna Gilligan reported live from the newly renovated Action Park in New Jersey in a bikini.

Gilligan was there to show how the park had been transformed.

But if she thought the hardest part of her broadcast was going on one of the rides and then swimming live on TV, she was wrong.

After getting out of the water, a self-conscious Gilligan, who admitted it was "scary" that she had to strip to a two-piece on air, was subjected to some awkward comments from Kelly.

As she started the Tarzan ride, Kelly exclaimed: "Wow! here she goes, in a two-piece!"
 
And he couldn't contain himself.

As Gilligan climbs out of the water, he tells her: "First of all, nice bathing suit."

She ignores the remark, but Kelly's co-host Rosanna Scotto warns him to "stay appropriate."
He does not heed the advice and continues with his cringey remarks.

When Gilligan says she is about to go and put some clothes on, Kelly tells her "Hold on a second, no, not so fast Anna."

He then stutters to find a question to keep the presenter on air and receives another telling off from Scotto who even slaps him on the arm and tells him to "be nice and stop milking this shot."

Even then, he does not pick up on the clues and continues with the awkwardness.

The camera operator even gets involved by sparing Gilligan's blushed and cutting to a shot of the pool rather than the presenter in her two-piece.

When it goes back to the Fox 5 studio, a suitably embarrassed Kelly tells Scotto, "don't be so frowning at me."

Former Marine Kelly, the son of NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, was cleared of a rape allegation back in 2012 and thanked Scotto then for her support.

He has been hosting the breakfast program since 2008.

Greg Kelly, keeping it classy as always.

Same goes for FOX 5 NY - great idea to put the female reporter in a bathing suit so that Greg Kelly could ogle her publicly on air.