Fox Sports Reporter Fired After Slurring Jews, Mexicans
JTA — A Fox Sports sideline reporter has been fired for making racist and anti-Semitic comments on a live Facebook broadcast Thursday.
In the broadcast Thursday on Barstool Sports’ Facebook Live, Emily Austen, 27, said Jewish people are stingy and expressed surprise that a Mexican immigrant was a high school valedictorian, because, “I didn’t even know Mexicans were that smart.” She also made a stereotypical remark about Chinese-Americans.
Citing an unnamed source with the Tampa Bay Rays, which Austen covers, Business Insider Friday that Austen had been fired for the comments and will not appear on any future game broadcasts.
In a statement first published on Deadspin, Fox Sports Florida senior vice-president Steve Tello said:
We were made aware that Emily Austen appeared in a social media video unaffiliated with FOX Sports in which she made insensitive and derogatory comments. She was not speaking on behalf of FOX Sports, nor do we condone any of the statements she made in the video. Emily has been advised that her comments were unacceptable, and she is not scheduled to appear on any upcoming FOX Sports Florida or FOX Sports Sun broadcasts.
Austen’s broadcast Thursday included a rant about Jewish customers at an establishment where she worked in Boca Raton, Florida: “The way I used to talk to the Jews in Boca. … I just didn’t care. They would complain and b—- about everything. I gave a guy, delivered his beer, and he was complaining to me that there was too much head. I knew that he was a stingy a– and he wasn’t going to give me a tip.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO