ESPN's Jemele Hill Expected To EXIT

Jemele Hill

Jemele Hill, the outspoken ESPN host and commentator who drew fire for calling President Trump a “white supremacist” on Twitter, is leaving the network next month, reports philly.com citing  multiple reports.

ESPN expert and bestselling author James Miller was first to report the news of Hill’s departure, noting on Twitter she was offered an “amicable” buyout of her $2.5 million per year contract after a meeting she requested with new ESPN president James Pitaro. The news was quickly confirmed by The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch and Variety’s Brian Steinberg. Hill’s last day at ESPN is expected to be Sept. 1

Neither Hill nor ESPN immediately responded to a request for comment.

Hill’s departure comes after Pitaro made it clear he wants less politics intermixed with ESPN’s sports coverage. Among other things, Pitaro has told the NFL the network won’t air footage of the national anthem prior to ESPN’s Monday Night Football broadcasts due to players’ continued protests of racial injustice on the sidelines.

“If you ask me is there a false narrative out there, I will tell you ESPN being a political organization is false,” Pitaro told reporters at a media event earlier this month. “I will tell you I have been very, very clear with employees here that it is not our jobs to cover politics, purely.”

Hill, a one-time Philadelphia Inquirer intern and reporter for The Orlando Sentinel, has worked at ESPN since Nov. 2006, when she joined the network as a national columnist. Hill is currently a senior columnist and corespondent for ESPN’s The Undefeated after stepping down from SC6, a failed attempted at a personality-driven version of SportsCenter that executives reverted back to a more traditional edition of the show.

Nearly one year ago, on Sept. 11, 2017, Hill called Trump “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself [with] other white supremacists.” Though it broke ESPN’s social media rules about commenting on politics unrelated to sports, then-network president John Skipper failed to suspend Hill. The White House called for Hill to be fired.

A little more than a month later, Skipper decided to suspend Hill after she criticized Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ anthem stance by tweeting, “Change happens when advertisers are impacted. If you feel strongly about JJ’s statement, boycott his advertisers.” She was off television for two weeks. ESPN called it a second offense. Hill said she regretted that she had “painted ESPN in an unfair light.” (NYPost)