Fox Anchor Was Told "You're Fired!' Via Teleprompter

Melissa Francis

And you thought radio was a hard business!

Former Fox News and Fox Business Network commentator Melissa Francis learned she had been fired in October 2020 after reading “you’ve been canceled” on her Teleprompter moments before her show was to go live, she told Megyn Kelly on Friday.

TheWrap reports Francis, who was working from a studio the network had set up at her house during the COVID lockdown, was preparing to do an upcoming newscast when she read on the Teleprompter that she wasn’t needed anymore, she said on the SiriusXM radio program, “The Megyn Kelly Show.”

At the time, she was a co-host of one of Fox’s biggest daytime shows, “Outnumbered,” and had been negotiating for a raise to match the salaries of her male counterparts.

Fox claimed that her sudden disappearance from the airwaves was due to “program changes” related to the election, but her camp reportedly thought otherwise. She and her lawyer, Kevin Mintzer, wouldn’t confirm at the time that she had filed a gender-based pay discrimination claim against the network, as the LA Times reported in 2020.

Francis confessed that she and Fox hadn’t wrapped things up “amicably,” explaining to Kelly the sordid details: While preparing to do her 4 p.m. show on what ended up being her final day, Francis was notified by Mintzer that the network was letting her go.