Tucker Carlson’s home studio dismantled by Fox News employees | FoxNews

As Tucker Carlson prepares to air his show on Twitter, Fox News, the network that fired the prime-time opinion host last month, has dismantled the studio he built in a barn at his home. in Maine.

“Fox came in last week and got all his shit out of there,” DailyMail.com said quoting Patrick Feeney, who he said was managing the studio’s rebuilding work.

“They took the set and everything, all the equipment, the chairs, the desk, the false walls, everything.”

A Fox News source with knowledge of the situation told the Guardian on Wednesday, “We removed the equipment (which we own) after building a custom studio at our own expense – we did not demolish the studio.”

Carlson was fired following a $787.5 million settlement of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems over the spread of Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud in the 2020 elections.

Fox News did not disclose the reason for Carlson’s firing. In its initial statement on the day it happened, April 24, the network said, “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as host and before this as a contributor.

Amid proliferating speculation about the reasons for Carlson’s firing, Variety recently reported that a Fox board member told Carlson that his firing was a condition of the Dominion settlement.

“The anonymous board member told Carlson that the condition did not appear in any of the settlement documents, and was instead a verbal agreement,” Variety said.

“If Fox didn’t comply, the settlement was overturned,” Carlson was told. Dominion carried a lot of weight given that the $787.5 million deal to settle Dominion’s libel lawsuit against the network wouldn’t officially close until late May.

However, a Dominion spokesman told the Guardian that the full settlement sum was received on April 18, two days before the case was closed and six days before Carlson was fired.

The spokesperson pointed to comments earlier this month in London in which John Poulos, the Dominion’s chief executive, told the Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism: “As we left the room audience, they wired the money.”

A Fox News spokesperson previously told Axios that it was “categorically untrue” that Carlson was fired as part of the Dominion settlement.

‘Carlson announced his planned move on Twitter on May 9, promising “a new take on the show we’ve been doing for six and a half years” but offering few details.

The status of his contract with Fox News remains unclear.

On Wednesday, the Mail said Carlson, 54, was working with a three-man construction crew to rebuild his studio in Woodstock, Maine, after Fox’s visit. The site posted photos of Carlson dressed in a plaid shirt and work vest and carrying a sizable axe.

“There’s no hardware in place,” crew member Feeney said. “There wasn’t even an infrastructure for a TV studio for a long time.”

He added: “We just came to clean it up and make it look like something again. There is no imminent business. We’re just preparing in case something happens. We don’t do anything but clean up the place, shore up the walls, make it beautiful again.

Feeney also told the Mail that Carlson “just got home late last night after meeting with lawyers and stuff. As you can imagine, he is very, very busy at the moment.