Former Tucker Carlson Tonight producer Abby Grossberg sat down for a lengthy, jaw-dropping interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
There are some real grains of salt to be taken with Grossberg. For one, I would guess she’s interested in working for MSNBC. For another, she played a part in Fox’s deceit about the 2020 election.
Nevertheless, I found her credible, sympathetic and compelling. I watched her full interview, which was at least a half hour, but I could only find the first 12 minutes online. But those 12 minutes were full of revelations. My highlights are below, with links to the places you can find the relevant portions on MSNBC’s YouTube video.
Grossberg discusses Tucker Carlson's misogyny, which is no secret, but I was shocked at Grossberg's anecdote that he and his cronies liked Andrew Tate so much, they wanted to party with him in Romania.
Ray Epps is mentioned twice, once at the beginning when Grossberg says she first thought the big news about Tucker Carlson on Monday (when he had been fired) had to do with Epps. She later talks about how the show demanded she find Jan. 6 insurrectionists who were really FBI informants which she could not find. Wallace quickly clarified that was related to phony accusations that Oath Keepers member Epps was working on behalf of the FBI on Jan. 6. (I’ll have more on this in my next post).
Grossberg said the Epps/Jan. 6 anecdote is an example of “What you see is what ends up on air, people are believers who are there.
Elsewhere in the interview, she says she went to work for the Tucker Carlson Tonight show because it was a promotion and she liked the staff. "I was hoping that it would be more professional and what he was portraying on air was just a show," she said. But working for a show she thought puts out divisive, inflammatory rhetoric "just for show" doesn't reflect that well on Grossberg, either.
Another grain of salt: Grossberg says her “wake up moment” was after Jan. 6 when she realized that what Fox News was airing “is hurting people.” She says she decided, “This is not OK, and I don’t want to be part of that.” Yet, she went to work for Jan. 6 apologist Tucker Carlson in 2022.
She talks about tension with Maria Bartiromo over the 2020 election results and she also says she was asked by Fox to spy on Bartiromo, and complied. In this same segment, she says she thinks that Fox wanted her to portray herself as best friends with Bartiromo, with the suggestion that the network was planning to scapegoat both of them for the Dominion lies. She also says that tension with Bartiromo was one of the reasons she went to work for Carlson.
None of this means that Grossberg was not telling the truth here and I believe she was. What I think is that there is a bigger picture about her that we don’t know yet. But it doesn’t really matter because every word she says about Tucker Carlson and Fox rings true.
What do you think? You can watch this first part of Grossberg’s interview below, from MSNBC’s April 25, 2023 Deadline: White House. If you find more of the interview online, let me know and I’ll post it.
Correction: This post originally said Grossberg mentioned Epps twice. She only said his name at the beginning. Wallace named him the second time.
