Report: Pete Rose out at Fox Sports in aftermath of underage sex allegations
Once again, it looks like Pete Rose’s past has caught up with him and this time he’s reportedly paying with his TV career.
The Hollywood Reporter, citing unnamed sources, says Rose is out at Fox Sports after allegations surfaced recently that he carried on a sexual relationship with a girl under the age of 16 back in the 1970s. Rose had been an MLB analyst since 2015. In the past, he’d had a role in Fox’s regular season baseball coverage. But he really made his presence known as part of Fox’s Emmy-winning postseason coverage, where he, Alex Rodriguez and Frank Thomas starred on the pre- and post-game show.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Lesley Goldberg and Marisa Guthrie wrote:
The decision to sever ties with Rose comes as 21st Century Fox has been rocked by systemic harassment allegations at Fox News that have resulted in millions of dollars in settlements.
Recently, the division suspended Fox Business Network anchor Charles Payne and Fox News Channel host Eric Bolling amid separate claims of inappropriate behavior toward women. (Payne and Bolling have denied the allegations.) And Fox Sports in July fired Jamie Horowitz, its president of national networks, after an investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior with female colleagues. (Horowitz, through a lawyer, denied the allegations and is fighting his termination for cause.)
In response to a Yahoo Sports inquiry about Rose’s status, a Fox Sports representative said: “We are not commenting on the Hollywood Reporter story.”
The underage sex allegations surfaced last month as part of a lawsuit that Rose filed against John Dowd, the special counsel who oversaw the investigation that resulted in Rose’s banishment from MLB. Dowd said in a 2015 interview that Rose committed statutory rape back in the 1970s with underage girls. Rose then sued Dowd for defamation.
In defending himself against those charges, Dowd produced sworn testimony from an an unidentified woman who says she started having a sexual relationship with Rose in 1975 when she was under the age of 16, which is the age of consent in Ohio. Rose — who was 34 and married at the time — acknowledged that he had an affair with the woman, but insisted she was 16.
Nonetheless — legal or not — Rose admitted to having a relationship with a 16-year-old girl. For Fox, a network that has continually been fighting sexual harassment allegations in recent years, even those optics look to have been enough to walk away from its relationship with Rose.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
