LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) — Talent agency UTA plans to drop former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly as a client when his contract expires at the end of March, according to a report in Variety.
As well, WME, which handled O’Reilly's book deals also announced that they were dropping him this week.
"It is our fiduciary responsibility to service the existing deals we have under contract, but we will not be working with him moving forward," a spokesman for the agency said in a statement provided to CNN.
Mark Fabiani, an O’Reilly spokesman, told Variety that the former Fox bloviator has already arranged for alternate representation but declined to offer details.
O'Reilly, who was a part of the Fox News brand from day one, was terminated last year following a series of sexual harassment lawsuits by five women with settlements totaling $13 million.
The news of his departure from his representation follows revelations in the New York Times earlier this week of new $32 million settlement O'Reilly paid last January to a woman who accused him of sexual misconduct. The newly-revealed settlement was notable both for its size and for the fact that it came just six months after Fox News exec Roger Ailes had been ousted over similar complaints. Fox renewed its contract with O’Reilly in February in an agreement that saw his annual salary bumped from $20 to $25 million.
O'Reilly, who is purported to be on the shortlist for the conservative Sinclair News Network, has suggested that the story in the New York Times was a "malicious smear” and denied any misconduct.
“I have been in the broadcast business for 43 years with 12 different companies,” he told former Fox host Glenn Beck on Beck’s radio program on Monday, “and not one time was there any complaint filed against me. Nothing. Zero. So I think my track record speaks for itself.”
