Hiring A Queens Divorce Attorney When Your Spouse Is Having An Affair
While Fox News continues to be a cable news juggernaut, it’s fair to say that the last few years have left the network with something of a black eye in public relations terms. First, allegations against the network’s founder surfaced, and then it’s nighttime ratings king was also taken down by allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. Revelations that the company had paid out tens of millions in settlements to women who’d been victimized by high profile personnel roiled shareholders and forced a wholesale re-evaluation of the Fox News corporate culture.
This has not, it seems, changed everyone’s behavior at the channel. In what must have come as unsettling news to top brass, the wife of host Jesse Watters filed for divorce from him last October after learning that Watters, 39, was engaged in an extramarital affair with a 25-year-old producer on his show, Watters World. The pair had raised eyebrows when they secretly took a tandem vacation to the Caribbean, and then posted pictures of themselves together on Instagram. It was not, perhaps, the classiest move one could make, but it does seem to fit with Watters’s on-air persona.
The situation must have been more alarming for co-workers because Watters met his wife, Noelle, while both worked for Fox. They married in 2009, when Jesse was a producer for The O’Reilly Factor and Noelle worked in marketing for Fox and hosted a web series focused on fashion called iMag Style. When Noelle gave birth to twin daughters in 2011, she opted to become a stay-at-home mom. This made perfect sense, as her husband’s career trajectory looked bright. Jesse had begun appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s show on occasion with lighter-side segments billed as Watters World. They displayed Jesse’s unconventional, slightly aggressive persona and were occasionally criticized for crossing lines, as when a segment on Chinatown was decried as racist.
By 2014, after years under the tutelage of his longtime boss O’Reilly, he was given a slot on Fox’s then-new daytime news and chat show, Outnumbered. The setup of the show is that four female panelists and one “lucky guy,” who is the outnumbered person in question, discuss the happenings of the day. The format was ideal for Jesse, who projects a sort of stylized, hyper-masculine image in front of cameras. Perhaps intending to shock his co-hosts, he once told the story of the time his wife told him that she had voted for Obama in 2012. He said he was stunned, but in the end it turned out that his wife was kidding. “She got me good,” he said, “but it wasn’t a big deal anyway. The rule of thumb for guys is you can be a crazy tea party right-wing conservative, but if the girl is communist and she’s hot, you’re in. I mean, it doesn’t matter as long as she’s hot.”
Also in 2014, a New York Magazine reporter named Gabriel Sherman published a book that included an incident where Fox founder Roger Ailes offered an employee a raise in exchange for sex. While Ailes and Fox both strenuously denied the charge, whispers began to circulate about some of Ailes’s less savory personal characteristics. In 2016, former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson brought a lawsuit against Ailes alleging that she had been fired when she, too, refused his sexual advances. Days later, Sherman published accounts from an additional six women detailing sexual harassment by Ailes. The network seemed to take a circle-the-wagons approach until another on-screen celebrity, Megyn Kelly, told internal investigators that she too had experienced advances from Ailes early in her career.
Ailes resigned his job at Fox in July 2016, taking with him a $40 million exit package. Watters’s longtime mentor, Bill O’Reilly, defended Ailes vigorously on the air until the network reached a settlement agreement with Gretchen Carlson. He did not immediately reveal that the network was simultaneously negotiating a settlement with a woman he had attempted to pressure into a romantic relationship and then tried to have fired when she rejected him. The following month, another former Fox host, Andrea Tantaros, filed her own sexual harassment suit against Fox and implicated O’Reilly as a harasser.
Reporters chased the story for months, and in April 2017, The New York Times reported on five separate lawsuits that Fox had settled on O’Reilly’s behalf, going back to 2002. In total, the paper said that the network had paid out $13 million in damages from O’Reilly’s misconduct over the years. Later, an additional $32 million payout was revealed when a former Fox legal analyst alleged that O’Reilly had forced her into sex and harassed her over a period of years.
The house cleaning at the network was certainly to the benefit of Watters, whose Watters World segments became a weekly Saturday night show in January 2017. With openings in the roster, another younger commentator, Eric Bolling, got his own show, leaving a spot on The Five open. Watters was moved into that just in time to watch Bolling’s career flame out in his own sexual harassment scandal. Amazingly, it was against this backdrop that Watters had begun an affair with a producer on his show. Emma DiGiovine joined the broadcast in 2016 as a 23-year-old former model and aspiring actress, and while his peers at the network were repeatedly forced out for sexual misconduct scandals, Watters was pursuing his own interoffice romance.
Last October, shortly after Noelle filed her divorce suit, Watters and DiGiovine went to the company’s Human Resources department to disclose the affair and make their relationship public. Fox reassigned DiGiovine to Laura Ingraham’s show, and according to the Daily News, the pair remain a couple to this day. After years of scandals in his workplace, the network must be relieved that at least this relationship was consensual.
How Affairs Affect Divorce Cases In Queens
It is a stressful time when you discover that your spouse is having an affair and trying to decide whether or not to file for divorce.
If you think your marriage in Queens is ending, the lawyers at Zelenitz, Shapiro & D’Agostino can help you get the best settlement possible. Call us today at 718-523-1111 for a free consultation with an experienced Queens divorce and child custody attorney.
