Kimberly Guilfoyle, who delivered a boisterous and controversial speech on the opening night of the Republican National Convention, has reportedly backed out of making an appearance at a Bay Area TV station after staffers engaged in a “major pushback.”
According to veteran Bay Area media blogger Rich Lieberman, Guilfoyle — a campaign adviser for the president and Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend — was scheduled to drop by KTVU-FOX 2’s Oakland headquarters on Friday to shoot some promotional segments.
But Guilfoyle, he reported, abruptly canceled the visit.
Lieberman, citing “multiple sources” at KTVU, wrote that staff members complained to management that a Guilfoyle visit would represent a conflict of interest within the station’s news department — giving the impression that KTVU supported the Trump campaign.
Staffers reportedly fired off a memo to KTVU news director Amber Eikel, saying a Guilfoyle visit would be “out of bounds.”
But Tuesday evening, Eikel tweeted that the incident “never happened.”
“We won’t even let employees in the building right now due to COVID, let alone someone from ANY political campaign,” she said.
I'm so disappointed that a local newspaper would publish such a ridiculous lie. There were no complaints because THIS NEVER HAPPENED. We won't even let employees in the building right now due to COVID, let alone someone from ANY political campaign 1/ https://t.co/6In8QynNNJ
— Amber Eikel (@AmberEikelKTVU) August 26, 2020
KTVU is owned and operated by the Fox Television Stations subsidiary of Fox Corporation. It’s an arrangement that often is misconstrued by some who believe KTVU is affiliated with Fox News Channel, the cable news network often openly supportive of Trump.
Guilfoyle is a former Fox News host. A San Francisco native and former San Francisco prosecutor, Guilfoyle married Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2001. He was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2003 but they split up when she moved to New York in 2004 to seek her fame on cable news, eventually being recruited by Roger Ailes for Fox News.
She received both praise and social media ridicule on Monday for shouting her way through a dark gloom-and-doom, pro-Trump speech in which she warned that Democrats would destroy the country, claimed “socialists” Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to “enslave you” and touted the president’s ability to restore America to a “shining city on a hill.”
In the RNC speech, Guilfoyle also trashed her home state of California, claiming that Democrats “have turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”