Joy Reid created a 'toxic work environment,' threatened violence against co-host

We’ve covered the Joy Reid saga pretty extensively, from here blog comments to her bizarre hacking claims. You may recall that one of the claims made by the expert hired by Reid was that she couldn’t have written some of these homophobic old blog posts because she was too busy being a radio host. Today, her former co-host has spoken up and says Reid created a “toxic work environment,” which included threats of violence:

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Andre Eggelletion, former lead host of the morning show with Reid, recently spoke out about her for the first time in more than a decade, saying Reid created “the most toxic work environment I’ve ever experienced” and threatened him with violence.

“It was a very unhealthy work environment because of her attitude. She attacked me on a constant basis while I was there. I was even once threatened with physical violence during a break with her,” he revealed to Fox News…

The threat came following a “dispute” over a news item that Reid opposed covering — despite Eggelletion being the show’s lead host.

“There was a dispute over it and I told her, ‘Go ahead and call the manager’,” Eggelletion said he told Reid, after she refused to cover the story suggested by him.

To which she allegedly replied, “If you ever speak to me like that again I’m coming over there and it’s gonna be me and you.”

As for the contents of her blog, Eggelletion believes she wrote the comments about gays:

“I do believe she’s not telling the truth about who that person [who wrote the blog posts] was. Maybe she has changed, but back then, that was one evil woman,” Eggelletion said…

The former lead host recalled one example in which Reid’s opinion on the radio show echoed her writings. “She did call Charlie Crist ‘Miss Charlie’ on the air,” he said.

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The insinuations that Crist was gay was one of the very first items discovered on Reid’s blog which got her in trouble, at least this year:

It was in response to these new discoveries from her old blog that Reid claimed the site must have been altered by someone else and that she had notified the FBI about it. When her claims fell apart, Reid made a semi-apology on air which never quite admitted she had been wrong about the hacking claim.

Since then many more examples have turned up, leading Reid to apologize again more recently. After Reid’s most recent apology, MSNBC put out another statement of support. Neither Reid’s statement nor MSNBC’s mentioned the whole hacking claim, but it seemed nothing in Reid’s past, at least nothing found on her blog, was going to be enough to make MSNBC let her go.

The question now is whether these new accusations, which come from a person who witnessed the incidents and was impacted by them, will be treated the same way as her blog comments. That may partly depend on whether or not Joy Reid has changed in her behavior toward colleagues. If she’s still making threats off-camera I suspect we might see a tape leak, like the one that humiliated socialist brawler Lawrence O’Donnell after he had a meltdown at his staff while taping (“Stop the hammering!”).

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Even if Reid is a better employee than she used to be, it’s fair to ask how much credibility she has left at this point. Even if you set aside the past comments, there’s still the lying about the hacker that took place just last month. I guess if she was killing it in the ratings they’d put up with it but she’s really not, so how long will they keep backing her?

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