Fox Sports laid off anchor Joy Taylor on Monday months after she was named in a sexual-battery lawsuit.
Taylor had co-hosted the show Speak on its cable network, FS1, alongside former NFL star Keyshawn Johnson and former NBA player Paul Pierce since 2022. In addition to cancelling Speak, the company is also canceling its morning shows Breakfast Ball and The Facility, according to The Athletic.
All three shows had flailing ratings, according to Front Office Sports. Fox Sports did not return an immediate request for comment.
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The news came six months after a former Fox Sports hairstylist, Noushin Faraji, accused Taylor of dismissing Faraji’s claim that then-Fox Sports programming executive Charlie Dixon groped her during Taylor’s birthday party in 2017.
Faraji also claimed that Taylor, who is married, had an affair with Dixon, which is how Taylor got her role as moderator on Skip and Shannon: Undisputed. Faraji further accused Taylor of mocking her accent and her PTSD-induced humming.
Taylor denied the accusations to The Athletic earlier this year. “The claims set forth against Ms. Taylor are devoid of merit and appear to have been strategically framed to create unwarranted publicity rather than to seek legitimate redress,” a spokeswoman told The Athletic in February.
Taylor was tight-lipped on the suits in an interview with New York magazine’s The Cut earlier this year. “I know that the public has a lot of interest in this situation,” she said, “but I have to let the legal process play out.”
She expanded on the situation to Charlamagne tha God’s radio show The Breakfast Club last month, albeit briefly. She also said she was renegotiating her contract.
“I have felt a lot of different emotions,” she said. “I think it’s a grief process when anything like that happens. I’ll say, I’ve been through a lot of traumatic things in my life. A lot. And I think any time you go through a trauma or a grieving period of something, you can’t decide who you are when it’s happening. And that’s been the biggest thing for me.”
Dixon was placed on leave in February after the suits, and the network fired him in April.
The lawsuit also accused Fox Sports star Skip Bayless of offering Faraji $1.5 million for sex. Bayless, who left the network last year, has denied the claim.
Taylor’s contract was set to expire this summer, according to a Front Office Sports report in May. After the lawsuits went public, Taylor was pulled off the air for two weeks before she returned.
