I guess when generating anger and hate is your stock in trade, it makes sense that a Fox affiliate would hire someone with anger management issues. Too bad he turned out to be an “alleged” pedophile as well:
Fox 5 Investigative Reporter Charles Leaf faces three sex crime charges in the alleged assault of a 4-year-old girl, sources told NBCNewYork.
The formal charges are aggravated sexual assault on a minor, sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child, according to sources. Police arrested him after learning of allegations he sexually abused “a 4-year-old female acquaintance” at his residence.
Maybe this could have been prevented if they had looked into his background just a little bit. Of course maybe they had and liked what he brought to the table with his “aggressive” approach to “journalism.” After all he had worked at a number of Fox stations in Denver, Kansas City and Detroit before mvoing the the Big Apple and apparently was being groomed for bigger things:
The Fox 5 news site says, in part, that Leaf “has covered major local and national stories including national exclusives on the Bernard Madoff scandal and the proposed development of a mosque near the World Trade Center Site.”
He has also been on FOX News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor,” “The FOX Report,” “FOX & Friends,” “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren,” “America Live with Megyn Kelly” and “Geraldo at Large.”
So what were the telltale signs that Fox overlooked or never bothered to discover? Take a gander:
While working in Mobile, Alabama a decade ago, Leaf was charged in a civil suit with a “willful physical attack” against a local councilwoman.
The case was eventually settled, but two years later, in Detroit, a man told police that Leaf shouted homophobic obscenities at him after being pelted with eggs while covering a story.
Bobbi Barrow, spokeswoman for Denver Health Medical Center, told Warner she believed Leaf misrepresented himself to get an interview with her boss, Dr. Patricia Gabow, at an event last November. “What he did was unprofessional,” Barrow told Warner.
He also acquired some notoriety for this incident of “ambush-style” journalism:
In short he fits right in with the rest of Fox’s many interesting hires, including a former alcoholic and serial liar (Glenn Beck) and Bill O’Reilly, confirmed sexual harasser and a woman who found governing Alaska was just too much work when your trying to cash in on your fame and possibly run for President in 2012 (Palin). Of course, Charles Leaf did take things to the extreme: he physically assaulted a woman, he was a homophobe, lied misrepresented himself in order to get an interview and practiced “gotcha” journalism in an attempt to make a prominent Muslim developer look like a terrorist based on the fact that said developer didn’t want to talk to a Fox News reporter (imagine that).
What’s peculiar about this report is that it zeroes in on a few minor functionaries in the financial chain behind the construction of the mosque — loan guarantors and the like. Leaf invades their homes, follows them into foyers, and tries to run after them in parking lots. All this, ostensibly, to follow the “money trail” behind the mosque.
Of course, they somehow neglected to try talking to one of the imam’s more generous backers — Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Maybe that’s because Talal is the No. 2 shareholder in Fox News. […]
It’s bad enough that they sicced their camera crews on a bunch of unsuspecting bankers, accountants and real-estate developers who are, unsurprisingly, not willing to have their lives destroyed by a scandal-mongering bunch of fake journalists on a witch hunt. But the pernicious part of this kind of reportage is the way that it implies guilt — for some unnamed misdeed — simply in the refusal to go on-camera.
Quite a character, by which I mean bigot, bully and now an alleged sex offender with a 4 year old child. I’m sure Fox will do everything in their power to get him off and give him his own national cable “news” show. He fits their business model after all to a T.
Update [2010-10-8 13:43:19 by Steven D]: More on Leaf’s checkered past can be found here in this report by Michael Robers in the Denver newspaper Westwood
For example, here is more detail on Leaf’s behavior at the Detroit incident:
As Leaf and his cameraman arrived at the building, Sebastian Graham, the owner of a nearby home business, jeered them; Graham says he felt Fox was unfairly vilifying the landlord, whom he calls a sincere person upgrading a dangerous eyesore. The newsmen conducted some interviews, and as they were getting ready to leave, several young people allegedly unhappy with Fox for an unrelated reason — its coverage of the war in Afghanistan — expressed their displeasure by smashing an egg on Leaf’s head and tossing others at him. When one hurler appeared to enter the back of Graham’s house, Leaf went to the front door because, he says, he wanted to pinpoint the miscreant’s location for police, whom his cameraman had already phoned. As Leaf tells it, Graham opened the door and shouted at him, but he didn’t rise to the bait.
For his part, Graham says that Leaf, accompanied by the cameraman and a source from the building, assumed he had been part of the egging and went off on him: “He called me a &’cocksucker’ and a ‘faggot,’ and his cameraman hit me. He tried to hit me, too, but he didn’t make contact.” Graham maintains that the trio left only after he reacted to a haymaker from the third man by kicking him in the stomach. Afterward, Graham told cops to check for video of the incident, because the camera’s light was on during the melee, but the TV folks swore nothing had been taped.
