Video: Fox News anchor brands Robin Williams ‘a coward’ over suicide
Fox News anchor Shepard Smith has apologised for branding Robin Williams “a coward” just hours after he was found dead in an apparent suicide.
“One of the children he so loved, one of the children grieving tonight because their father killed himself in a fit of depression,” Smith said.
“You could love three little things so much, watch them grow, they’re in their mid-20s, and they’re inspiring you, and exciting you, and they fill you up with the kind of joy you could never have known.
“And yet, something inside you is so horrible or you’re such a coward or whatever the reason that you decide that you have to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today.”
Smith then made a joke about Williams’ drug use, saying the actor “probably had more fun than most people I’ve ever known”.
He quipped to Fox presenter Lisa Kennedy Montgomery: “I know he used to get high with your aunt.”
Following condemnation on social media, Shepard Smith has now apologised. “The last thing I would ever suggest about a man I know nothing about personally, is that he’s a coward,” Smith told TVNewser. “That goes against everything I am. If those words, I used so innocently, offended his family, from the bottom of my heart, I could not be more sorry.”
