Names and faces
■ Fox News defended Jesse Watters on Tuesday after he used the phrase “kill shot” in a speech urging young conservatives to confront Dr. Anthony Fauci in public with a hostile interview on the subject of whether the National Institute of Health funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the covid-19 virus originated. Watters, a host on Fox News Channel’s panel show “The Five” who made his initial mark doing aggressive interviews for Bill O’Reilly, spoke Monday to a group of college and high school conservatives. While Watters’ audience booed at the mention of Fauci’s name, he said an interviewer should suggest he lied about the topic — something Fauci has disputed. “Now you go in for the kill shot, the kill shot with an ambush, deadly, because he doesn’t see it coming,” Watters said. Asked about it on CNN, Fauci, said Watters should be fired “on the spot” but predicted he wouldn’t be held accountable for his language. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted that for two years he’s been encouraging people to protect themselves against covid-19 by practicing good public health practices and get vaccinated. “For that, you have some guy out there saying people should be giving me a kill shot, to ambush me?” he said. “I mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days?” In a statement, Fox said “It’s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions … and his words have been twisted completely out of context.”
■ Actor Chris Noth, 67, facing allegations that he sexually assaulted two women, has been dropped from “The Equalizer” and will no longer film any new episodes of the television series, Universal Television and CBS said in a joint statement. The move, which is effective immediately, came just days after the women’s accusations against the actor appeared in an article in The Hollywood Reporter. A representative for Noth had no comment Monday night about the actor’s ousting from the show, in which he plays William Bishop, a former CIA director and a friend to Robyn McCall played by Queen Latifah. In a previous statement, Noth said the allegations against him were “categorically false.” In the article, one woman said Noth raped her in 2004, when she was 22. Another woman said she was assaulted by Noth in 2015, when she was 25, after a date in New York City. In matching statements shared on Instagram on Monday, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, who starred in “Sex and the City” with Noth and also in the reboot, “And Just Like That,” said: “We support the women who have come forward and shared their painful experiences. We know it must be a very difficult thing to do and we commend them for it.”