After a tumultuous two-year period that included a promotion to SportsCenter, barbs from the U.S. president, a suspension and eventually a demotion, Jemele Hill‘s 12-year run with ESPN is over.
ESPN and former SportsCenter anchor Jemele Hill have agreed to a buyout and she will depart the network September 1, “Those Guys Have All the Fun” author Jim Miller reported on his Twitter account Saturday. Hill had been with ESPN since 2006.
Per Miller, the buyout followed a meeting between Hill and new ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro that was at her request. It is reportedly an “amicable” departure.
The news, which ESPN has not announced officially, comes less than eight months after ESPN announced Hill would leave her position as co-anchor of the 6 PM ET SportsCenter. The network said at the time that Hill wanted to leave the show, which under executive Norby Williamson had transformed from a talk and interview show into a traditional SportsCenter.
It also comes less than a year after ESPN suspended her two weeks for suggesting people upset with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones boycott the team’s sponsors.
That suspension came within weeks of ESPN publicly distancing itself from Hill after she criticized the U.S. president on her personal Twitter account. Her description of the president as a white supremacist — which came less than a month after the president described a white supremacist rally in which a counterprotester was murdered by a white supremacist as a gathering of “very fine people on both sides” — resulted in direct criticism from the president and a call for her firing from his press secretary.
Though it is almost certain the decision was in the works before Hill’s comments, ESPN put Williamson in charge of SportsCenter not long after her tweet about the president. If a recent story in The Hollywood Reporter is to be believed, Williamson was hostile to Hill’s presence on the show, going as far as to say “one down, one to go” when she announced her departure in January. The “one to go” — co-host Michael Smith — left SportsCenter a month later and has not since been given a regular position on any ESPN program.
Hill’s downfall at ESPN began in October 2016 when the network announced that she and Smith, with whom she had been co-hosting the well-regarded His & Hers on ESPN2, would move to the 6 PM ET SportsCenter. The show was intended as a blend of the conversational, semi-debate format of His & Hers and a traditional SportsCenter, but in its first iteration was weighted almost exclusively to the former.
Thrust into prominent roles on a show that did not work, Hill and Smith were already the subject of viewer acrimony even before Hill became culture war fodder.
Yet Hill’s position on ESPN was always tenuous. Early in her career with the network, she had a series of missteps that included a 2008 suspension for invoking Hitler in a column about the Boston Celtics and a 2009 appearance on First Take in which she suggested fans throw batteries at Brett Favre when he returned to Green Bay as a member of the Minnesota Vikings.
After maintaining a fairly low profile for the early part of this decade, including a stint as a college football sideline reporter, Hill joined the cast of ESPN’s Numbers Never Lie alongside Smith and Hugh Douglas in 2013. After Douglas got fired, the show became a vehicle for Hill and Smith, was renamed His & Hers, and the rest is history.
Hill appeared on ESPN as recently as Friday as a panelist on the final episode of SportsNation.
[News from Jim Miller/Twitter 8.25, The Hollywood Reporter 6.20]
