ESPN reporter Marly Rivera fired for calling colleague a 'f***ing c**t' while cameras rolled
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: Instagram/@ivongaete / ESPN
ESPN has confirmed that baseball reporter Marly Rivera 'no longer works here' after an incident on 18 April where she swore at Ivón Gaete.
According to the New York Post, Rivera and Gaete had a disagreement over who was supposed to interview New York Yankees player Aaron Judge at Yankee Stadium.
Rivera says she had arranged an interview with Judge and repeatedly tried to tell Gaete that she had an appointment with the player, claiming that her fellow reporter ignored her.
Gaete was at Yankee Stadium on a freelance basis for Tokyo Broadcasting, she is the wife of John Blundell, MLB Vice President of Communications.
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The former ESPN reporter then called Gaete a 'f***ing c**t' with her remarks caught on video. She said she afterwards tried to apologise but was rebuffed.
ESPN have since released a simple statement confirming that Rivera no longer works for them, she has since disabled her social media accounts.
Rivera says that she accepts responsibility for swearing at Gaete but said she was 'being singled out' for the incident by people with whom she had a 'long history of professional disagreements'.
"I fully accept responsibility for what I said, which I should not have," Rivera told the New York Post of the incident.
"There were extenuating circumstances but that in no way is an excuse for my actions. I am a professional with a sterling reputation across baseball and I do believe that I am being singled out by a group of individuals with whom I have a long history of professional disagreements."
Rivera had been working for ESPN for 13 years as a baseball reporter, working both as a broadcast reporter and a writer for the sport broadcaster.
She's not the only reporter who has been caught on video saying something they probably shouldn't as the history of broadcasting is fraught with times when people said something when they didn't know they were on camera.
Of course there are the classic instances where someone simply doesn't know that the cameras have started rolling, including the time a reporter complained about his job during a TV interview where technical difficulties meant he hadn't known it had started.
Then there's the times when someone definitely knows the cameras are on them and uses the opportunity to say something nobody would expect.
Few are the news anchors who would call their audiences 'morons', but if you're going to say it then if anything it's probably better if you meant it to be heard than not.