Gawker Outed Fox’s Shepard Smith Revealing Workplace Romance With 26 yr Old Guy
Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, has found love in the workplace with an attractive 26-year-old production assistant, according to Gawker. The 49-year-old anchor started courting his production assistant named Giovanni “Gio” Graziano while he worked under him on Fox Report With Shepard Smith.
Gawker reports:
Gawker has learned that Smith is dating a 26-year-old Penn State grad and Fox Business producer named Giovanni “Gio” Graziano. According to multiple sources with knowledge of their relationship, the couple met sometime after Graziano started working at Fox Report in October 2011 as a production assistant. He’s the man with whom Smith frequents Bathtub Gin.
“Yes, that’s Shepard’s boyfriend,” Katya Minskova, the Bathtub Gin waitress Smith berated in March, confirmed to Gawker when shown a photo of Graziano. Another source who had seen them together at the Chelsea speakeasy confirmed Graziano’s identity as well. Both sources say they saw Graziano and Smith together at the bar on multiple occasions, and that they appeared to be romantically involved.
While Smith and Graziano’s boss Roger Ailes, a notorious homophobe, was apparently kept in the dark about the relationship—“higher ups had no idea,” a source close to Graziano said—the pair doesn’t appear to have gone to great lengths to keep the workplace romance from their co-workers.
“The people who know the most are [Graziano’s] former coworkers from Fox,” one source told Gawker. “One of the production assistants even saw him getting into Shep’s limo one night earlier this year around 8 p.m. outside Fox, after Shep’s show was over,” the source added.
Indeed, away from Fox, Smith and Graziano appeared together throughout Manhattan, showing up at fratty bars like the Ainsworth in Chelsea and the Village Pourhouse on 3rd Avenue, to watch football when Penn State or Ole Miss (Smith’s alma mater) were playing.
Still, Smith was concerned about the optics of dating a subordinate. Last year, according to former Fox News employee, the anchor arranged for Graziano’s transfer, in October 2012, to Fox Business Network, where he was installed as an associate producer for Varney & Co. “Shep had to move him to Fox Business to avoid a ‘conflict of interest,’” the former employee, who asked not be named, explained.
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