WASHINGTON — Former Gov. Mike Huckabee doesn’t think the women at Fox News are “trashy,” but a lot of other women in New York are.
Huckabee, a 2008 presidential candidate and potential 2016er, refuted reports that he called the women at Fox News “trashy” and “inappropriate,” but didn’t step away from comments he made about women in New York who use profanity.
Huckabee, an evangelical conservative from Arkansas, described the “cultural shock” he experienced while living part-time in New York to work on his Fox News show, calling the city a “different planet” where men and women don’t avoid cursing in professional settings.
“In New York, not only do the men do it but the women do it. And you just are looking around saying my gosh this is worse than locker room talk,” Huckabee said Friday in a radio interview. “This would be considered totally inappropriate to say these things in front of a woman and for a woman to say them in a professional setting, we would only assume that this is a very — as we would say in the south — that’s just trashy!”
Huckabee corrected reports Wednesday that he was referring to his female colleagues at Fox News in a post on his website, writing that he was describing “normal conversations in business settings in New York,” but never suggested those conversations happened at Fox News. Huckabee left the network early this month in order to seriously consider a presidential run.
“Frankly, I never conducted ‘business meetings’ at Fox News. I wasn’t there to do business, but to host a show,” Huckabee said, explaining he did business for his “various companies that had nothing to do with Fox News.”
The meetings apparently left a mark on Huckabee who said he experienced a “culture of crude” in the New York business world that he would have never found in the South or the Midwest.
“You would not have people who would just throw the f bomb and just use gratuitous profanity in a professional setting,” Huckabee said in the radio interview.
Huckabee is touring the country promoting his latest book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy” as he eyes a potential 2016 bid. He spent his weekend in Iowa, an early caucus state he won in 2008.
