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Bill O’Reilly Once Assaulted Wife? Fox Host Subject Of Domestic Violence Allegation [Report]

By Bradley Ryder
Published on: 11:46 PST, May 18, 2015

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is the subject of a stunning allegation. According to Gawker, the syndicated columnist once assaulted his wife before they split. Sources say the O’Reilly Factor political commentator and his ex-wife, Maureen McPhilmy, recently ended a “bitter three-year custody dispute.”

Note: While multiple sources are reporting about O’Reilly’s alleged assault on McPhilmy, Inquisitr has not independently verified the same. However, it’s not the first time Bill and Maureen’s marital struggles have been raised in the news.

Gawker claims its sources, an insider close to the O’Reilly-McPhilmy legal jostling, said a judge ruled in the wife’s favor and granted her custody of the couple’s two minor kids three weeks ago. The media group claims that a forensic examiner testified at a hearing about the couple’s 16-year-old once seeing Bill O’Reilly assaulting her mom.

So the story goes, the daughter saw her father drag her mother down a staircase by the neck. The investigator said the parents were not aware the teenager was present at the time of the domestic violence incident. Back in 2010, the couple separated. Reportedly, his wife began dating Jeffrey Gross, a Nassau County Police detective. When O’Reilly learned about the romance, sources say he called in a number of favors, using his influence among inner circles to “have something done about Gross.” Allegedly, Bill was instrumental in raising funds for the police foundation.

Reportedly, the enquiries sparked an internal affairs investigation into the man’s alleged affair with O’Reilly’s estranged spouse. Over the course of time, information about the probe leaked and a number of media sources carried the story. Apparently, it amounted to a misuse of internal resources: manpower and time. Stories also surfaced in the news about Bill’s alleged attempts to have his wife ex-communicated from the Catholic Church.

The site referenced a court case — Anonymous 2011-1 v Anonymous 2011-2 — that apparently suggests the parties involved in a custody hearing are actually Bill and his former wife. The writer pointed out that the appellate court believed “O’Reilly’s behavior ‘could undermine the integrity’ of their joint-custody agreement and ordered a trial court to consider McPhilmy’s petition for sole custody.”

In its report on Bill’s alleged physical assault of his ex-wife, New York Daily News wrote that “O’Reilly is famous for his short fuse and has a history of flipping out both on and off the set.”

Then, the site of the recent report attacked Bill O’Reilly from the standpoint of him having allegedly once assaulted his wife, and juxtaposed this with his “obsessing over patterns of violence among racial minorities, particularly black people, and the apparently unique effect of violence on the integrity of black families. As he fulminated on-air in December, 2014: ‘The astronomical crime rate among young black men—violent crime—drives suspicion and hostility… No supervision, kids with no fathers—the black neighborhoods are devastated by the drug gangs who prey upon their own. That’s the problem!'”

On charges that O’Reilly once physically assaulted his wife, apparently Fox did not comment on when the site reached out to them for a response to the revelations.

Update: Bill O’Reilly issued the following statement on the evening of May 18, 2015, through his personal attorney, Fred Newman of Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, LLP.

“All allegations against me in these circumstances are 100% false. I am going to respect the court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect my children and will not comment any further.”

[Photo by Rob Kim / Getty Images]

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