Bill O’Reilly has addressed more accusations over the integrity of his reporting, last week pointing to a statement from a former colleague who says he was accompanying O’Reilly when the Fox host claims to have witnessed a suicide in 1977.
The tale in dispute centers around the suicide of George de Mohrenschildt, a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of John F. Kennedy. De Mohrenschildt shot himself in Manalapan in Palm Beach County, Florida on March 29, 1977.
In his book, “Killing Kennedy,” as well as the children’s version of the book, and several television appearances, O’Reilly has said he heard de Mohrenschildt’s fatal gunshot while standing outside a house in Florida that day.
Under scrutiny from several reporters and liberal watchdog Media Matters, O’Reilly has not backed down.
On March 9, O’Reilly addressed the matter during his Fox show “The O’Reilly Factor.”
“The far left attacks on my reporting continue, nothing I can do about it,” he said.
He directed viewers to a statement, released online by the book’s publisher, from a former colleague at Texas station WFAA, where he worked as a reporter at the time of de Mohrenschildt’s suicide.
Several colleagues from the station have disputed O’Reilly’s tale that he was in Florida at the time.
In the statement, former WFAA reporter Bob Sirkin said that he and O’Reilly ran into reporter and Oswald biographer Edward J. Epstein while he interviewed the Russian emigre that day, and were shooed out of the hotel.
The statement said that he and O’Reilly then “split up,” with O’Reilly heading to the house where de Mohrenschildt was staying, and later met up after the suicide.
In a previous interview with Media Matters, Sirkin said he could not confirm O’Reilly’s story about hearing a gunshot, the watchdog said. In other previous statements, Sirkin made no mention of O’Reilly hearing a gunshot.
The day after Sirkin’s statement, filmmaker Frank Eberling, who Sirkin said was there with him and O’Reilly the day of the suicide, told Media Matters he does not recall any of them getting there before March 30, 1977.
“I highly doubt that [O’Reilly] actually was there when [the suicide] happened, I don’t think he came into town until the next day,” Eberling told Media Matters.
Epstein, who interviewed de Mohrenschildt the day he died, recently wrote that O’Reilly’s tale is “impossible.”
What’s more, tapes of a phone call recovered by CNN reveal that on the day of the suicide, O’Reilly told a congressional investigator he would be “coming to Florida” the next day.
When CNN asked Sirkin about the recordings, he said he was baffled.
“I can’t explain it. I’m befuddled by it,” he told CNN.
“The only thing I can think of is that the call that’s being referenced here was made from Florida because it is implausible, impossible that Bill O’Reilly and I were not in Florida. We left for Florida on [March] 28th, and arrived on the morning of the 29th,” he added.
O’Reilly did not address the content of the tapes during his show on March 9.
This post has been updated.