Symone Sanders Townsend, a former spokesperson for Vice President Harris, said Fox News made her job “honestly exhausting” and accused the news organization of covering Harris differently because of her race and gender.
In a post Monday on social platform X, Sanders Townsend fired back at a Fox News story with the headline, “Ex-Kamala Harris spox hints at bad experience working with VP” and that quoted the former aide telling Harris, “You might be the last woman I work for.”
Sanders Townsend, who also served on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2016 campaign, clarified that it was what she described as a gender imbalance in the news coverage of female politicians — not the politicians, themselves — that led her to “jokingly” say one day that she might not work again for a woman.
“Yes because folks like y’all made my job harder than usual,” Sanders Townsend wrote on X, in response to the Fox News story. “The misogyny. The racism…the not covering what she said or did.
“How you all treat elected officials who are women- especially how you treated Vice President Harris – prompted me to jokingly say this to the VP,” she continued. “You’re honestly exhausting but very on brand I guess.”
The Fox News story was published last month but resurfaced in a social media post Monday.
In response to Sanders Townsend’s Monday remarks, a Fox News insider criticized her MSNBC show, saying, “Maybe Symone should worry less about Fox News and more about her lousy ratings.”
On an MSNBC panel last month, Sanders Townsend described the difficulties she faced while working for Harris, before transitioning into a career in media.
“The thing about being the first is because you’re the first — whether you’re the first woman, first person of color, so on and so forth, folks just sometimes don’t know how to deal with you. They don’t know how to process it,” Sanders Townsend said on MSNBC, in remarks on which Fox News subsequently reported. “And so they resort to, unfortunately, sometimes racist, sexist tropes and memes and stereotypes.”
“It was new for me when I worked for her because I never worked for a high-profile woman before. I had only ever worked for men,” she added. “There was one day at work where I was like ‘Ma’am, you might be the last woman I work for because this is — it’s a lot that we got to deal with over in here.'”