Fox News host Shepard Smith regrets suggesting actor and comedian Robin Williams’ apparent death by suicide was cowardly.
Toward the close of a Monday night special report on Williams’ death, Smith read a quote from Williams about his daughter. “One of the children he so loved, one of the children grieving tonight, because their father killed himself in a fit of depression,” Smith said.
“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? You could love three little things so much, watch them grow, and they’re in their mid-20s and they’re inspiring you and exciting you and they fill you up with a kind of joy you can never have known,” he continued. “Yet something inside you is so horrible, or you’re such a coward, or whatever the reason that you decide have you to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today.”
Smith told Mediaite in a phone interview Tuesday that he was just “wondering aloud what could have made this man want to end it all.”
“But no matter how you process it: Look at what this family is going through,” he said, as quoted by Mediaite. “I would never presume to know anything about his private life. And if any of his family members and friends were to have seen me use the word “coward,” I would be horrified. I would just to apologize to the end of the earth to anyone who might think that I meant to openly call him a coward.”
“To the core of my being, I regret it,” he added.
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