Jennifer Eckhart, Former Fox Producer, Dies by Suicide at 36

Jennifer Eckhart wrote the sentence in her personal ledger. I need to kill myself. It's the last thing to do.

Her mother found her on September 19 in the bathtub of the house in Hobe Sound, Florida. A folding pocketknife lay beside her right hand. Deputies noted a large laceration across the front of her throat and neck. She was 36. The Martin County investigation began as a possible homicide. Two days later sheriff’s spokesperson Christine Christofek told reporters the death had been ruled a suicide. The medical examiner reached the same conclusion.

Sheriff John Budensiek stood at a press conference on September 21 and walked through the final stretch of her life. Eckhart had been held under Florida’s Baker Act six times in the preceding eighteen months. The statute lets officers and clinicians detain someone in acute crisis for evaluation. “She spent a seven-week period in a mental health facility trying to get help for all her suicidal ideology, and had been out of that facility for one week,” Budensiek said. Upon release she had been given a significant course of psychotropic medication. Investigators determined she had stopped taking it.

The day before she died she tried to buy a firearm. A mandatory waiting period blocked the sale. Because she couldn’t get the gun, she purchased a knife. That knife was the one recovered next to her hand in the bathtub.

Neighbors had already watched the decline. They described her as decompensating, holding frantic, illogical conversations with herself and with people on the phone while she stood outside the house. One week before the discovery, after an argument with her father, deputies came to the residence on a welfare check. They evaluated her again for a Baker Act hold. They did not take her into custody.

Eckhart had spent seven years inside the Fox orbit. From 2013 to 2020 she worked as an associate producer at Fox Business Network, the sister channel to Fox News, producing The Claman Countdown. In 2020 she left the company and filed a lawsuit accusing Fox News anchor Ed Henry of rape and sexual assault. She alleged he had used his position to control her and had threatened retaliation. Fox News opened a third-party investigation after an employee complaint of willful sexual misconduct. In July 2020 an internal email circulated: “Based on investigative findings, Ed has been terminated.”