Former Fox News Staffer Jennifer Eckhart Dead at 36 | E! News
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.”
That same year Eckhart sat for an interview on CBS This Morning. “I think it’s safe to say that I was paralyzed by fear when I was working there [at Fox News Network],” she said. “I don’t know how you could continue to cultivate and foster an environment that rewards sexual predators consistently year after year.”
The litigation stretched across five years. A federal court dismissed her claims against the network itself in March 2025, finding the company had not known of the alleged conduct. Three months later, in June 2025, she and Henry reached a confidential settlement on the eve of trial. Speaking to People that month she described what the fight had cost. “This has been an exhaustive, retraumatizing, five-year legal battle with incredible challenges that at times I almost felt was unable to bear.” She continued, “With this settlement in place, a weight has now been lifted from my shoulders and my passion to support fellow trauma survivors has been renewed.”
After she left Fox she tried to build something else. She launched a podcast titled REINVENTED, framing it as a second act and filling episodes with stories of people who had come through hardship. The last episode went out in March. She also started a nonprofit meant to support trauma survivors. The public record of those efforts thins out in the months that followed. the private record, the one kept by the sheriff’s office and the medical examiner, showed a different arc: six Baker Act holds, a seven-week residential stay, the abrupt stoppage of medication, the ledger entry, the blocked gun purchase, the knife.
On the morning of September 19 her mother entered the bathroom of the Hobe Sound house and found her there, the pocketknife still beside her right hand.