Fox News’s Favorite Nasty Woman

On television, Jessica Tarlov is built to withstand impact. The hair, naturally limp, is blown out, set in rollers and teased into what she calls “TV size.” The false lashes she once resisted are glued into place. There is a serious smoky eye, even in the morning, matched to whatever pantsuit she’s wearing that day. The lone liberal on America’s most-watched cable news show has a fight waiting for her at five o’clock Eastern, and Fox News does not send its talent into battle barefaced.

The arena is The Five, Fox News’s flagship panel show, where Tarlov is outnumbered four to one every evening. For an hour, five co-hosts sit around a table and argue their way through the news, a format somewhere between a political roundtable and every Thanksgiving dinner you’ve ever dreaded. The show is watched by around 3.5 million people every weekday, about half of them Republican, 20 percent Democrat, and the rest somewhere in the middle, looking, as Tarlov puts it, for someone “to be a normal human being.” In four and a half years as a co-host of The Five and a decade as a presence at Fox, the 42-year-old professional dissenter has endured co-host pile-ons, death threats from strangers, and public attacks from the president. But she is still, conspicuously, here.

To understand why, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon in late August, I meet Tarlov at the network’s office building in midtown Manhattan, where she steers us to a pair of corner seats in the first-floor café without breaking stride. She is, naturally, camera-ready: black rectangular glasses, a saturated teal dress and a matching double-breasted blazer.

It almost feels like a coffee date, except for the entourage. The personal representative who helped shepherd me through the weeks of negotiations required to conduct this interview inside the Fox building sits on my side; a Fox representative sits on Tarlov’s. It gives the glossy lobby café the air of a diplomatic meeting. Tarlov, to her credit, talks to me like neither of them is there: perfectly at ease but “on” in that television-person way. She warns me cheerfully that she is a crier and “will probably cry at some point” during this interview.

There is plenty of good news to get through first, though. She just signed a new three-year contract with Fox News. “It’s always a great affirmation of your seat at the table,” she says. “No matter how contentious it looks or difficult or terrible to some people, that you’re a valued element in this discourse.” And in just a few weeks, her book I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends is set to publish.

Fitting, because Tarlov has rules—an entire system, really, for how to argue with the same co-hosts every day without losing either the fight or the friendships (and yes, they are friends). You can have meaningful relationships with people whose beliefs fundamentally oppose your own, she believes, and those relationships can make everyone in them better. The system helps her walk into a room structurally rigged against her every afternoon and walk out with her convictions and her connections intact. But it is also a kind of armor, designed to hold together what might otherwise come apart.

One recent afternoon on The Five, Tarlov is sitting across from her colleague, Jesse Watters, who is inventorying warships. He knows the names of all of them, and he is making the case that the war in Iran is going perfectly, or at least better than anyone is giving the administration credit for, and Tarlov is losing her mind.

Not visibly. Visibly, she is taking notes and listening to how long he has been talking and calculating how long she will have before the commercial break. Ninety seconds if she’s lucky, less if Greg Gutfeld jumps in, which Gutfeld often does because she’s “pretty sure that Greg knows” when she has a good run planned and enjoys the sabotage. She’s sorting through the wire dispatch she read and a set of figures she memorized about the current state of the conflict that she may or may not deploy, depending on how hyperbolic she decides to be in her opening line.

She is also considering whether to make a joke, maybe something about how the administration should hire Watters as their spokesman because he’d be better at painting a “rosy view” of the war than their actual press secretary. She actually calls this her “olive branch,” she tells me, a compliment disguised as a dig that might soften the table enough for her to pivot into data that contradicts everything he just said. And underneath it all, she “hopes and prays” that when it’s her time to speak, “they won’t interrupt me too much...if I’m going to get 90 seconds, I want to make the most of it.” All of this is happening behind her face while a man is talking about ships.

The job is, at its core, an act of high-speed triage, and on paper, Tarlov is probably over-qualified for it. She has a PhD in political science from the London School of Economics, spent years as a strategist for Democratic pollster Doug Schoen, ran consumer research at Bustle Digital Group, and worked as a communications strategist on Boris Johnson’s reelection campaign for Mayor of London. “I’m a researcher first and foremost,” she says. But she took this gig, she explains, because of “the person who votes the same as me, that’s sitting at home thinking, I don’t have a platform.” After all, the liberal seat on The Five is a party of one. Tarlov rotates it with the pundit Harold Ford Jr., which means that on any given evening, the person doing the representing is her and only her.

So she does her homework. Before each show, she pores through legislation, polling data, and wire reports, looking for two things: the points she absolutely needs to land and one thing she can concede. Take Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill: She’ll comb through it, looking for a provision that isn’t “completely horrible,” because she knows her audience, and “knee-jerk, complete opposition to something completely turns off the other side.” That’s also why she is so meticulous about sourcing. She picks outlets her co-hosts can’t wave away and quotes Republican legislators back to themselves because “they’ll regularly say to me, ‘Oh, these are just liberal attacks.’” When Vice President JD Vance appeared on the show and discussed the conflict in Iran, she opened her rebuttal by naming The Wall Street Journal’s reporting. When Vance countered that she was repeating Iranian propaganda, she snapped back: “Oh, like The Wall Street Journal?” She tells this story with visible satisfaction.

But preparing to fight is only half the problem. The other half is the people she is fighting with. Watters sits to the right of Tarlov, which is a lot of proximity to a man who once told a story on air—which he later said was a joke—about deflating a female colleague’s tires to get her to accept a ride home. He is four years into a resolution to stop interrupting Tarlov, and it is not going well. During one segment he cut her off with “You don’t know anything about real estate, Jessica. You rent.” During another, he told her not to “talk like you know anything about the oil markets.” When she pushed back, he said, “It’s the difference between a man and a woman.” Gutfeld has the comic instinct of only finding out where the boundaries are only by crossing them. He has snapped, “Don’t play that bullshit with me!” at Tarlov during an argument about political violence, informed her mid-sentence that trans issues amount to “just mutilating kids, but go on,” and once called her “too emotional” on air. “HR watches this, by the way,” she later replied.

Surely this is untenable. Surely the best she can do, after years of this, is to tolerate the people across the table and leave the building as fast as possible. But ask Tarlov and she will tell you, without a trace of irony, that they are her friends. Not just Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush who became something of a mentor. Or Emily Compagno, a legal analyst who was just named as the replacement for the ever-incendiary Jeanine Pirro. But the men too. “Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld actually care about me as a person,” she says. “And that doesn’t make them soften their political opinions, even though I think that they should in some cases, especially when they’re enormously wrong.”

By friends, she means she and Gutfeld text outside work three or four days a week. She has been to his apartment, has spent time with his family, and was invited to his daughter’s first birthday party. She texts regularly with Watters’s wife and once said yes to a charity gala she was hosting before learning the venue was Bedminster, Trump’s golf club. “Are you fucking kidding me?” was her response upon finding out, but she eventually went anyway. With Perino and Compagno, a recent night out involved dinner at Carnegie and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) on Broadway.

To an outsider, it may be hard to square Tarlov’s beliefs with the company she keeps. Politics are, in the truest sense, a reflection of one’s morals and ethics, and staying close to people who adhere to a different set of principles is itself a moral choice.

For Tarlov, however, it’s easy. It’s about “fundamentally understanding them as people and how they think about politics” rather than seeing them as “a set of political opinions,” she says. What she has come to understand, she explains, is that some of her co-hosts, “in particular Jesse and Greg, don’t think that politics is the most important thing in the world.” Which is to say that it can be compartmentalized.

The trouble is that Tarlov herself does not describe politics as something that stays politely contained inside politics—and there is tape to prove it. Gutfeld once asked her why she cared whether he liked Trump. “It’s not just like a friend you brought to the bar who I find annoying,” she said. “This is somebody setting an agenda for an entire country that has real implications. People don’t have healthcare because of Donald Trump. People are sitting in cells because of Donald Trump. People are dead.” On the day Roe v. Wade fell, she cried thinking about what the ruling could mean for women seeking emergency care. Her colleagues and the production team, she says, “really cleared the field for me that day... No interruptions. Just that I should get to say whatever I have to say.”

There are limits, Tarlov says. Stephen Miller cannot be her friend, and she does not want to meet Trump. But Gutfeld and Watters sit on the safe side of those limits, and she has decided they belong there, even though the policies they defend are the ones she describes as dangerous.

Some would call this a contradiction. Tarlov would describe it as the reason she’s the right person for the job. “I have said, multiple times on-air, these policies are killing people. This isn’t just an abstract thing,” she says. But she believes in what she calls “the long game,” and to her, that means keeping the people she is arguing with close enough to actually hear her.

According to Tarlov’s mother’s medium, her dead father still helps with her Fox News talking points. Tarlov is not entirely sure she believes this. “I don’t know if that’s actually true,” she says, “or if she has a crazy medium.” She does know that when he was alive, he did. Mark Tarlov was a lawyer, and when she started doing television, she used to send him what she planned to say, and “he was awesome at helping guide me towards honing in on what I really wanted to hammer home.” He helped her figure out what to cut, what to keep, and what she could reasonably drive home before someone started talking over her. It's the system she still runs on The Five every day, and one she learned at home.

Home was a dinner table in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, where two lawyer parents and two daughters talked over each other every night. Her mother, Judith Roberts, “would tell you that I came out argumentative, that this was built into me,” Tarlov says. Her parents discussed their cases openly and “hashed out their problems” in front of their children, and their daughters’ “votes mattered” in their household. She tells me that in art class, at 5, she demanded a ruler to draw with because using it was faster, and that when faced with a maze on a test she went around it, because that was faster too. She went to a progressive school in the West Village where she called her teachers by their first names and found high school formality bizarre. (“He’s just Steve!”)

It was, in every sense, a childhood that trained her to hold her own in any room. She credits her parents with that—specifically their decision to raise their children as people whose opinions were heard. “They had daughters, I have daughters. I think that was a really essential component to making me feel like my voice mattered from when I was a little kid to today.”

Still, “there’s not one person that I know that would’ve predicted that this is what I would be doing for work,” she says. A researcher by training and instinct, Tarlov had spent years building arguments from data before anyone asked her to make one on camera. Then in 2015, Doug Schoen, the Democratic pollster she had been working under for half a decade and already a Fox contributor himself, encouraged the network to put her on the air. She kept coming back, even as she held down other jobs: first, as a guest; next, as a contributor; then, in 2022, as a co-host on The Five.

She was not, by her own admission, immediately great at it. She watches early tape and concedes that the hair was still finding itself and the outfits were not from her finest era. Worse yet, she hadn’t learned what to do with her 90 seconds, and she can hear herself swinging at absolutely everything. “It was almost like machine-gun fire,” she says. “And I wasn’t sure of what I absolutely needed to say, what would have the most impact, what would mean the most to me.” The deeper issue, she adds, was that “I didn’t know myself. And I think that came through in the way that I communicated too.”

The shift came partly from experience and partly from Perino, who sought her out early on for a conversation about how she was approaching the job. Perino told her she doesn’t have to carry the opinions of “80 or 81 million people on your back. It’s too much and you’re going to crumble.” Tarlov took the advice. She learned that there would be another show tomorrow and another chance to make the point she had missed. “That’s frankly when you make some of your worst arguments,” she says, “when you’re trying to cram everything in there and go in 50 directions versus really landing something effectively.”

Perhaps the most unlikely source of encouragement was Roger Ailes, the Fox News founder whose career ended in disgrace amid sexual harassment allegations. She recounts in I Disagree being called to his office early on, certain he was going to tell her to smooth out the vocal fry in her voice. He told her the opposite. “It’s not your voice, Jessica. It’s your content. What you’re saying runs against how they see the world.” Don’t change a thing, he told her. “They may hate what you stand for and what you’re saying, but you want them to know that it’s you on the TV.” She is clear that there is “no excusing the awful things Roger Ailes did.” But that advice, she writes, helped her stop apologizing for her voice.

Brian McKenna, her husband, tells me on a phone call a few days after our interview that he got his first clue her television career was a little more substantial than she had let on when they met at the beginning of the pandemic. She described it to him more or less as: “I appear on Fox sometimes.” He accepted this until a cable-news-obsessed friend pieced together who she is: “Did you make out with Tarlov? Are you dating Tarlov?” McKenna was confused. It occurred to him that perhaps he should Google the woman he was dating.

He has since caught up. McKenna, who is 48 and works at a hedge fund, tells me he gets “a good laugh out of it more often than people would think, just because I’m so often reminded of how she gets the best of me in arguments.” Their longest-running dispute is about airports. “She has a dogmatic loyalty to flying out of JFK,” he says, and he has learned to recognize the transformation from “my sweet wife” doing school drop-offs and nail-salon runs with the girls (the couple has two daughters, Cleo, 4, and Teddy, 2) to “shoulders up, big hair, locked in with TV makeup on and just ready to tear me to pieces in terms of flight time.” He adds: “She’s the wrestling heel. The heroes are Greg and Jesse and Dana. And she’s cast as a villain, so to speak.”

But at home, the villain has tells, and McKenna has learned to read them. “A little bit of the persona fades away,” he says. He watches her go back through every source she cited, the way someone checks the locks before bed. “There is a paranoia,” he says, that “maybe you said something incorrectly.” She processes her days out loud with him, replaying the arguments she wishes she’d made differently. The debriefs, he admits, “can get emotional at times. Anytime you see someone you care about and love be at the point of tears,” he says, “it’s a difficult moment.”

Outside the café windows, a small protest is underway on the sidewalk. Tarlov is doing what she has spent a decade learning to do: staying in the conversation no matter what’s happening around it. A joke lands right before or after something gets too heavy, almost like clockwork. But even Tarlov can still be caught off guard.

Like the time the president of the United States attacked her on social media for the first time. “This just can’t be real,” she said to her husband on a Friday evening in June 2025 when she first saw the post. Not as a figure of speech; she genuinely thought someone might have fabricated it. AI, maybe, or a troll angling for engagement. “People will even do that stuff for attention,” she says, “create something that Trump said about them to get people to pay attention to them or fundraise.”

McKenna admits there’s a part of him that wanted to laugh because the post was so bombastic, so full of non-sequiturs, that it read like parody. “And then you’re looking at your wife and you see the weight of it hit, and you try to put yourself in the shoes of [having] the most powerful person in the world taking aim at you,” he says.

The post, apparently triggered by Tarlov citing his poll numbers on air, ran several hundred words. It called her a “failed TV personality” and said her voice, her manner, and everything she said were “a disgrace to television broadcasting.” It praised Watters and Gutfeld as “terrific” while questioning why Fox kept her on the show, and has since drawn nearly 35,000 likes and roughly 8,000 shares.

The first thing she did was cry. And then, because this is Jessica Tarlov, she tried to “intellectually process” it, to separate the attack on her style from the absence of any attack on her substance, because “this is the way that so many people lob criticism. And, I think, especially how men come after women, frankly, when they can’t deal with the content of what you’re saying. So they just pick on your jittery presentation or your unendurable voice.”

The president was an antagonist attacking from a distance. Other threats appear closer. In September 2025, the same week conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at a college event in Utah, a death threat against Tarlov was being investigated. In the aftermath, she and her husband discussed putting AirTags on their daughters’ strollers. Their nanny, who had previous experience working for people in media, immediately offered to keep a diary of everywhere she took the girls and to share her location so the family would always know where the children were. This wasn’t the last, or only, time that Tarlov has been threatened. “I’ve had people online say, ‘I know where your kids are,’” she says.

Moments like this show the frightening reality of doing this. They also raise a question she has heard in various forms for years, from friends on the left who wonder why she’s on the network at all to critics who argue that her presence functions as little more than a liberal prop in a conservative. What good is she really doing?

It’s a line of questioning that Tarlov does not entertain. “I honestly think that in this era and the way that media works today, that’s a very lazy framing of people who want to sit on the sidelines or live in a silo,” she says. She understands the criticism, she adds, but thinks it misses “the tremendous opportunity for you to be able to get your message out and represent the viewpoint of a majority of Americans on the biggest platform that there is.”

And anyway, she can handle all of it, she says, as long as she can “keep my side of the street clean” and not leave “any cards on the table.”

She’s also seen the difference her presence has made. In her book, she describes a trans woman from Alabama whose conservative family watches Fox News all day and does not speak to her. “If more people talked like you do,” the woman told Tarlov, “I might get my family back one day.” At a separate event, a Trump supporter who had been attacking Tarlov online for years approached her to apologize. She had gone through cancer, she said, and come out the other side less angry. She wanted Tarlov to know she respected what she was doing.

Whether the table itself has moved is harder to say. Gutfeld “would tell you no, that I haven’t changed his mind but opened his mind up to possibilities, realities that he wasn’t considering,” Tarlov says. When Tarlov explained on air that the Save America Act would require voters to produce a birth certificate or passport, Watters cut in. "Is that true?" he asked. She told him it was. “Well, that's kind of crazy,” he said. But the influence runs both ways. Her colleagues’ arguments on immigration shifted her own position; she now believes sanctuary city mayors should cooperate with federal authorities when undocumented immigrants commit crimes. She also talks about abortion “radically differently” than she did before Dobbs. After having her own children, “I know what 20 weeks means,” she says. “I know what 24 weeks means.”

If there is a professional red line, it has nothing to do with ideology. “If it became a hostile work environment where I wasn’t happy and I didn’t feel like I could carve out my own space to be able to say what I needed to say, then I wouldn’t want to do the job anymore,” she says. “But if there are bad ideas being expressed, I would rather have the opportunity to inject what I think are my good ideas.”

For the record, Jessica Tarlov does not go to therapy. She went once, briefly, when she had a toxic boyfriend, and her mother paid for it. She does not intend to go back, though she cries a lot and is in fact about to. “This is my session,” she tells me at one point, gesturing at the space between us on the couch.

The black rectangular glasses she wears on camera every afternoon were her father’s. He died in them from a 9/11-related cancer when she was twenty weeks pregnant with Cleo, so he never got the chance to meet her daughters. “He just would’ve loved them,” she said, adding, “He missed out on the grown-up version of me.” For the first time in our conversation, no joke arrives to soften the landing, and she sobs. When she first started doing television, he was too scared to watch her live; he would make her mother prescreen each segment and then watch the recording while peering from behind his hand, afraid of what might happen to his daughter.

She has cried about him on air before. “There was great relief and also discomfort,” she says, “because I had gotten to the point where it had to be addressed almost, when you’re walking around with something that’s so bottled up. ...No one wants anyone to be looking at them while they’re crying. I’m also a very ugly crier, so I didn’t want that to be going on for too long.” Her colleagues, she says, knew “to pump the brakes” and take it easy on her that day.

Compagno, Tarlov’s longtime friend and newest co-host on The Five, has learned to calibrate around her. If Tarlov has already taken enough heat, Compagno says, “I don’t need to be the fourth person to pile on.” Not because she thinks Tarlov is fragile; quite the opposite. “Jessica has incredibly thick skin, Teflon armor,” she says. “I know that I could never do her job because I would just crumple immediately.” Tarlov describes the same construction from the inside. “I also feel like I’m a soft and caring and emotional person, but there is certainly a tough exterior to me in a lot of ways,” she tells me. Learning to separate that emotionality from the arguments she makes in public “has taken concerted effort.”

Eventually, the tears stop. Tarlov has a portrait shoot scheduled just outside the building. She excuses herself, heads upstairs to reapply her makeup and repair whatever the last hour did to her face. A few minutes later, she emerges through the revolving door: eyes dry, hair untouched, eyelashes intact. You would never know.