Honey, Please

The way this is normally done, the ambassador resigns to spend more time with her family, the White House thanks her for her service, and everybody pretends nobody was pushed. On Tuesday the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, held her first briefing, four days after the President named her to the job. It ran about fourteen minutes and she called on three reporters. When a Daily Mail reporter asked about a timeline for removing the ambassador to Greece, Zacharia said: "We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign. She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well." Kimberly Guilfoyle had not resigned yet. Less than two hours later she did, on X: "These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity." The paper suspects that was not the order in which anyone in the building wanted those two sentences to come out, and it intends to return to Ms. Zacharia's debut on its own soon. The President supplied the epitaph that afternoon: "She wasn't a member of my family. She dated my son a long time ago." She and Donald Trump Jr. were together from 2018 and, according to the Daily Beast, engaged by the end of 2020. On December 10, 2024, hours after tabloid photographs showed his son holding hands with a Palm Beach socialite, the President nominated her to Athens, writing, "For many years, Kimberly has been a close friend and ally." A long time ago was twenty-two months.

Here is what she was asked to resign over. The Wall Street Journal obtained hundreds of text messages, emails and letters between Guilfoyle and Eric Deters, a suspended Kentucky lawyer, failed candidate for governor, conservative YouTube host and Trump donor. On July 3, 2025, six days before her Senate confirmation hearing, she needed $100,000 that she said she owed American Express. "It won't show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express," she wrote him on Signal. "Please." And: "I have been officially announced honey please I need you to get this done for me today." Read the first one again. It is not a request for a loan. It is a description of how a payment can avoid being seen, sent by a nominee to a donor days before senators questioned her, and CBS reported the point was to keep the debt off her financial disclosures. CBS also reported that White House officials were told the messages look authentic. Her lawyers, David Schwartz and Jesse Binnall, dispute that, though they have declined to say what in them is wrong, and say Deters owed her money for appearances at his events. Deters denies that. He never sent the money. He told her it would cost him his marriage, an excuse he now says he made up. "I didn't have $100,000 to spare to give to Kimberly Guilfoyle," he told CBS. "If I had the $100,000 at the time, I would have paid it."

What he wanted for it is the funniest shopping list ever entered into the record of an American embassy. He wanted to talk to the incoming IRS Commissioner, Billy Long, about an investigation into his tax deductions. She would call him the next day, she assured Deters, and then texted: "I wrote him a very nice message. Told him how important it was that you're close to me and to don." Long, she reported that afternoon, had written back. The Journal could not confirm what came of it; Billy Long is now the ambassador to Iceland. Deters wanted the Justice Department to seek the extradition of Abubakar Atiq Durrani, an Ohio spine surgeon who fled to Pakistan after being charged with defrauding insurers, and whose former patients are Deters's malpractice clients. He told her he would pay her a million dollars if she got him on Tucker Carlson's show, and she told him she was working on it. Carlson's review, to the Journal: "A million dollars for a podcast appearance? Isn't she the ambassador to Greece? This is completely nuts." And Deters and a local guitarist had written a song called "Kentucky Outlaw," and he wanted the ambassador-designate to the Hellenic Republic to get the lyrics to Kid Rock. It never reached him, as far as anyone has reported. John Oliver asked the only question left: "Do you know how bad a song has to be for it to be not good enough for Kid Rock?"

Now the part that should bother you more than the American Express bill. Deters says he had already paid Guilfoyle $300,000 over the years in speaking fees for his events, plus $200,000 to Donald Trump Jr. and $100,000 to Eric Trump. He told Louisville Public Media why: "I overpaid, but I didn't care because I was nurturing my relationship in Trump world." He told CBS the American Express request was "quid pro quo." He is not confessing to anything, in his own telling. He is describing the ordinary cost of doing business with the President's family, in the President's second term, out loud, to reporters, and nobody has resigned over that part. Deters came forward, by his own account, because the business stopped working. His surgeon was not being extradited. He set her a deadline and wrote, "If you don't, I'm going to go to the media." "When I didn't do that $100,000," he said, "she never talked to me again." On Facebook on Tuesday: "I released the Kimberly Guilfoyle information. I released that. I did." A man who paid the sons six figures and could not get a fugitive surgeon extradited or a song to Kid Rock decided the product was defective and went to the Journal. That is not a whistleblower. It is a refund request.

The Journal kept going, and so did the rest of the file. It reported a recording of Guilfoyle at Davos in January, furious at being left off the guest list of a dinner for Eric Trump, saying of the hostess, "She should be kissing my f---ing ass," and "I'm going to make you a lot of f---ing money," and bragging that Greek tycoons paid for her luxury travel. It reported that she promoted a Greek energy and construction company and brought its lobbyist into private diplomatic meetings, and that she told guests at a reception that the United States could undermine the Greek government. Her lawyers say she sought and followed State Department guidance before every trip, and the embassy said she "has faithfully followed State Department ethics and gift reporting guidelines." Greece's opposition did not find it reassuring; a former deputy foreign minister called it "an issue of national dignity." Two officials told ABC that the State Department's inspector general is investigating and that the findings could go to the Justice Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, standing next to her in Athens the week before, offered: "Our ambassador has been a strong ambassador here," and, of the reporting, "It's not the gospel."

None of this was a surprise to anyone who had read about her before. She left Fox News in 2018 after a human-resources investigation; HuffPost, citing six sources, reported that she showed colleagues photographs of male genitalia and named the men, discussed sex at work, and was abusive to hair and makeup staff. In 2020 The New Yorker reported a 42-page draft complaint by a former assistant alleging she was made to work in Guilfoyle's apartment while Guilfoyle was naked, was shown photographs of the genitals of men Guilfoyle had slept with, and was offered money to lie to the lawyers investigating misconduct at the network. Fox reportedly paid more than $4 million to settle before anything was filed. Guilfoyle has said, "I have never engaged in any workplace misconduct of any kind," none of it was ever tried, and the paper reports it as what it is: allegations, and a settlement Fox never confirmed. What is not an allegation is the money. In 2020 she was paid $15,000 a month through Brad Parscale's firm, an arrangement that kept the payments off the campaign's federal filings. On January 6, 2021, she was paid $60,000 to introduce Donald Trump Jr. at the Ellipse, a speech that lasted about two and a half minutes. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of the January 6 committee called it what it was: "a grift." The common thread of the last eight years is not sex or Greece. It is that every job she has held came with someone else paying for it, and she was not careful about where the money showed up.

Which brings us to the question everybody is asking, which is whether this was arranged. Deters says he leaked it himself and the paper has no evidence anyone else did. Here is what is on the record. Over the weekend Guilfoyle told allies she would not resign and had been told she would not be fired, according to CNN. On Monday the President said, "We're looking at it. We're not happy." On Tuesday his new press secretary announced the resignation before the ambassador did, and the President said he had not spoken to her: "No, she will not be there. I didn't like what I read." What did he read that he did not already know? That his son's ex-fiancée was in the access business. The access on the shopping list was to his IRS commissioner, his attorney general and his Justice Department, and the man shopping says he had already paid his two sons $300,000 for the privilege. The commissioner who got her "very nice message" is an ambassador now too. The lesson the administration has taught this week is not that you cannot sell access in this government. It is that you must not put the price in writing, and you must not sell it to a man from Kentucky who keeps his texts and doesn't pay.

In her speech to the 2020 Republican convention, to a nearly empty hall, at a volume the networks are still recovering from, Kimberly Guilfoyle promised the country: "The best is yet to come!" It came. It was a Signal message to a Kentucky lawyer that said "honey please," and a song nobody will send to Kid Rock. Five clowns.