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Controversial Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly is taking a vacation from his Fox News Channel show amid sponsor defections triggered by sexual harassment allegations.
The firebrand conservative commentator's vacation announcement came as about 60 companies said they would not advertise on his show after multiple women claimed O'Reilly sexually harassed them.
It comes a day after Fox News's parent company 20th Century Fox confirmed it was investigating the allegations.
Announcing the break at the end of Tuesday's show, O'Reilly said the vacation was planned and long in the works. He said he would return on April 24.
"[Around this time of year] I grab some vacation, because it's spring and Easter time. Last fall, I booked a trip that should be terrific," he said.
The advertiser exodus followed a recent report in The New York Times that five women were paid a total of $13 million to keep quiet about harassment allegations.
Mercedes-Benz was the first advertiser to pull its support and was followed by dozens more, including Subaru, BMW, Lexus, Advil, Bayer, Jenny Craig and Ancestry.com.
Wendy Walsh, a regular guest on O'Reilly's show, told the Times the cable TV anchor retracted a lucrative role as a Fox contributor after she rebuffed his sexual advances in 2013.
Another former Fox News host, Andrea Tantaros, named O'Reilly in a lawsuit last year claiming he and other network executives had subjected her to unwanted sexual advances.
O'Reilly has denied the allegations and last week received the backing of President Donald Trump, who described the Fox News host as "a good person".
The amount of advertising time by paying customers on The O'Reilly Factor has been cut by more than half since the Times report, according to an analysis issued on Tuesday by Kantar Media.
But O'Reilly has not been abandoned by his audience.
His show averaged 3.7 million viewers over five nights last week, up 12 percent from the 3.3 million he averaged the week before and up 28 percent compared to the same week in 2016.
The O'Reilly Factor drew an average of just under 4 million viewers for the first three months of 2017, his biggest quarter ever in the show's 20-year history.
On Tuesday, the host offered his audience some general advice.
"If you can possibly take two good trips a year, it will refresh your life. We all need R&R. Put it to good use," O'Reilly said.
Topics: media, information-and-communication, broadcasting, law-crime-and-justice, sexual-offences, television-broadcasting, united-states
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