Longtime St. Louis television personality Rene Knott is speaking out about his sudden and unexpected departure from KSDK-TV after 21 years, telling KMOX that comments made in "jest" were taken out of context. His first broadcast interview about it was with The Dave Glover Show.
Knott, a familiar face on St. Louis screens for more than two decades, said the end of his career came abruptly after what the station called an "HR issue." He said he received a late night call from the station's new news director telling him not to come to work.
That was followed by a FaceTime call with HR. "It wasn't even a 'on January 3rd this happened,'" Knott explained. "It was 'did you say this? Did you say anything about a gun? Did you say that you were going to do that?'"
Knott said one of the key allegations involved a physical threat that he claims was simply workplace joking.
"Did you ever say you're gonna kick somebody's butt?" Knott recalled being asked. "And I go, 'we say that all the time to each other. In jest.' Are you kidding me? Am I gonna really as a 61-year-old man gonna walk across the room on the set and just start pummeling somebody? Let's be realistic."
He said the accusation was baffling to him given what he described as his long and clean record at the station.
"I have spent my time giving to the community, doing the stories," Knott said. "I have never been to HR. I never had a write up. All of my reviews have all been exemplary. I've never not had a new contract."
The sudden end has taken a significant personal toll, not just on him but on his family. He said the most difficult part was the impact on his wife, who found out about the situation after an article about it was published online.
"She comes home and she just starts bawling because she doesn't want to move. She doesn't want to leave here," Knott told Dave Glover on Monday. "That was, and it still is, the hardest thing."
He added, "It's hard for me to look at her with a confidence that it's all going to be okay, because I don't know myself, at least not right now."
Knott said the experience left him feeling a breakdown of trust for his now-former colleagues in the Channel 5 newsroom. He said after the complaint was filed against him he had no desire to continue working there.
"Why then would I want to continue to work with people that I feel don't trust me or I can't trust them?" Knott asked. "Why would I want to be in an environment now where I'm going to have to wonder, well who said what and why, and who's out to get me?"
Now, Knott is facing an uncertain future in a media world that has changed drastically over his career.
"You look at our landscape now when it comes to broadcasting," he said. "We talk about podcasts and all that stuff. Everybody does those things. You know, how are you gonna do something that's going to stand out from the rest? It's that, and it's every day, my head spins."
The shock, he said, is amplified by the professional high he was on just a few weeks before, planning to cover the Winter Games in Milan for the NBC affiliate after having most recently covered the Summer Olympics in Paris.
For now, Knott says he feels at the lowest point he has been since his college football career ended in 1986, trying to figure out what comes next.