Inside Kat Timpf’s office at Fox News headquarters, her husband was holding the baby. “I have a little bit of drool on me, but it wasn’t there when I got here, I swear,” Ms. Timpf apologized as she settled behind her desk. Her husband, Cameron Friscia (he’s a consultant and combat veteran, they met on Raya), had swung by the office for a visit with their 5-month-old son. He laid the boy in his stroller and gently maneuvered him past the congratulations-slash-sympathy gifts piled on Ms. Timpf’s office floor. The father took the baby home. The mother got back to work.
“I’ve been through a lot, but I’m also still kind of going through it,” Ms. Timpf said. “Like, ‘I still don’t have nipples’ is probably the best way to describe it.”
Ms. Timpf is a co-host of “Gutfeld!,” Fox News’s spin on the late-night comedy show, which regularly draws more viewers than Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert (though it airs earlier than those shows, at 10 p.m.). This has made Ms. Timpf the most watched woman in late-night television at a time when the late-night stage has become unexpectedly politically charged.
It has also made her an object of audience members’ fascination, concern, judgment and, occasionally, their madness. The spotlight has only intensified in the past year — the year that Ms. Timpf turned 36, got pregnant, was diagnosed with breast cancer, gave birth, had a double mastectomy, underwent reconstructive breast surgery and talked about it on “Gutfeld!,” a show named for its host, Greg Gutfeld.
Mr. Gutfeld’s style mixes anti-liberal insult comedy with relentless punchlines about women’s bodies — their age, their weight, their sexual attractiveness. Each night, Ms. Timpf sits at his right-hand side, playfully challenging him while staking out an alternate style of physical humor — one that centers her own experience inhabiting a woman’s body.
I met Ms. Timpf on a Tuesday morning in August, on her second day back at “Gutfeld!” after a reconstructive surgery in which the tissue expanders inserted behind her chest muscle during the mastectomy she underwent in March were replaced with permanent breast implants.
She wore baggy jeans and a tight gray T-shirt, which she had second-guessed that morning. “Would I be better off wearing a looser shirt?” she asked. “Something about breast cancer is — I don’t want to say embarrassing,” she said. “People are like, Are you breastfeeding? And you have to be like, I just cut my tits off.” She added, “It’s a weird thing, which is part of the reason why I’ve decided to be so open about it.”
The night before, Ms. Timpf had made her return to “Gutfeld!” just as the backlash to the backlash to Sydney Sweeney’s campaign for American Eagle jeans was fomenting on the right. A former heavyweight pro wrestler known as Tyrus offered his take on Ms. Sweeney’s female critics: “They look like a bag of oatmeal and they’re ugly and mean,” he said. But Ms. Timpf spied an opening for a disarming joke, one that turned the controversy back on herself. “I was watching it on the couch,” she said of the ad. “And I thought: Should I have gone bigger?”
Most Fox viewers have reacted to Ms. Timpf’s openness around pregnancy and cancer the way one might respond to hearing that news from a co-worker or a friend. They have offered congratulations on the baby and prayers for her recovery. But some have wanted her to know that she is sad, vile and wrong. They log on to Facebook or X to pop off while they watch the show, often tagging her into their own fantasy debates: YES, WE KNOW SHE HAD A BABY, BLAH BLAH. I HAD CANCER, BLAH BLAH. You don’t need a double mastectomy. Try ivermectin first. Go on maternity leave and spare us. Stay Home and Be a Mother!
For Ms. Timpf, “Gutfeld!” has given her an opportunity to stitch together some meaning out of a traumatic event. “If one woman is less embarrassed about her own mastectomy, that’s a win,” she said.
And inside Fox News studios, Ms. Timpf’s storytelling around her pregnancy and her cancer fits the network’s impulse to lift the veil on its anchors’ personal lives, to position its personalities as a television family. But when “Gutfeld!” airs, it also projects Ms. Timpf into a political ecosystem in which women’s autonomy over their bodies and lives is under review — where pronatalist influencers urge women to produce babies by the half-dozen, right-wing streamers preach wifely submission and critics convene in “Gutfeld!” feeds to demand that Ms. Timpf retreat from public life. At 10 p.m. on Fox News, the personal is political.
From ‘Red Eye’ to ‘Gutfeld!’
If you were to play a game of Guess Who? with the Fox News personalities, you could find Ms. Timpf in three moves: She is a woman, under 40, wearing glasses. And women who wear glasses, in the iconography of the network, are a little different. The biggest female star on Fox News is, perhaps, the blond, nationalist shock jock Laura Ingraham. Ms. Timpf is a registered independent who has never voted for President Trump. She is pro-capitalist, antiwar and sometimes critical of ICE. She used to bleach her brown hair but got tired of sitting in the salon chair. She has dated women, though she doesn’t think of it as a big deal.
Last year, she published “I Used to Like You Until …,” a comic manifesto against political polarization. The title refers to people who used to like her until they disagreed with something she said — or discovered that she worked at Fox News. When Mr. Kimmel was briefly suspended from ABC after a verbal lashing from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, following his commentary on the death of Charlie Kirk, Ms. Timpf was the one who stood up for him on “Gutfeld!,” saying, “You shouldn’t want the government to have this kind of power over speech.”
Ms. Timpf first appeared on the network in 2013, when she spent her days reporting for the anti-leftist watchdog Campus Reform and her nights telling jokes at D.C. bars and clubs. Mr. Gutfeld told me that he invited her on “Red Eye,” his 3 a.m. late-late-night comedy show that predated “Gutfeld!,” after reading her work on college culture wars, and he was surprised by who showed up — a “lanky blonde” who is also “a dude, full of masculine energy,” as he put it in a book. Her Fox News headshot still immortalizes her TV look from that era: barrel-curl of blond hair, liberty blue dress, pair of nonprescription glasses perched on her nose.
And yet Ms. Timpf had an instinct to scratch at the lacquered femininity of television news, to reveal the burlesque of its performance. Early on, she joked about her “double mastectomy”-size breasts and the clip-in extensions that made her hair appear to tumble to her back. When Ms. Timpf first met the MTV V.J. turned libertarian Fox personality Kennedy, backstage before a Fox News appearance, “She had a bag of fake hair, and she was talking about her fake glasses, and her bra that gave her fake boobs,” Kennedy recalled. “I didn’t like her at first, and she didn’t really like me.” They later connected over the death of a parent; Kennedy officiated Ms. Timpf’s 2021 wedding.
When Fox News started piloting “The Greg Gutfeld Show,” a forerunner to “Gutfeld!,” in 2015, Ms. Timpf was initially positioned off to one side, cast in the role of an ombudswoman who would check guests on their facts and spar over points of disagreement. But she was soon promoted to the role of Mr. Gutfeld’s sidekick, and foil. “I didn’t want someone who was going to agree with me all the time,” Mr. Gutfeld said.
For a while, Ms. Timpf was the childless cat lady of “Gutfeld!,” joking about her pair bond with her elderly cat, Cheens. Now she is its unapologetic working mother. “I think that what has been challenging for her is not working,” Mr. Gutfeld said of her past year. “I think it drives her crazy.” And her relationship to work can agitate other people, too. She recently joined a live taping of Tim Pool’s podcast, “The Culture War,” where she argued in favor of feminism. Myron Gaines, the author of “Why Women Deserve Less,” argued against. Mr. Gaines spent the debate trying to verbally shoo Ms. Timpf back into the kitchen. He later needled Mr. Friscia, whom he had spied bouncing their baby backstage, as her “cucked husband.”
“I’ve got a team of haters,” Ms. Timpf said. “They are mad that I exist — truly, that I exist.” She thought that these people might be nicer to her once she got pregnant, but in her estimation, they got meaner instead. As soon as she satisfied the expectation that a woman become a mother, she was confronted with all of the other expectations foisted on mothers.
In April, Ms. Timpf posted an Instagram video addressing the feedback. “One fun thing I’ve noticed about being a mom is if you ever post without your baby — or God forbid, having fun without your baby — people are like: ‘Oh my God, where’s her baby? She’s a mother!’” she said.
At a time when traditional motherhood has emerged as a remunerative public performance — i.e., a job — Ms. Timpf exposes her life without shrinking it to fit that narrow role. “A lot of the criticism that we get is rooted in sexism,” said Jessica Tarlov, one of Fox News’s resident Democrats and a friend of Ms. Timpf’s. “Sometimes the meanest people are the folks that have, like, ‘Good Christian,’ ‘Lover of Christ,’ ‘Mom of four Navy veterans,’ ‘God, country’ in their bios. And then they’re calling you the c-word.”
Ms. Timpf has a theory about the women who come for her. “I am not ladylike,” she said. “I’m a little rough around the edges. I think that a lot of women are told that they should be ladylike. And I’m successful, career-wise, not being ladylike. I also have a man who loves me, and a baby, not being ladylike.” As for the men, she said: “I think sometimes men just hate women.”
Ms. Timpf is not a Trump supporter, or a tradwife, or a typical conservative, but she is also not a scold. When Mr. Trump himself came on the show last September, she asked him if there were real aliens at Area 51 and if he would ever host “Love Island.” In the place of outrage, she offers neurotic self-deprecation, which has earned her a fan base of her own. “Her problems are problems like: ‘Oh, I farted in the office of Greg Gutfeld. What if he finds out?’” said Gerd Buurmann, a German fan who streams the show from the Fox News International app on his phone. (“I have never farted in Greg’s office,” Ms. Timpf clarified.)
Even as she provides an alternate perspective or a polite rebuke, she radiates an air of relaxed tolerance for whatever invective is currently being flung across the set. “I think she’s there to soften the base line misogyny of that show and that universe,” said Nick Marx, an academic who studies the conservative comedy scene. Mr. Gutfeld characterized that criticism itself as “deeply sexist and inaccurate,” adding, “Kat is on the show because of her fearless humor, intelligence and connection with the ‘Gutfeld!’ audience.”
When Ms. Timpf disagrees with Mr. Gutfeld, she doesn’t feel the need to say it “every single time,” she said. “I’ve already said on the show that I voted third party. I’ve already said that I don’t see any need to be deporting people who are peaceful and who are here working and contributing to the economy.”
In the few instances when she has tried out Mr. Gutfeld’s tactic of criticizing the personal appearances of public figures on air, the blowback has been intense. In 2023, she joked on the show that the country singer Jason Aldean “looks like every guy I’ve ever seen at the bar of a Buffalo Wild Wings,” and a segment of the audience reacted as if she had brought dishonor upon the Fox family. One viewer was so disturbed by the joke that he felt moved to say that Ms. Timpf looked better as a blonde, adding: “I will now not watch Gutfeld whenever you are on, which is all the time.”
‘Timpf!’
“Gutfeld!” styles itself as a late-night comedy show, but it is also the finale of Fox’s daily news reporting — a place where the network’s subtext can become text. When I attended a taping last month, I sat in the back row of the studio audience and looked down upon a circle of tufted armchairs arranged around a central coffee table. “We’re in their living room, and they see us like family,” Mr. Gutfeld said of the television audience watching from home.
Mr. Gutfeld perches in the center of Fox’s psychic den, a waggish variation on the sitcom patriarch. Ms. Timpf sits at his side, taking the role of the quirky sibling. “He always laughs like an older brother would when the little sister makes fun of him,” Tom O’Connor, the show’s executive producer, said. When I asked Ms. Timpf if she saw herself as Mr. Gutfeld’s little sister, she reminded me that, at 61, Mr. Gutfeld is 25 years older than she is.
At the top of the show, Mr. Gutfeld delivered a battery of topical jokes in which he matched pieces of the day’s news with verdicts on liberal women’s bodies. Hillary Clinton is ugly. Joy Behar is old. Nancy Pelosi is old. Rosie O’Donnell is fat, Whoopi Goldberg is fat, Lizzo is fat, a professor of political science you’ve never heard of is fat. As Mr. Gutfeld delivered yet another rant about the left-wing reaction to Ms. Sweeney’s ad, Ms. Timpf calmly waited her turn, then sarcastically congratulated Mr. Gutfeld for managing to call not just one, but multiple women fat. “What a segment,” she said.
“Greg chooses the topics,” Ms. Timpf told me. “When I host, the topics are different.” If Mr. Gutfeld is absent, Ms. Timpf sometimes claims the center chair, and the set’s cartoonish orange “Gutfeld!” banner converts to “Timpf!” I asked her whether she thought, given her political convictions and refusal to support Mr. Trump, there was a ceiling to her rise at Fox News, and she replied, in her diplomatic way, “That’s definitely an interesting question.”
For now, she sits next to Mr. Gutfeld on the show that bears his name, sharpening her ambition. As she recovered from her cancer and her son’s birth, she took four months off from the show, spending time at home just as some of her critics had hoped she would. “I was complaining to my husband about how I wasn’t getting anything done,” Ms. Timpf said.
Earlier this month, she flew to Wisconsin for the weekend, where she performed five sold-out shows at a comedy club and tested out new mastectomy-related material. “I think there’s a lot of talk about how women should have kids, and not enough talk about men becoming the kind of partners that women would want to have kids with,” she said. “The only reason I’m happy doing it is because my husband is amazing. Even if I wouldn’t have had cancer at the same time, it would have been really hard.”
While some critics accuse her of “milking the cancer situation,” as one X user did in July (while cc’ing Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, Dan Scavino and Kash Patel), there is still much that she left unsaid.
Ms. Timpf found the lump on her nipple when she was nine months pregnant. She was with her sister, shirt off, stimulating her own breasts to try to induce labor, when her sister took a closer look. Her doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer 15 hours before labor began.
As she labored in the delivery room, she kept forgetting that she had a new medical condition to disclose. The anesthesiologist seemed upset when she told him “oh, I have cancer” just as he was inserting the epidural. She had one month to recover from childbirth and breastfeed her son before her mastectomy surgery. When her breasts were removed, her body was still bleeding from birth. Her son would cry out to her from his crib and she could not pick him up to console him. She had to summon someone else to do it.
Breast reconstruction, Ms. Timpf has learned, is not a surgery but a long series of surgeries. She will have her nipples reconstructed over the next year. It will be her first tattoo.
“I don’t think that those are small things,” Ms. Timpf said. “I think that those are big things.” As she tells her story, on “Gutfeld!” and online, she affirms her control over her own body. She signals that her ambition coexists with her maternal love, and that these things are as relevant to a show about politics as a celebrity ad for bluejeans.
Amanda Hess is a writer at large for The Times.
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