Ray Epps has accused Fox News host Tucker Carlson of being “obsessed” with him and said he will go to any lengths to “destroy” his life.
“He’s [Carlson] obsessed with me,” said the man who has found himself at the centre of allegations that he was an instigator during the Jan 6 riots.
“He’s going to any means possible to destroy my life and our lives,” he said in the interview with CBS’s Bill Whitaker on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.
“Why?” asked Whitaker.
“To shift blame on somebody else,” Mr Epps said. “If you look at it, Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, (Matt) Gaetz, they’re all tellin’ us before this thing that it was stolen. So you tell me, who has more impact on people, them or me?”
Mr Epps has been accused by various far right media personalities aligned with former president Donald Trump of being an FBI plant.
Though he was at one time on the FBI’s wanted list, Mr Epps never ended up facing criminal charges over his involvement in the Jan 6 Capitol riots.
In January 2021, he traveled to Washington DC from Arizona to support Mr Trump as a joint session of Congress was set to certify the results of the 2020 election which Joe Biden won.
Mr Epps was filmed the night before the attack urging people to go inside the Capitol and also was seen moving past exterior barricades on 6 January, though he did not go inside and sought to diffuse the tensions with a violent mob.
Carlson has focused on Mr Epps more than 20 times on his top-rated show and a half dozen times so far this year, according to CBS.
His remarks come amid Fox News’s $787.5bn settlement with Dominion Voting Systems which had accused the network of defamation for airing false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Mr Epps said during the 60 Minutes interview along with his wife that they had received death threats and relive the day of the Capitol riot everyday.
Mr Epps’ wife Robyn told Whitaker: “Some people have said, ‘Well, just let it go, and let it die down’.”
“What they don’t understand is it doesn’t,” she said.
In Mr Epps’s interview with investigators, he testified he was not a federal agent and said the “crazy” conspiracy theories surrounding him had torn his life apart.
Last month, a lawyer for Mr Epps demanded Carlson retract his “false and defamatory” statements about him and deliver a “formal on-air apology” for the “lies” he promoted.
