EDGE Chicago

Openly gay news anchor Charles Perez is not taking his recent firing from Miami’s ABC affiliate lying down. As he prepares a discrimination complaint with the Miami-Dade County Equal Opportunity Board against WPLG, Perez, who alleges the station fired him for being "too gay" for advertisers’ taste, has spouted off against news director Bill Pohovey in recent media interviews.

Speaking of Pohovey, who is also gay, in an Advocate.com interview last week, Perez called him a "company man." He referred to a controversial comment his agent Richard Liebner had made that compared the news director to "Jews in the 1930s who sold out other Jews so they would stay good with the guys in power."

Liebner does not recall making the comment, but Perez maintains that this and other allegations he’s made in the Advocate and other interviews, are all true. He does not regret making the comment.

"That’s an honest conversation I had," Perez told EDGE earlier today. "People may not like to hear that, but I think everything is so sanitized in this country now that it’s important to speak the truth. To pretend I didn’t have that conversation for the sake of better press is a cop-out."

WPLG originally fired Perez on Aug. 5, just a week and a half after the station demoted him from hosting the main weekday news to anchor the weekend desk instead. He claimed in a guest column on The Daily Beast "[the station] sold me out as soon as my being gay became too widely known. It made them uncomfortable and made me, in their eyes, less advertiser-friendly."

Perez said the tipping point came in March after his tenuous breakup with Dennis Ricardo Peña caused a publicity storm. The blogs were abuzz with the release of the former news anchor’s private e-mails revealing he may have been dealing with "gender identity issues," among other things. A Miami judge yesterday granted Perez a two-year restraining order against Peña. And he maintains his former partner’s actions triggered the timeline of events that resulted in his firing.

"As one of the main anchors, they are selling advertising on your face and they put our faces on the posters sent to all the advertisers," Perez said. "[The executives] don’t want to do anything that would make an advertiser see you as less family friendly. Though they will never say ’We need to get rid of the gay guy,’ they will say ’We need to go a different direction here.’"

The ’different direction’ Perez claims WPLG wanted to take involved removing his image from promotional materials and heavily promoting co-anchor Laurie Jennings instead.

"My straight co-anchor was very open about being straight," he said. "They ran promos with her children and family, and it’s a double standard to hide one and push the other one out there because she has the ’acceptable’ personal life. It’d be one thing if they were promoting us both as journalists, but they weren’t. I became un-promotable."

Dave Boylan, WPLG vice president and general manager, denied in a statement released earlier this month the publicity surrounding Perez’s personal life played a role in the station’s decision to fire him. He claims Perez’s reassignment to weekends began months before the publicity storm. And it was due to a loss of revenue that Boylan said required staffing cutbacks.

Pohovey was also quoted in the statement. He denied Perez’ claims by referencing his own sexual orientation. Pohovey called the accusation "outrageous."

"As a gay man myself, I can safely say the Station does not discriminate against gay people," Pohovey said. "His false claims should offend all people -- including those of us in the gay community."

Perez, who is represented by employment attorney Melanie Damian, said the reasons being cited by the station for his firing remained unclear. And he added he hopes the lawsuit will, if nothing more, result in the truth being told.

"The reasons they’ve given me were financial, but I’ve tried to calculate it and there’s no way it makes sense. They are giving the lines their attorneys have written for them," Perez said. "We are the number one newscast in the market, regardless of time of week, so why mess with what works? It didn’t make sense, financially or rating-wise."

He continued.

"The truth is very powerful," Perez said. "If [the station was] standing on the truth, all they had to do was tell it, but obviously that’s not what they wanted to tell me."

Perez’s and WPLG’s legal representatives are currently involved in conversations regarding a mediation session before the complaint hits the courts. According to its statement, the station will "bring the facts out in the appropriate legal forum and fully expects to be completely vindicated."