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MUGSHOT: Charles Leaf booking shot
(courtesy Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office)
Leaf, who joined Fox 5 News in July 2006, was taken into custody Thursday at his Luisa Avenue home in Wyckoff by members of the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Sex Crimes and Child Abuse Unit and the Wyckoff Police Department. After being interviewed by detectives at Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office in Paramus, he was charged with aggravated sexual assault and child endangerment.
Leaf, 40, who is married with two children, is being held on $250,000 bail at the Bergen County Jail in Hackensack. A Nov. 4 arraignment is scheduled.
The Fox 5 news site says, in part, that Leaf “has covered major local and national stories including national exclusives on the Bernard Madoff scandal and the proposed development of a mosque near the World Trade Center Site.”
He has also been on FOX News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor,” “The FOX Report,” “FOX & Friends,” “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren,” “America Live with Megyn Kelly” and “Geraldo at
Large.”
Before landing in New York, Leaf was an investigative reporter at KDVR-TV FOX 31 in Denver, Colorado. Before that, he worked for WJBK FOX in Detroit and WDAF-TV FOX in Kansas City, Missouri.
A graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, Leaf began his career in Yuma, Arizona. He also served five years in the U.S. Marine Corps, leaving the military with the rank of non-commissioned sergeant.
Leaf also worked for the U.S. State Department, with assignments at the American Embassy in Warsaw and Canberra, Australia, among other places.
He’s run into trouble in many of them, according to private detective Bill Warner.
While working in Mobile, Alabama a decade ago, Leaf was charged in a civil suit with a “willful physical attack” against a local councilwoman.
The case was eventually settled, but two years later, in Detroit, a man told police that Leaf shouted homophobic obscenities at him after being pelted with eggs while covering a story.
Bobbi Barrow, spokeswoman for Denver Health Medical Center, told Warner she believed Leaf misrepresented himself to get an interview with her boss, Dr. Patricia Gabow, at an event last November. “What he did was unprofessional,” Barrow told Warner.
Charles Leaf said he did nothing wrong in any of the incidents.
“If what took place in Mobile hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be talking to me about someone in Detroit throwing eggs at me,” he reportedly told Warner.
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