The announcement came less than a week after the network agreed to pay $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit in which Mr. Carlson’s show, one of the highest rated on Fox, figured prominently. He was said to be surprised by the move.

Here is the latest on Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News.

Mr. Carlson’s program became a must-watch for conservatives during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, an ideological ally and occasional confidant of Mr. Carlson’s. Both men helped push hard-right positions on issues like immigration reform and race relations into the Republican mainstream, and both relished antagonizing their political opponents with audacious and often untrue attacks.

Here is what else to know:

• The decision to let Mr. Carlson go was made on Friday night by Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive officer of Fox Corporation and the son of its co-founder, Rupert Murdoch, and by Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, according to a person briefed on the move.

• Mr. Carlson was given no heads-up that his time at Fox News was drawing to an end, according to two people with knowledge of the timing of the conversation. The anchor was told of the network’s decision on Monday morning, and his senior executive producer, Justin Wells, was also out of a job.

• A Fox spokeswoman said Mr. Carlson’s show would be replaced with a new program called “Fox News Tonight” that would feature rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named. Brian Kilmeade was the first host on Monday night, but he said little of Mr. Carlson beyond wishing him well.

• Mr. Carlson is also facing a lawsuit from a former Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg, who claims that he presided over a misogynistic and discriminatory workplace culture. Ms. Grossberg said in the lawsuit, which was filed in March, that on her first day working for Mr. Carlson, she discovered the work space was decorated with large pictures of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing a swimsuit.

• In April 2022, The New York Times examined how Mr. Carlson positioned himself to inherit the movement that grew around President Trump as he constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news.

April 24, 2023, 8:30 p.m. ETApril 24, 2023

April 24, 2023, 8:30 p.m. ET

Jeremy W. Peters

The decision to let Carlson go was made on Friday night by Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, according to a person briefed on the move.

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Carlson’s program brought in far more ad revenue than other Fox prime-time shows.

Last year, Anderson Cooper’s 8 p.m. program on CNN had ad revenue of $50.7 million, while MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” brought in $30.9 million, according to Vivvix data.

Meanwhile, Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. Fox News show took in $50.4 million, and “The Ingraham Angle” had ad revenue of $53.7 million.

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” also had a bigger year-to-year increase compared with those shows. Last year, the show took in $10 million more in ad revenue compared with 2021, a 15 percent jump.

This is how Carlson’s exit might affect the spread of misinformation.

The television host was “one of the nation’s most prolific mouthpieces for white supremacy, misinformation and misogyny,” said Bridget Todd, director of communications at the gender equity advocacy group Ultraviolet.

“We are not sad to see him go,” Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization GLAAD, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Carlson’s show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was the most-watched show in prime-time cable news, averaging 3.25 million viewers in the first quarter of the year. He was also a prominent figure in the defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. Before the election technology company settled with the network last week for $787.5 million, it blamed stars like Mr. Carlson for giving credibility to false voter fraud narratives while privately mocking them.

Yet even as Mr. Carlson’s ability to spread misinformation is likely to be “greatly diminished” without Fox News, the conspiracy theories he championed will continue to be shared, said Howard Polskin, who compiles a daily newsletter, TheRighting, which tracks conservative news outlets.

“This is a weed with deep roots — just because you take away something on top of the soil, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to pop up elsewhere,” he said. “There are so many voices on the right. They’re proliferating, and they’re a lot of the time getting louder and more passionate.”

Andrew Torba, who founded Gab, a social network that has become a hub for white supremacists and extremists, said Mr. Carlson should create his own digital broadcasting network “so that he no longer needs to ask permission from anyone to cover any story he wants.”

The absence of an explanation from Fox News about Mr. Carlson’s exit did not prevent an outpouring of unfounded speculation about the departure, including rumors that he had been silenced by Fox.

Prominent anti-vaccine skeptics, including the Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., proposed without proof that Mr. Carlson was fired for suggesting that Fox News had promoted the Covid-19 vaccine to please its pharmaceutical advertisers.

Anti-vaccine activist Dr. Sherri Tenpenny also posted several messages to her 124,000 Telegram followers, suggesting that there was a conspiracy behind Mr. Tucker’s departure from Fox News. “Don’t expect #FoxNews to tell the truth, as they got rid of the only Journalist that could NOT be controlled,” she wrote.

Mr. Carlson and Fox News did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Rashad Robinson, the president of the advocacy group Color of Change, worried that Fox would replace Mr. Carlson with “someone even worse” and called for more accountability for media figures who spread misinformation.

“Firing Tucker Carlson doesn’t undo the damage he’s already done or signal any new direction for Fox,” Mr. Robinson said on Twitter.

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A surprise exit catches Trumpworld by surprise, too.

The casual news observer would be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Trump and his family no longer had a relationship with Mr. Carlson, given the recent disclosures of the Fox host’s scathing private text messages, which emerged as part of the conservative network’s legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems.

In early 2021, as Mr. Trump desperately tried to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Carlson texted a confidant that he hated the president “passionately.” He also described Mr. Trump as a “demonic force.”

When the texts were released in March, Mr. Trump was wounded and called Mr. Carlson to talk about them, according to a person familiar with the outreach. But the two men patched it up quickly. Since then, they have talked regularly, exchanged text messages and appeared to have a closer relationship than at any time before, according to two people close to Mr. Trump who are familiar with their relationship and who did not want to be identified to discuss their private interactions.

In an interview with Greg Kelly of Newsmax that was recorded shortly after Mr. Carlson’s departure became public, Mr. Trump offered support for the former anchor. “I’m shocked. I’m surprised,” Mr. Trump said. “I think Tucker’s been terrific. He’s been, especially over the last year or so, he’s been terrific to me.”

Mr. Carlson did not respond to a request for comment.

Last year, some of Mr. Trump’s advisers had worried that Mr. Carlson seemed poised to support the potential presidential candidacy of Mr. Trump’s top rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Carlson had given Mr. DeSantis plenty of airtime and praised his policies. But over the past six weeks, as Mr. Trump and Mr. Carlson spoke more often, the Trump team felt increasingly confident that Mr. Carlson would not be weighing in for Mr. DeSantis, who has been heavily promoted by Rupert Murdoch’s media properties including Fox News.

The Trump team liked their odds even more when they learned that Mr. Carlson was disgusted with Mr. DeSantis’s decision, in late March, to call President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “war criminal.”

Senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who is a close ally of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carlson, described the Fox News host’s ousting as a shock.

“Tucker is a giant, and the most powerful voice against idiotic wars and an economy that placed plutocrats over workers,” Mr. Vance said in a text message. “This is a huge loss for a conservative movement that hopes to be worthy of its own voters. I assume he’ll land on his feet and continue to have a powerful voice. If he doesn’t it will be terrible for the country.”

“The best decision I ever made was leaving Fox. Good for you, @TuckerCarlson. You’re free & uncensored!” Kari Lake, a Republican who lost the governor’s race in Arizona last year, wrote in a tweet. Ms. Lake left her job as an anchor at a local Fox channel in 2021.

Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, struck an upbeat tone in a Monday tweet: “Wherever Tucker Carlson goes, America will follow!”

Joe Kent, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington State, tweeted, “Standing by for the launch of the Tucker news network, the people demand it!”

One close ally of Mr. Trump said he was happy that Mr. Carlson would not be able to give rocket fuel to any other candidate on Fox’s airwaves. Yet for some candidates in the Republican primary field, the loss of Mr. Carlson could mean a minefield they would have to navigate is now gone from a prominent platform.

For instance, Mr. DeSantis’s statement to Mr. Carlson weeks ago describing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” set off alarm bells and a wave of criticism among Republicans in Washington and some donors. It represented the beginning of what has been a period of concern about Mr. DeSantis’s expected candidacy from some who had seen him as the best option to stop Mr. Trump.

A Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the sense in Mr. Trump’s world was that any pro-Trump host at Fox News had something of a target on their back after the Dominion lawsuit.

Mr. Trump’s longest-serving adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., who is also an old friend of Mr. Carlson’s, said in an interview that Fox News had “essentially canceled the single most influential conservative commentator in the country, at the same time killing a cash cow for the network.”

He predicted that Mr. Carlson would take his “massive audience” wherever he ends up next.

Alyce McFadden contributed reporting.

April 24, 2023, 4:20 p.m. ETApril 24, 2023

April 24, 2023, 4:20 p.m. ET

Joe Rennison

The company’s share price fell below $30 per share on Monday, down roughly 4.5 percent since the start of the month. That compares to a modest gain for the broader S&P 500 index over the same period.

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Carlson’s public and private statements differed when speaking about Dominion.

Two days after the election, Mr. Carlson’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, said that voices on the right were “reckless demagogues,” according to a text message. Mr. Carlson replied that his show was “not going to follow them.”

But the same day, on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Mr. Carlson expressed some doubts about the voter fraud assertions before insisting that at least some of the claims were “credible.”

On Nov. 7, 2020, Mr. Carlson privately told Mr. Pfeiffer that claims about manipulated software were “absurd.” Mr. Pfeiffer replied later that there was not enough evidence of fraud to swing the election. But during his broadcast on Nov. 9, Mr. Carlson devoted time to various theories, suggesting there could be merit to claims about software manipulation. “We don’t know, we have to find out,” he said.

Mr. Carlson and other hosts also privately criticized Sidney Powell, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist who was gaining traction among the far right for her involvement in several lawsuits aimed at challenging the election results. Mr. Carlson called her claims “shockingly reckless.”

What’s next for Tucker Carlson? Former anchors chart a possible course.

Mr. O’Reilly also runs a news and commentary website, billoreilly.com, where he livestreams interviews with politicians, writes opinions pieces and hawks merchandise. The site had 1.2 million visits last month, according to SimilarWeb, a web traffic monitoring company. (Fox News’s flagship news site had 329 million visits during the same period.)

Glenn Beck, the former Fox News host, departed in 2011 to begin his own online news venture. That included The Blaze, a news and video website that had 12 million visits last month, according to SimilarWeb. He also hosts “The Glenn Beck Program,” a radio show and podcast that ranked No. 13 in Apple’s top podcast charts for news shows in the United States, according to Chartable.

Chris Cuomo, the former CNN host, was fired in 2021 amid an inquiry into his efforts to help his brother, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, navigate sexual harassment accusations. The anchor now hosts “CUOMO” on NewsNation, a subscription television news network. The site had five million visits last month, according to SimilarWeb. Also in 2021, two top editors at NewsNation resigned amid staff complaints of a right-leaning tilt to its coverage and abysmal ratings.

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Carlson’s show has been a hit for Fox since the beginning.

From 2017 to 2020, Mr. Carlson had the second-highest number of viewers on Fox News, finishing only behind Sean Hannity’s prime-time program. Fueled by the pandemic and a chaotic election cycle, Mr. Carlson’s show in 2020 had more than four million viewers, one of the best ratings performances in cable news history.

In 2021, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” bested “Hannity” and finished the year as the most-watched show in cable news with 3.2 million viewers.

Last year, Mr. Carlson’s 8 p.m. show narrowly ceded the most-watched crown to Fox’s 5 p.m. “The Five,” part of a broader trend in cable news where viewers have been flocking to afternoon shows.

Through the first three months this year, that trend has held: “The Five” averaged 10,000 more viewers than “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Mr. Carlson had been the top show among the viewers — ages 25 to 54 years old — that matter most to advertisers. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” had averaged 443,000 viewers in that age bracket compared to the 357,000 that watched “The Five,” in the first quarter this year.

A brief timeline of Tucker Carlson’s rise: From CNN and PBS to Fox.

2000-2005: CNN

Mr. Carlson started at CNN in 2000 as a host of “The Spin Room.”

In 2001, he sparred with commentators from the left as a host of “Crossfire,” a debate show in which he conducted a memorably contentious interview with the comedian Jon Stewart. The show was canceled in 2005, and CNN ended its relationship with Mr. Carlson.

2004-2005: PBS

His show, “Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered,” lasted about a year and ran at the same time as CNN’s “Crossfire.” It was part of an effort by the public media network to add ideological balance.

2005-2008: MSNBC

In what would now be an unexpected pairing, Mr. Carlson hosted “Tucker” on the cable news network until 2008, when it was canceled for low ratings. MSNBC gradually moved to the left during his tenure.

2009-2023: Fox News

He began appearing on several shows as a contributor, and in 2016 became the host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” at times running in the 7 p.m., 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. time slots. His show became the highest-rated cable news program in prime time.

2010-2020: The Daily Caller

Mr. Carlson co-founded the conservative news site, a pioneer in online conservative journalism, in 2010. He sold his stake in 2020.

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‘Fox News Tonight,’ with rotating hosts, will replace Carlson’s show.

The Fox News host Harris Faulkner said Monday while on air that, starting Monday evening, the interim show, “Fox News Tonight,” would fill the 8 p.m. hour “with rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named.”

Brian Kilmeade was the first host on Monday night, and he told viewers in brief comments: “As you probably have heard, Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. I wish Tucker the best. I’m great friends with Tucker and always will be.”

Mr. Carlson’s last show was on Friday. In it, he appeared to not know it was his finale. He ate a sausage and pineapple pizza with a delivery man who had thwarted a man running from police and told viewers: “We’ll be back on Monday. In the meantime, have the best weekend with the ones that you love.”

It has been a wild few hours in cable news.

In response, CNN called Mr. Lemon’s statement “inaccurate,” saying that he was “offered an opportunity to meet with management but instead released a statement on Twitter.”

Their sudden exits came less than 24 hours after Jeff Shell, who commanded Comcast’s sprawling entertainment empire as the chief executive at NBC Universal, left the company on Sunday after an investigation into a complaint about an inappropriate workplace relationship.

And on Monday morning, the sports behemoth ESPN made significant layoffs.

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In a lawsuit, Carlson has been accused of promoting a hostile work environment.

Ms. Grossberg said in the lawsuit naming Mr. Carlson that male producers regularly used vulgarities to describe women and frequently made antisemitic jokes.

On her first day working for Mr. Carlson, Ms. Grossberg said she discovered the office was decorated with large pictures of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing a plunging swimsuit. She said she was once called into the top producer’s office to be asked whether Ms. Bartiromo was having a sexual relationship with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy.

Ms. Grossberg also said in her lawsuit that after she was coerced by Fox’s lawyers into providing a misleading deposition in a recent defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems and defending an offensive text from Mr. Carlson, his producers emailed the rest of the staff in recognition of “Abby Day” and suggested ordering a staff lunch to celebrate.

Fox has disputed Ms. Grossberg’s claims, and Mr. Carlson hasn’t said anything publicly about the case.

“We will continue to vigorously defend Fox against Ms. Grossberg’s unmeritorious legal claims, which are riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees,” a Fox News spokeswoman said.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, also names Fox Corporation, Fox News, some network executives and several of Mr. Carlson’s producers as defendants.

In a statement on Monday, one of Ms. Grossberg’s attorneys, Tanvir Rahman, said that Mr. Carlson’s departure from Fox News “is, in part, an admission of the systemic lying, bullying and conspiracy mongering claimed by our client.” Mr. Rahman said that the legal team would be taking Mr. Carlson’s deposition and those of his subordinates “in the very near term.”

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Speculation on Carlson’s next move begins.

In a post on its English language account Monday on Twitter, RT invited Mr. Carlson to “question more” with the network, using one of its slogans. Mr. Carlson’s commentaries have been regularly parroted in Russian state media, including conspiracy theories that reflect Russian views of the world.

Howard Polskin, who compiles a daily newsletter, TheRighting, that tracks conservative news outlets, said that Mr. Carlson could join niche networks like NewsNation or Newsmax. He could start his own media brand, like Dan Bongino, the conservative pundit who also parted ways with Fox last week, Mr. Polskin said.

“He’s probably the biggest individual personality and brand in conservative media,” he said, adding that if Mr. Carlson was offered enough money to join a smaller online outlet, such as PJ Media or The Daily Caller, “it would be like an injection of superfuel.”

Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, said in a statement said that Mr. Carlson’s departure will continue an exodus of viewers from Fox News. Like Fox, Newsmax has also been sued by Dominion Voting Systems over defamation claims involving false election fraud narratives.

“For a while, Fox News has been moving to become establishment media, and Tucker Carlson’s removal is a big milestone in that effort,” Mr. Ruddy said.

Read The Times’s investigation into how Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable.

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While his critics cheer, Tucker Carlson’s supporters wonder what’s next.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican of Wisconsin, said on Twitter that Mr. Carlson “has been engaging in the best journalism on TV uncovering and exposing the truth.” He called it a “huge loss” to Fox News.

Among many of those who had criticized the Fox News host, the news was seen as comeuppance.

“Crazy thought, but maybe it’s time to face some consequences after blatantly lying to millions of Americans and actively eroding democracy for years,” Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said on Twitter.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who last week accused Mr. Carlson of inciting violence, had a one-word response on Twitter: “Wow.”

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April 24, 2023, 1:13 p.m. ETApril 24, 2023

April 24, 2023, 1:13 p.m. ET

Jason Karaian

Roughly speaking, the drop today is worth some $600 million in lost market value.

Carlson’s private comments on Trump: ‘I hate him.’

On several occasions, Mr. Tucker’s private messages contrasted sharply with his support on the show. As votes were being counted in the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson texted with his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, fretting about viewers turning away from Fox News after the network called Arizona for President Biden.

Two days before the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Carlson texted with members of his staff about looking forward to not having to cover Mr. Trump.

Tucker Carlson, a Source of Repeated Controversies, Is Out at Fox News

The decision to let Mr. Carlson go was made on Friday night by Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, and Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, according to a person briefed on the move. Mr. Carlson was informed on Monday morning by Ms. Scott, another person briefed on the move said.

Mr. Carlson’s program became a must-watch for conservatives during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, an ideological ally and occasional confidant whose rise as a political force was fueled by the same populist, culture war grievances that made Mr. Carlson a star.

His departure ends a rapid and scandal-scarred rise at the conservative news and opinion channel, where he was promoted to the prime-time lineup in early 2017 after Mr. Trump’s inauguration and quickly emerged as one of Fox’s biggest names.

Few other conservative commentators anywhere — on television, talk radio or the internet — had both the relationship with Mr. Trump and the ability to sway his thinking, even if only fleetingly, and the power to speak directly to the anxieties of the former president’s followers.

But the power that Mr. Carlson, 53, wielded outside Fox News could not insulate him from a growing list of troubles inside the network related to his conduct on and off the air, some of which had been grating on Mr. Murdoch and his father, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, who co-founded the network in 1996, according to the two people with knowledge of the company’s decision.

The host, a polarizing and unpopular figure at the network outside of his own staff, was exposed as part of a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems as a bully who denigrated colleagues and sources, often in profane and sexist language, and called for the firing of Fox journalists whose coverage he disliked. He has also drawn condemnation from the right and left for his role in fostering a revisionist account of the assault on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

No one so high-profile has exited Fox News so suddenly and unexpectedly since the tumultuous period at the network in 2016 and 2017, when Roger Ailes, the chief executive, and Bill O’Reilly, Fox’s biggest prime-time star, were fired, in their cases for sexual misconduct.

One early point of contention was Mr. Carlson’s 2021 documentary, “Patriot Purge,” which advanced the conspiracy theory that the attack that day was a so-called false flag operation designed to discredit the former president and his political movement. Lachlan Murdoch was said to have been caught off guard by the program, which also led two conservative Fox News contributors to quit in protest, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes.

In March, Mr. Carlson edited down tens of thousands of hours of footage from the attack given to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and used them to falsely portray the rioters as people Mr. Carlson called “mostly peaceful” onlookers who had innocently ambled into the Capitol. The broadcast drew a rebuke from Senator Mitch McConnell, who is a friend of Rupert Murdoch’s and said Mr. Carlson had drawn “offensive and misleading conclusions.”

In recent weeks, however, tumult unfolding off the air was what contributed to Mr. Carlson’s ouster. He was set to be a star witness in the trial of Dominion’s billion-dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News until the network abruptly settled for $787.5 million last week.

And late last month, one of his former producers filed a lawsuit against Fox and Mr. Carlson, claiming that the host ran a toxic workplace. The producer, Abby Grossberg, said in her complaint that she endured an environment “where unprofessionalism reigned supreme, and the staff’s distaste and disdain for women infiltrated almost every workday decision.” She also accused her former colleagues on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” of making antisemitic remarks and frequently speaking crudely and disparagingly about women.

On Monday, Fox offered a terse statement of gratitude in making the announcement of Mr. Carlson’s departure but did not offer any explanation. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” the network statement said.

Mr. Carlson did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

The Fox News host Harris Faulkner said on air Monday that starting that evening, an interim show, “Fox News Tonight,” would fill the 8 p.m. hour “with rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named.”

The ouster was an ignominious turn in the career of a man who had once been rumored as a possible presidential contender in Republican circles. When Mr. Trump was in the White House, Mr. Carlson had his ear when he wanted it. And long before he became a Covid vaccine skeptic — Mr. Carlson’s political persona often shifted with the whims of his audience — he traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, in March 2020 to personally encourage the president to take the coronavirus more seriously. He explained to Vanity Fair that at the time, he felt “a moral obligation to be useful in whatever small way I could.”

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carlson helped push far-right positions on issues like border policy and race relations into the Republican mainstream, and both relished antagonizing their political opponents with audacious and often untrue attacks.

Mr. Carlson warned his viewers that they were under assault from liberal elites and unchecked immigration, borrowing some of his central themes from the white nationalist and far-right web and polishing them up for a more mainstream audience. When he feared that Mr. Trump was wavering on his campaign promises — to enact harsh policies to deter and expel migrants and reduce American entanglements in foreign conflicts, for instance — he made his concerns known on his show, which typically drew about three million viewers a night.

When Fox launched a streaming network, Fox Nation, to draw more revenue from its most loyal fans, it was Mr. Carlson who became the new platform’s top personality, with a thrice-weekly talk show and periodic documentaries that doubled down on his themes of duplicitous elites and race-obsessed liberals.

At his height within Fox, he defied the network’s senior leadership while cultivating the impression among colleagues that he was cozy with the Murdoch family, particularly the Fox chief, Lachlan Murdoch. But in his sworn deposition as part of the Dominion suit, Mr. Carlson said the two men were not especially close. Asked how often he communicated with Lachlan Murdoch, Mr. Carlson replied, “Rarely.” He added, “It’s not on a weekly basis or even a monthly basis.”

The Dominion case exposed Mr. Carlson as someone whose polemical pro-Trump persona didn’t always match what he said privately. As he told his viewers after the 2020 election that they were right to have doubts about the credibility of the vote counting, he was telling his producers the opposite.

His private messages with members of his staff — in which they denigrated Mr. Trump and his legal advisers after the 2020 election in vulgar and sexist terms — were disclosed as part of Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox. In one exchange with staff, Mr. Carlson texted about Mr. Trump, “I hate him passionately.” In another, he labeled Mr. Trump — whom he often praised on his show — “a demonic force, a destroyer.”

In the lawsuit recently filed by Ms. Grossberg, in which she claims that she was coerced by Fox’s lawyers into providing a misleading deposition in the Dominion case, she accuses Mr. Carlson of presiding over a misogynistic and discriminatory workplace culture.

Ms. Grossberg said in the lawsuit, which was filed in March, that on her first day working for Mr. Carlson, she discovered the work space was decorated with large pictures of Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing a plunging swimsuit. .

“Mr. Carlson’s derogatory comments towards women, and his disdain for those who dare to object to such misogyny, is well known” on the set of his show, the lawsuit said.

A lawyer for Ms. Grossberg, Parisis G. Filippatos, said on Monday that Ms. Grossberg had almost 90 recordings from her time at Fox that bore out her claims of a hostile work culture, and bolstered the case that Fox had aired lies about voter fraud.

Fox has said it would fight Ms. Grossberg’s claims. She was fired after filing the lawsuit in New York, and another one, against the company, in Delaware.

Justin Wells, the senior executive producer of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” is also no longer employed by Fox News, according to two people with knowledge of the decision inside the network. Mr. Wells had worked closely alongside Mr. Carlson since his prime-time show began in 2016.

In recent years, Mr. Carlson led people to believe that he was untouchable. Last year, in an interview with the media outlet Semafor, he boasted that he operated with virtual autonomy at Fox. “I don’t clear anything with anybody. I file my script late,” Mr. Carlson said.

He is not the first star Fox personality to leave the network after developing a huge following. In 2011, the network pushed out Glenn Beck, the Tea Party megastar whose anti-Obama rants made his show one of the most popular in Fox News history. Two years later, Fox parted ways with Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor.

Fox executives said at the time that one factor more than anything else led to the departures: No one person is bigger than the network.

Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.