Desk · United States
Fresh unverified claims are swirling around the Fox News anchor. Here is what is documented about her 2023 saga — and what Velvet is not repeating, and why.
New unverified claims about Fox News anchor Julie Banderas began circulating online this week, touching on her finances, her health, her private life, and her family. The claims arrived at this desk through an anonymous informant, with no official statements and no independently verified documentation attached.
Velvet is a gossip desk, not a rumor laundry. So before going further, here is the rule we apply to every story like this one: what is documented gets reported, and what is merely asserted stays out until it can be checked. This is that exercise, conducted in public.
In February 2023, Banderas announced live on Gutfeld! that she was divorcing Andrew Sansone, her husband since 2009 and the father of her three children. In December 2022, Sansone had been arrested following an alleged domestic altercation, facing charges of menacing and criminal possession of a weapon, with a restraining order issued afterward.
In July 2023, a New York judge found Sansone not guilty, ruling the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Contemporaneous reporting also described contested financial and custody matters inside the divorce proceedings. Every sentence in those two paragraphs traces to on-the-record reporting or court outcomes — People, Mediaite, and the Daily Beast among them — and Velvet's earlier Vault reconstruction of the saga.
The fresh claims go well beyond that record: alleged personal debts, an alleged illness and hospital visit, an alleged new relationship with relocation plans, and speculation that custody of her three children should change hands. None of it arrives with statements, filings, or reporting that Velvet can independently confirm.
A document purporting to be a New York court petition over an alleged six-figure debt was also circulated to this desk. It did not withstand basic verification — wrong court naming, a nonstandard index format, a future date, and a corporate office listed as a home address — so it is not evidence of anything, and we are not treating it as such.
Debt, illness, and fitness as a parent are not ordinary gossip fodder. They are the kinds of claims that follow a person — and her children — for years, and laundering them through “some say” and “allegedly” does not make them harmless. A single anonymous source is not verification; it is the starting point of verification, and this one did not survive contact with the facts.
Readers deserve the fun of the gist without the rot of the smear. When there is something real — a filing with a verifiable docket number, an on-record statement, reputable outlet reporting — Velvet will cover it the same day, with the same energy. Until then, the specifics stay out.
The 2023 saga itself remains a legitimate story: a very public divorce, three children, contested proceedings, and a criminal case that ended in acquittal. That record is where the public interest lives, and it is all documented above.
Anyone with on-the-record information — statements, filings, or firsthand accounts given with a name attached — can reach this desk through the Contact page. The inbox is open; the standards are not negotiable.
