Former Spectrum News NY1 meteorologist Erick Adame quit X, formerly Twitter, this week after telling his followers that his firing from the station last year has had a profound effect on him "emotionally and financially."
Adame was fired from the New York City station in September last year, after nude screenshots of him on an adult website were leaked.
"The toll this has taken on me mentally and financially is hard to even begin to describe," Adame wrote on X Friday, according to the New York Post. He deleted his account soon after the post. "I’m still pushing forward and trying my hardest to stay positive, but I need to take a break from social media."
Adame admitted it was "something I had done before but wasn’t caught in this way until then. Months later someone would send these images to my mom, my bf and my work."
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He said more than a year after his firing he hasn’t been able to find work on or off camera.
The 40-year-old started a direct-to-email weather subscription service last spring called Weather with Erick, which he said he plans to continue for now.
In an interview with Deadline in September, Adame’s crisis-management representative, Howard Bragman, suggested that Adame could still find work despite this scandal.
"I think it’s a different generation out there," Bragman said. "I think younger people just don’t care about these kinds of things; it’s not an issue. I think when you talk about people under 40, virtual sex and nude photos are pretty much part of the life."
In a September interview with The Advocate, the meteorologist said he meant for the X-rated webcam to be a "private space" for him.
"Once I did it a few times and no one recognized me, I got comfortable," he told the outlet. "I thought it was going to be these people in this small bubble that would ever see this or hear this."
Adame said the night he was recognized — his last webcam session — he had hundreds of viewers and, at the request of one of them, he wrote NY1 on his chest.
He also revealed his name, address and job and said, "It'd be hot if my boss saw me. I would love my boss to f--- me on camera."
He told The Advocate, "I knew as I was doing it, that it was a mistake."
"What people don't know, except for those that are close to me, is that afterward, I cried," he revealed. "I didn't really understand why I did what I did. Sometimes sex is super complicated and you have this immediate regret. I literally cried because I felt the really high risk of what I had done."
He said months of "so much anxiety" went by as he tried to find and pull images of him off of social media before he was finally pulled into HR at NY1 and told him to remove all the remaining photos. After more graphic images were sent to his bosses, he was finally let go.
"It's been over a year, and I'm still getting emotional now talking about it. I loved my job so much," he said, explaining that while he hasn’t gotten a news job offer yet, and he currently works as a restaurant host, he has had "some great conversations" with stations in the Deep South.
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"That gives me hope that the right position will come along and someone's going to give me that second chance that I've been asking for," he added. "I am still very much still in this, but I can see that light at the end of the tunnel. It's way down there, but I see it."
