What has Candace Owens said publicly about the circumstances of her firing?
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Executive summary
Candace Owens says she was fired by The Daily Wire in March 2024 and has publicly framed the split as liberating—“The rumors are true — I am finally free,” she wrote on X and promised to relaunch her show on her own channels [1]. She has also said the firing helped her career and publicly thanked Daily Wire founders, while more recently revisiting the episode in interviews where she names a suspected internal leaker and disputes the public narrative of her departure [2] [3].
1. Owens’s public account: “I am finally free”
Immediately after The Daily Wire announced the end of their relationship with Owens, she reposted the company statement and wrote on X that “The rumors are true — I am finally free,” telling followers she would continue her work on her personal site and relaunch her show after a brief hiatus [1]. That phrasing frames the split as voluntary liberation rather than a purely punitive corporate action [1].
2. Gratitude and a career spin: firing as a growth moment
In subsequent public appearances Owens said the firing boosted her profile and even thanked Daily Wire leaders by name, saying she was grateful to Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing and others for “realizing before I did that I should be fired,” and credited the split with driving her podcast to number one globally [2]. This is a striking reframing: instead of portraying herself as a victim, she presents the severing as a strategic benefit to her platform [2].
3. Dispute over narrative and alleged gag order reporting
Independent reporting noted friction: the split followed public tensions after Owens criticized Israel and Ben Shapiro called her comments “absolutely disgraceful,” and outlets reported The Daily Wire confirmed the partnership had ended [2]. Two months after the split, reporting by journalist Glenn Greenwald was cited as saying The Daily Wire had obtained a gag order to stop Owens speaking negatively about the company—an allegation tied to the larger dispute over what she could say publicly after her exit [2]. The sources we have do not quote the gag order directly from court filings; the claim is presented as reporting [2].
4. Owens revisits the firing and points to an internal leak
In November 2025 Owens revisited the period around her suspension and firing during a livestream interview. She told the host she believes she knows where a key leak that affected her firing came from and suggested it came from a former Daily Wire employee, saying “she no longer works for The Daily Wire and I think she was behind that leak” while also saying she could neither fully confirm nor deny some public rumors [3]. That is a new allegation from Owens about internal actors shaping the public story [3].
5. Competing media framings and implications
News outlets present competing emphases: entertainment-style pieces report her X post and relaunch plans [1], features frame her firing as part of ongoing internal conservative-media infighting and note the Israel comments as the crystallizing controversy [2]. Podcast and livestream coverage foreground Owens’s personal version and her claim about a leak [3]. These different framings point to a mix of public relations, ideological dispute, and internal workplace conflict in accounts of the same event [1] [3] [2].
6. What sources do not (or cannot) confirm
Available sources do not provide contemporaneous Daily Wire internal communications or court documents proving a gag order, nor independent verification of the specific leak Owens blames beyond her own statement [2] [3]. Sources do report that The Daily Wire announced the relationship had ended and that Owens herself confirmed the split publicly [1] [2], but definitive documentary proofs of the internal causes remain unreported in the material provided.
7. Why Owens’s public framing matters
Owens’s choice to describe the firing as freedom and to thank her former employers reframes a potentially career-damaging corporate split into a platform-expanding moment; that messaging has real consequences for audience perception and for how other media cover the episode [2]. Her more recent claims about a leaker shift attention from her own comments to alleged internal sabotage—another narrative that supporters and critics will use differently [3].
Taken together, the available reporting shows three clear threads in Owens’s public remarks: an initial self-portrayal of liberation [1], a later depiction of the firing as beneficial and career-boosting [2], and a more recent allegation that an ex-employee leaked information that helped produce the public story around her departure [3].