Abusive anchorman Rob Morrison quit his WCBS-TV job Wednesday after a meeting with station brass.
The abrupt resignation came three days after the veteran broadcaster’s arrest for choking his wife — and then allegedly threatening to kill her — in a late-night fight in their Connecticut home.
“My family is my first and only priority right now and I have informed CBS management that I need to put all of my time and energy into making sure that I do what’s best for my wife and my son,” Morrison said in a terse statement.
“I very much appreciate the opportunity that CBS has given me and I thank them for accepting my decision.”
WCBS-TV officials had summoned Morrison for a Manhattan sitdown following the flood of negative publicity over the wild weekend fracas.
The station was not commenting Wednesday, but Morrison’s mother-in-law offered little sympathy for the newly unemployed Morrison.
“I don’t want to see anybody’s life destroyed,” Martha Risk told the Daily News. “What do people say — we have to pay the piper? We all pay for what we do in some way.”
Morrison’s resignation came one day after Connecticut court papers charged he turned homicidal while in custody, promising he “would kill” his wife Ashley Morrison once cops turned him loose.
Officials at WCBS were livid that the “News at Noon” anchor allegedly lied to them about the bruises on his face when he came to work Monday, sources said.
He “misled station management and has made a horrible situation even worse,” a source said.
It is unclear what Morrison told his bosses about the incident.
The accused wife-beater was also a two-timing husband, television colleagues told the Daily News — and his affair with a co-worker led to his departure from NBC.
Morrison, who was living in Manhattan with his wife at the time of the alleged extramarital 2008 romance, allowed his mistress to live at the couple’s Long Island home, the colleagues said.
Morrison denied the charge when confronted by Ashley, an anchor of CBS News’ MoneyWatch. But she hired a private investigator who captured incriminating evidence by bugging his car, the colleagues said.
Ashley Morrison also fired off a memo to NBC management about the illicit romance, and his contract was not renewed in 2008, the colleagues said.
The couple remained together for five more turbulent years until the weekend fracas at their $1.26 million Connecticut home that led to Rob Morrison’s arrest — and his alleged death threat — Sunday.
Morrison, speaking to the Daily News Tuesday night, blamed himself for the domestic dispute — but pinned his arrest on his mother-in-law, who called 911 from her home in Indiana after Morrison had called her to complain about Ashley.
Cops followed up Risk’s call by heading to Morrison’s house to defuse the volatile situation.
“Don’t piss off your mother-in-law is the moral of the story,” Morrison, 44, said Tuesday night as he listening to the Grateful Dead’s “Attics of My Life.”
Morrison claimed he initially called Risk in hopes she would calm everybody down in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
“I reached out to her mother in good faith looking for a level head in what was a chaotic situation and that’s what I got in return,” he said, admitting tension between him and Risk “is not new.”
