Florence “Flo” Anthony, who spent four decades breaking celebrity news and breaking down barriers for Black women in entertainment journalism, died August 6 of cancer. She was 74.
Jack Hirsch, biographer of Anthony’s husband, Olympic and professional boxing champion Michael Spinks, confirmed her death to the New York Amsterdam News, her longtime publication. Anthony had disclosed her cancer diagnosis to Hirsch in March. The couple married in a New York City courthouse ceremony in January, capping 39 years together that began in 1987. A cause of death beyond the cancer diagnosis has not been released.
Born March 4, 1952, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Anthony began her career as a publicist for boxing figures including Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Butch Lewis and Mike McCallum, alongside her future husband. In 1985 she joined the New York Post as an agate clerk in the sports department, later becoming the first woman staffer at the paper’s sports and entertainment department and its Page Six column — and the first African American columnist at The National Examiner, opening doors that had rarely offered Black journalists a byline on the biggest gossip pages in the industry.
Over the following decades, she broke stories on the marriages of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger and Mike Tyson and Robin Givens, and became a fixture on television, appearing regularly on “Inside Edition,” “The Insider” and “Entertainment Tonight,” co-hosting E!’s “The Gossip Show” for six seasons.
Through her company, Dottie Media Group, she produced the nationally syndicated radio segments “Gossip to Go With Flo” and “Flo Anthony’s Big Apple Buzz,” reaching more than three million listeners daily across some 20 markets by 2017. She also worked closely as a publicist for the Jackson family, maintaining a decades-long relationship with La Toya Jackson.
Anthony wrote four novels, including “Deadly Stuff Players” and its sequel “One Last Deadly Play,” and held strong views on her craft, describing a real journalist as someone who researches a story and talks to the people involved rather than simply repeating what appears on a blog. CNN entertainment journalist Lisa Respers France said she felt deeply indebted to Anthony as a Black woman covering pop culture, calling her someone whose importance went well beyond gossip.
