Former Fox News employee Joe Muto says he’s “not a sociopath” and didn’t walk around Fox “for 8 years with a chip on my shoulder.” Muto, fired Thursday after revealing himself as the mole paid to share information on the company, simply says, “I couldn’t be in that building one day longer without exploding.”

Without commenting on his financial arrangements with Gawker, Muto told Howard Kurtz on CNN today, “this was a primal scream from a longtime Fox employee who just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Of the legal fight now brewing, Muto says Fox News is, “trying to intimidate me into silence because I’m revealing unflattering information about the inner workings of the company.”

“They promote people for pushing this conservative viewpoint,” Muto says of the “top-down” management, which “comes from Mr. Ailes himself.”

People at work knew I wasn’t really enthusiastic about the right-wing leanings there, and as a result it seemed after a while my career was stalling. I was never going to advance in the ranks there because I did not buy into this conservative viewpoint.”