CNN Cuomo Prime Time talker Chris Cuomo’s aggressive come-on to a young woman 11 years ago at ABC was much more than garden-variety harassment.
It was an assault, says the woman who complained to CNN about it, and at the height of the #MeToo movement that brought down one leftist media bigwig after another, Cuomo tried to contact the woman to protect himself.
The latest on the disgraced anchor — ostensibly fired because he moonlighted as a public-relations man for his brother, New York’s discredited former Governor Andrew Cuomo — appears in a long report in The New York Times about the recent contretemps at CNN.
CNN President Jeff Zucker recently quit the network because of his illicit affair with the hate-Trump network’s marketing chief, Allison Gollust. Gollust quit yesterday. Like Cuomo, Zucker and Gollust were ex-officio advisors to Andrew Cuomo.
How About Lunch?
When CNN cashiered Cuomo on December 4, it appeared mostly concerned about the text messages released by New York’s attorney general. They showed that his role in advising his brother about his sex-assault and harassment scandal was much greater than he led them to believe.
Before the network fired Cuomo, it had suspended him on December 1. Then it received bad tidings from #MeToo lawyer Debra Katz. Katz was the attorney for sex-assault hoaxtress Christine Blasey Ford, who falsely accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attacking her when they were in high school.
Katz sent a letter to CNN detailing a serious sex-assault allegation that, at the time, contained “unspecified misconduct claims,” as the New York Post put it. The network canned Cuomo almost immediately. It was the third sex claim against him; two others had surfaced in September.
Now, the third woman’s claims are no longer “unspecified.”
Katz’s letter, the Times reported, “relayed a story that had begun in 2011 when the woman, who was referred to as Jane Doe, was a young temporary ABC employee hoping for a full-time job.”
The married Cuomo had offered the woman some career advice, then invited her to “lunch in his office, according to the letter, interviews with the woman and emails between her and Mr. Cuomo.” The Times continued:
When she arrived, there was no food. Instead, Mr. Cuomo badgered her for sex, and after she declined, he assaulted her, she said. She ran out of the room.
Later that day, the woman, who was still seeking a job, tried to smooth things over by writing Mr. Cuomo friendly emails.
The Times interviewed five friends and former colleagues who said the woman told them Mr. Cuomo had made unwelcome sexual requests. She said that only in the past year did she begin to tell people that Mr. Cuomo had also assaulted her, which she hadn’t previously divulged because it was private and painful.
When the #MeToo movement took off and took down prominent leftist media celebrities such as Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, “Mr. Cuomo contacted the woman, seemingly out of the blue.”
“Mr. Cuomo proposed arranging a CNN segment about the company where she worked doing public relations. The woman tried to avoid any contact with Mr. Cuomo, but CNN ultimately broadcast a segment anyway,” the Times reported:
“After years without any substantive communication from Mr. Cuomo whatsoever, Ms. Doe suspected he was concerned about her coming forward publicly with her allegations and wanted to use the proposed segment as an opportunity to ‘test the waters’ and discourage her from going on the record about his sexual misconduct,” Ms. Katz wrote.
The Times reviewed Mr. Cuomo’s messages to the woman and the segment and spoke with her boss at the time. Her boss said that after the segment aired, the woman shared some of the details of the encounter and Mr. Cuomo’s subsequent outreach.
Before Katz provided evidence that Cuomo assaulted the woman, Zucker fired him.
Gollust Quits
Zucker’s career at the network ended two weeks ago. He quit, supposedly, because of his affair with Gollust, who left CNN yesterday.
Yet the couple weren’t forced out solely because they were lovers. Like Chris Cuomo, they were key advisors to Andrew Cuomo and twisted coverage to make him look good.
“Gollust and Zucker … gave Andrew Cuomo endless positive coverage because of their relationship,” a source told the Post. They “even advised Andrew what to say — how to respond and particularly how to hit back at [President Donald] Trump to make it more compelling TV,” a source said.
“Based on interviews of more than 40 individuals and a review of over 100,000 texts and emails, the investigation found violations of Company policies, including CNN’s News Standards and Practices, by Jeff Zucker, Allison Gollust, and Chris Cuomo,” WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar wrote in a memo about Gollust’s departure. WarnerMedia owns CNN.
Cuomo, who denies the assault claims and says Zucker and Gollust knew what he was doing for his brother, wants a $60 million payout.
H/T: Fox News
