Sexual Harassment Allegation Against Chris Cuomo, and a Woke Push To Eliminate Biological Sex, with Shelley Ross and Katie Herzog | Ep. 173
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 34 minutes
Words per Minute
157.9231
Summary
Shelly Ross is a former executive producer at ABC News and CBS News who has publicly accused anchor Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her during both of their time at ABC and CBS. Katie Herzog is back with us to talk about some of her latest reporting on how woke ideology is spreading in the medical industry amongst MDs.
Transcript
00:00:00.600
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:12.600
Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We have a big show for you
00:00:16.920
today. Just a bit later, we're going to be joined by Katie Herzog. She's back with us to talk about
00:00:21.400
some of her latest reporting on how woke ideology is spreading in the medical industry amongst MDs.
00:00:28.380
That's not good. But joining me first for her first exclusive interview is Shelly Ross.
00:00:34.460
She's a former executive producer at ABC News and CBS News who has publicly accused anchor Chris
00:00:40.940
Cuomo of CNN of sexually harassing her during both of their time at ABC News. Shelly, great to have
00:00:48.160
you here. Thank you for being here. Thank you. So I thought it was fascinating that you came out with
00:00:53.940
this and in a New York Times op-ed and just were given the chance to tell your story. And I did
00:00:59.140
wonder whether the New York Times was the first one you went to or whether anybody else had passed on
00:01:04.400
the opportunity to tell this story. Can I start with that? Sure. I actually earlier, a year before,
00:01:13.460
thought, let me see what this looks like. And there was one of the magazines had a first person story
00:01:23.760
that was very, very moving. And I contacted them and was in just a half a discussion.
00:01:34.040
And then came all of the harassment against Asians. And I thought, this is not a time to talk about
00:01:44.380
sexual harassment in the workplace. This is a time to talk about harassment of Asian people because of
00:01:53.420
the pandemic. And so it was a very brief, and I said, I'm going to end this dialogue. I'm going to
00:02:05.180
withdraw everything because I think there's a more important dialogue to have. And that was just a
00:02:14.440
very quick toe in the water, nothing. It was just sort of a, what do you think?
00:02:22.400
So how long were you his EP at ABC News? Well, I was first his, he was a sort of a floating network
00:02:34.500
correspondent. And so I was EP at Good Morning America for five and a half years. And for,
00:02:46.620
he came to ABC, I don't know what date, but somewhere in that timeframe. So he was, I put him on the air
00:02:58.220
and assigned him stories out of a pool of car correspondence. And he was a legal correspondent.
00:03:05.820
So I had him, for instance, covering the Martha Stewart trial, if that gives you a timeframe.
00:03:13.060
And he, you know, he was on Good Morning America quite a bit. And then in 2004, I took over
00:03:28.440
Primetime Live. And when I took over Primetime Live, they had gone to, it had gone through a lot of
00:03:38.240
ups and downs. It had been merged with 2020 and then unmerged with 2020. And it was, you know,
00:03:49.880
magazine shows were, were sort of shrinking and trying to redefine themselves. And I came into
00:03:57.480
Primetime Live and there were four anchors, Diane Sawyer, Cynthia McFadden, John Quinones, and Chris Cuomo.
00:04:08.240
Mm-hmm. So he was one of your anchors and you were his executive producer for how long?
00:04:17.500
No, it was about less, a little less than a year.
00:04:20.640
Okay. And how did you, what was his character like prior to the incident that we're going to
00:04:25.760
get into? What did, how did you, you know, know him? What did you think of him?
00:04:29.780
Well, you know, he was a former Fox guy. He was a Roger Ailes discovery, interestingly enough.
00:04:41.940
Um, and he came to ABC and he was just had a big personality. Um, he was, you know, uh, attractive
00:04:54.000
looking on air, but he was, you know, had the personality that you've seen, we've seen of a frat
00:05:02.920
boy. He was a guy's guy, uh, you know, called people buddy and, and, uh, and he, he was, uh, very,
00:05:14.900
he was younger and arrogant. He knew it all and didn't want anybody. Uh, he didn't want anybody's
00:05:25.960
advice. He didn't want anybody's direction. And he certainly didn't want anyone to touch his,
00:05:36.120
Right. And when you're at network television, they do. I mean, that's, it's not like cable at
00:05:42.000
all. Having worked in both industries, I can say the executive producers, the producers are much
00:05:47.140
more involved in the final product at the broadcast level than on cable. And I'm not surprised to learn
00:05:52.120
that, uh, even in the broadcast world, Mr. Chris Cuomo didn't, didn't think anybody should be touching
00:05:57.760
his work. Um, even somebody who is a seasoned executive producer like you, there's a reason you ran
00:06:03.800
GMA for almost six years. Okay. So that was the, I wasn't, I was at ABC news for 17 years. Yeah. So,
00:06:13.340
and you know, I, uh, I came up the ladder on merit on breaking a lot of stories, winning a lot of awards.
00:06:24.440
So I was respected and, uh, it was interesting to have somebody show disrespect.
00:06:32.460
So that's, and that, and that is a form of disrespect early on, but then you were no longer
00:06:39.520
his executive producer and take us to the night that you were at this bar on the Upper West side.
00:06:45.620
What were you all going there for? Um, there was a going away party. I had moved on to the entertainment
00:06:54.400
side of ABC and I had just finished producing. I don't know if you remember David Blaine's, uh,
00:07:04.720
Lincoln center to our live special where he lived in a bubble for a week and he went for the breath hold,
00:07:13.380
uh, world record. And I had produced that special, but someone from ABC was leaving primetime live
00:07:23.380
and had invited me to the going away party. Now I made it a habit not to go. I rarely,
00:07:32.800
I did anything more than drop in to a going away party. I always felt that people's arrivals
00:07:42.160
should be celebrated and not, you know, but I would always be up for a respectful toast.
00:07:51.100
I'd be there for the toast and wish them luck in the next chapter and leave. You know, I had no desire
00:08:00.360
to, you know, spend a night drinking with people who worked for me. I was the boss. I felt that was
00:08:07.760
not appropriate. So, but I was invited and, um, I was honored to be invited because I wasn't there
00:08:17.760
anymore. And I thought I would just drop in, have a quick toast, meet my husband there because we were
00:08:27.680
driving back to Connecticut, um, from Manhattan together. So I thought we'd meet there. He usually
00:08:37.520
would just pick me up, you know, outside the building, but I thought let's meet here and then
00:08:43.840
we can go together, go home. Okay. So you go into the bar and Chris Cuomo sees you and what happens?
00:08:52.880
He walked right into the bar, walked right over to me, um, gave me a bear hug, slipped one hand down
00:09:04.940
my body to my buttocks and squeezed really hard on my cheek while saying, I can do this to you now that
00:09:18.620
you're no longer my boss. And I pushed him away and said, no, you can't. And when, as I pushed him away
00:09:29.540
and stepped back, it revealed that my husband was sitting on a very low ottoman, which you couldn't
00:09:39.400
see him. You know, while I was talking to people I worked with, he was just sitting there drinking
00:09:44.340
a diet Coke, you know, waiting for the, to leave. He didn't know anybody. And, um,
00:09:51.320
so he saw everything. It was right in front of him. Maybe I love eye level at this moment. Here's
00:10:02.120
this guy who's, you know, an anchor, a talent at the, at the network. You're in a very well-respected
00:10:09.220
position there. You've been there almost 20 years. And what goes through your head as this guy has the
00:10:15.260
nerve to squeeze your ass? It was belittling. It was clearly a power trip. It, it, to make me feel,
00:10:28.340
you know, you're no longer my boss. I can do anything I want with you. You know, he knew he,
00:10:37.860
something in his head said he couldn't do that when I was his boss. Maybe he thought he would get,
00:10:45.980
you know, I would fire him or something. Uh, but it was meant to diminish, uh, Chris Cuomo's over six
00:10:57.380
feet tall. I'm five, two, I'm under a hundred pounds. And it, it was, uh, it,
00:11:07.860
it was overpowering and I certainly didn't like it.
00:11:13.460
To me, I feel like anyone who is that brazen with a female work colleague, especially one who
00:11:20.480
had just been above them on the power totem pole, uh, must've done it before. I just, that doesn't
00:11:27.360
sound like somebody who's experimenting with that kind of behavior for the first time. What do you
00:11:32.620
think? I really don't know. I didn't discuss it as you know, until now. So it's not like I was,
00:11:43.520
um, you know, talking to everybody at work and that it was like the buzz. Then I just left, went home
00:11:53.140
and, uh, I didn't report it. Did you talk to anybody about it there? Did you, you know,
00:12:00.380
do you go to like a colleague and say, Holy cow? I mentioned it to, you know, to, um,
00:12:08.560
a close colleague at, you know, I had moved on and it was a prime time, but I called a somebody that I
00:12:16.540
had remained close to at good morning, America, one of the senior producers and said, you know,
00:12:22.900
because people who knew that, and I, that he was just more about this arrogant frat boy personality.
00:12:32.200
And I said, you won't believe what happened. And it's not. So I, I talked to a friend at the time
00:12:39.820
and, uh, and just really talked to my husband about it. And my husband has always said, and it's
00:12:49.360
interesting. I heard from another, you know, when I, when the editorial was published, I heard from
00:12:58.340
Brian Rooney, who was an ABC correspondent. And he said to me, he was the first person who called
00:13:06.300
early in the morning and said, Shelley, I think there are two kinds of men in the workplace.
00:13:13.420
One, the, who behaves like Chris Cuomo and the other has no, cannot fathom ever behaving like that.
00:13:25.400
Yeah. He said, I just, I can't imagine, you know, manhandling, uh, one of my female colleagues,
00:13:36.960
you know, and my husband always said that, that he would like read about sexual harassment
00:13:42.320
and he was, you know, a boss who hired lots of women and lots of women, vice presidents.
00:13:49.100
He just could never believe either. Like, uh, what am I the nerd? I mean, I don't get it. I don't get
00:13:57.540
how people gentlemen, he's a normal man, a normal man doesn't behave like this at the office. My husband
00:14:05.300
too, is the CEO of a company for a long time would never dream of behaving this way. I think about my
00:14:11.400
pal Janice Dean married to a firefighter, you know, he's around a lot of guys with a lot of
00:14:16.260
testosterone. Never, never that most men do not behave like this, but Chris Cuomo. And as we now
00:14:26.100
know, his brother, Andrew seem to behave differently and, and look at women differently. And your op-ed was
00:14:33.720
very well-timed because not only did Chris defend his brother, Andrew, we now know, but was actively
00:14:40.620
involved in trying to diminish the women who accused him. And people said, ah, it's his
00:14:45.520
brother. And I said, no, you advise your brother as a brother. You call him after hours and say,
00:14:50.580
brother, you know, I'm here for you. You know, look, come over, let's have a beer. You don't
00:14:54.260
actively enjoy, uh, join the strategy sessions, trying to tear down the women as just cancel
00:14:59.800
culture warriors. And he's been given a total passport by CNN. Well, that was the reason it
00:15:06.820
wasn't the timing. That's the timing I selected. You know, I got a lot of like pushback on social
00:15:14.640
media. Like, why did I wait 16 years? Well, I, I didn't wait 16 years, you know, I wasn't lying
00:15:25.080
in wait. I just had something to say now. Um, and what I had to say after 40 years of experiencing
00:15:38.580
and advocating against harassment in the workplace, I, I saw a moment where people were being held
00:15:49.660
accountable as the enablers. I wrote about Chris Cuomo in this editorial, not just to say he was my
00:16:00.120
sexual harasser. I wrote about him really because he was Andrew Cuomo's enabler and Andrew Cuomo,
00:16:12.040
when women started to come forward from accuser number one, Andrew Cuomo wrapped himself in this
00:16:23.580
protective shield of a crisis management team that he called his inner circle. And his inner circle
00:16:33.900
were people who used to be his chief of staff, you know, people who had very big deal jobs in, you
00:16:42.820
know, outside of government. And they came back to, you know, to help him manage this crisis. And,
00:16:52.080
and, and work with Andrew Cuomo's paid staff, but the inner circle was not paid. They were not
00:17:01.600
government employees, so they could operate in any way they wanted. And they were not accountable to
00:17:09.500
the pack taxpayers. And some of them, um, literally be their first reaction was let's have a smear
00:17:20.920
campaign against, uh, against, uh, against accuser. Number one, I carefully read the AG's report,
00:17:30.760
which was not just one volume. I, there are three volumes of evidence and I read every email,
00:17:40.440
every phone call, every spreadsheet of everything that they were doing, because I wanted to make sure
00:17:48.420
if I called somebody out as an enabler that they really were. And Chris Cuomo actually came in
00:17:57.720
and he may have come in before, but the evidence proves that Chris Cuomo actively came into the inner
00:18:07.340
circle at the time of accuser number two. And that's when he went from being copied on emails,
00:18:18.300
to writing the emails, to leading. This is what Andrew must say right away. And he must address this.
00:18:31.860
And it was a strategy and the strategy with accuser number two, um, which now the New York Times is on
00:18:41.560
to the strategy. Charlotte Bennett was accuser. Number one backfired when we launched a smear campaign.
00:18:51.800
So let's, let's be really nice to accuser number two. Let's say, let's make sure we say she is a valued
00:19:02.240
member of the team, but it's all a con game to them. They don't, they don't really know, you know,
00:19:12.460
we'll say, we'll, we'll smear this one. We'll be nice to this one. It's just like, nobody's being treated like,
00:19:21.800
a victim coming. No, no one, no one gives a damn whether Andrew Cuomo actually did it.
00:19:27.540
They're being managed. And so the strategy for Charlotte Bennett is now say, she's a valued
00:19:36.700
member of the team. And this is what, you know, Chris's is, you know, promoting and, but we'll still
00:19:46.020
deny their claims. Well, denying, denying that there was ever sexual, it's, it's calling them a liar.
00:19:55.500
It's saying you're a liar. Whether you, you make it generic, you're discounting what these women are
00:20:04.960
saying. And Chris Cuomo, you know, and his whole thing, then he's, again, I apologize for it. Well,
00:20:14.060
there's just so much you can, these are big ethics breaches. Here's my, you know, and he played,
00:20:23.400
you can understand, you know, I'm a brother and my family comes first and everybody loved that.
00:20:30.840
And that seemed to satisfy everyone. What he did was he advised him without disclosing it and then
00:20:37.840
went in the anchor chair night after night. And only when he got outed, he was outed as having
00:20:43.380
advised Andrew Cuomo. Did he come on the air and then try to lecture us on how deeply he cares about
00:20:49.140
women and sexual harassment? Here is that soundbite. It's number one for my team.
00:20:54.640
You're straight with me. I'll be straight with you. Obviously, I'm aware of what's going on with my
00:21:00.060
brother. And obviously, I cannot cover it because he is my brother. Now, of course, CNN has to cover
00:21:09.980
it. They have covered it extensively and they will continue to do so. I have always cared very deeply
00:21:19.360
about these issues and profoundly so. I just wanted to tell you that. He cares very deeply about sexual
00:21:27.180
harassment. Profoundly so. Your reaction when you saw that. Well, I knew he was lying. I knew he was
00:21:35.160
lying and that he was a good liar. He was a convincing liar. And that really, that was, I believe it was March
00:21:47.500
1st. And that's when I sat down and really thought, I want to see what, if I wrote something
00:21:57.720
about accountability, I want to see what it would look like. So I wrote my first draft after he said
00:22:05.740
that. And would he take any, would he take any real accountability, any responsibility? Because
00:22:12.640
you tell me, Shelly, I mean, you, in your New York Times op-ed, you print his written apology to you
00:22:20.580
after that night. He saw your husband. He knew he had stepped in it. You said, he said, I can do this
00:22:27.260
now that you're no longer my boss. And you said, no, you can't. So he knows he stepped in it. And you
00:22:33.620
printed his apology email to you. This is back on June 1st, 2005 at 6.30 PM. You can look it up
00:22:40.760
online if you want to read it yourself. It says, now that I think of it, he writes to you, I'm ashamed
00:22:45.820
though. My hearty greeting was a function of being glad to see you. And he goes on to say something
00:22:54.860
about Christian Slater just got in trouble for this, although he had negative attention, but,
00:22:59.080
and I didn't, he says, so pass along my apology to your very good husband, right? The apology is to
00:23:06.100
your husband. Um, and I apologize to you as well. He adds on afterward for even putting you in such
00:23:13.940
a position. Next time I will remember the lesson, no matter how happy I am to see you. So he was going
00:23:21.480
to remember the lesson. You tell me what you thought about that quote apology and whether it was
00:23:28.840
sincere. There's nothing sincere about that apology that Chris Cuomo is a lawyer. And that to me felt
00:23:39.580
like a, an apology to my husband because he was embarrassed. It felt there's one other sentence in
00:23:48.840
there. Um, that I would, you know, as a husband, I would have been upset seeing my wife padded as such. Well, as a
00:24:03.000
lawyer, he's memorializing a false narrative. I was not padded. I was groped, grabbed. Um, that pat is quite a
00:24:17.100
different, uh, different, uh, experience and talking about his intent that, you know, he had pure intent.
00:24:29.260
What's interesting is that's, that's gaslighting. That is, is, uh, making the reader of that assume,
00:24:40.320
you know, Christian Slater had negative intent and intent and he had pure intent. I don't know that
00:24:48.800
his, I don't know that, that he's right about Christian Slater. I don't know what his intent was.
00:24:56.960
And, you know, um, and I don't know what Chris Cuomo's intent was. I think his, personally,
00:25:05.140
his intent was to belittle his former boss and to exercise some, you know, jungle tribal, you know,
00:25:16.340
uh, I'm the king of the jungle thing over a female boss. Um, talking about intent,
00:25:24.920
if you really want to apologize to somebody is really awkward. Uh, and, and then to say,
00:25:35.140
to bring up Christian Slater. So Christian Slater had been arrested the day before Chris Cuomo
00:25:48.140
groped me and it was all over the New York tabloids. It was the water cooler story of the day. Can you
00:25:58.580
imagine? And up until that point, none of us knew that, that you could be arrested for grabbing a
00:26:08.340
woman's butt in that way. Yeah. And Chris Slater was drunk and he, he grabbed some woman's behind on
00:26:14.680
the street in New York and got arrested. Yeah. But he got arrested and it, it, we all learned it was
00:26:21.780
water cooler. Everybody was talking about it the next day that we all learned it's a third degree
00:26:29.560
sexual assault. And I just thought, Whoa, like who knew that? You know, I certainly didn't feel like
00:26:41.000
I was sexually assaulted, but under the law, that's, it's a chargeable offense. So if he,
00:26:48.780
if he, if Chris Cuomo knew that, why did he do it? And you're right to point out the size
00:26:57.460
differential between the two of you, because that also, I mean, a man like that understands
00:27:02.600
the physical advantage he has over a woman like you, uh, though he didn't have the power advantage
00:27:08.260
at ABC over you. And there's no question in my mind that is, that was a factor in his behavior.
00:27:14.780
I can tell you, and you know, this too, and every woman listening to this and man knows
00:27:18.920
we've all gone to work functions where we are overjoyed to see somebody that we haven't seen
00:27:24.000
in a week or more, and you couldn't be more delighted. And we don't grab their backsides
00:27:30.360
and squeeze it in front of a bunch of work colleagues. He was absolutely trying to diminish
00:27:36.220
you. I a hundred percent agree with this. And I've been down this road enough times to know.
00:27:40.020
Um, and, and that's the man who reared his ugly head when his brother got caught doing that same
00:27:46.540
stuff to women who worked for him. His first instinct was not, let's find out whether this
00:27:52.700
is a problem. And these women actually have an issue. And my brother maybe has an issue. It was
00:27:57.640
get them, get them. And CNN has failed to reconcile with the reality of the man they have sitting in
00:28:04.600
that anchor chair at 9 PM. Instead, they've sicked him on women on his staff and within the organization
00:28:12.120
who are now one by one coming out, talking about his bully behavior. And we'll get to the latest one
00:28:18.020
right after this quick break. Uh, so much still to go over with Shelly, former executive producer at
00:28:23.360
ABC, also executive, uh, at ABC accusing Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her up next. We'll get to
00:28:30.860
some of what I just mentioned along with, um, um, the me too reckoning and, uh, our own shared history
00:28:37.120
when it comes to Roger Ailes. Joining me today is Shelly Ross. She's a former executive producer
00:28:48.440
at ABC 17 years. She was there and CBS executive producer as well, who has accused CNN's Chris Cuomo
00:28:55.120
of sexually harassing her when they were both at ABC back in 2005. So let me just jump back to that
00:29:02.280
2005 moment. And he sent you that email. Shelly, did you respond to that email either with your own
00:29:08.380
email or in person? No. And, uh, I really think if you are friends and I've had, you know, plenty of
00:29:18.140
friends who have said things that are, and colleagues said things that were wrong, got a little too,
00:29:26.220
you know, handsy having a drink and it was different. It was, um, it was people who respected me and then
00:29:38.620
said, did I really say that last night? Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. And you really, it's different
00:29:47.260
when somebody really is your friend. And if they do something overboard, if they're happy to see you,
00:29:55.220
I think you don't get like a legal note of apology to your husband. You get like a phone call that says,
00:30:05.360
oh, I just, I'm so embarrassed. I don't know why I was such a knucklehead.
00:30:13.700
Or you walk into somebody's office. He walks into your office. That's,
00:30:17.260
the more likely reasonable scenario and say, oh my God, please forgive me. What a dope. But this,
00:30:23.560
yes, this was a CYA because he recognized he had offended you. He'd done it in front of witnesses
00:30:28.600
and it could come back to haunt him. I've got to ask you about your husband, David, because
00:30:33.780
your poor husband must've been like, what on earth?
00:30:38.280
Well, my husband was, we were both shocked. I have to say, we just left. We don't even remember
00:30:51.760
like, I remember my husband standing up and looking at him. And I remember looking at Chris
00:31:01.660
Cuomo. And I'm sure something was said. And we just left. We, neither of us remember anything,
00:31:10.760
but like getting out of that room very quickly and heading home.
00:31:19.800
It was just, well, look that some people online are like, why didn't your husband deck him? It's
00:31:24.520
like, okay, have you seen Chris Cuomo with his weird steroid infused muscles, putting out videotape
00:31:29.780
of himself, but threatening to beat up everybody. I mean, please. And David was a gentleman. He got
00:31:34.960
his wife out of there and you did the right thing. Well, it's so funny because some of the backlash and
00:31:41.380
a lot of the, the social media comments of like, you know, well, what about the husband? How could
00:31:48.820
he just sit there? Why didn't he do something? And my poor husband looked at me the other day and said,
00:31:55.120
when did I become the bad guy? No, he's not the bad guy. My husband's never lifted his hand
00:32:02.620
or resorted to violence in his entire life, nor would he. Nor should he have been put in that
00:32:08.700
position to begin with. I I'll note for the record. I don't know that it's a fact. Chris
00:32:12.440
Cuomo has taken steroids. It just looks like that to me. Um, I want to ask you this. So you come out
00:32:18.920
with this op-ed and one of the things you add and you felt it was important to add was that you don't
00:32:24.360
want to see Chris Cuomo fired from his job at CNN. I had Tucker, I had Tucker Carlson on the show the
00:32:30.560
other week and I disagreed with you because I think he's had a pattern of bullying, dishonest behavior,
00:32:36.880
but why don't you want to see him fired? I've been in this fight for equality in,
00:32:46.400
in the way people are, women and men are treated in the workplace. It's 40 years now and nothing's
00:32:54.040
worked. Um, you know, calling lawyers didn't work, uh, sexual harass, corporate training for sexual
00:33:04.760
harassment. Hasn't worked for times up where, you know, where people were getting fired, you know,
00:33:14.180
within 36 hours up for some deserved it because they were really sexually assaulting women and,
00:33:24.600
you know, things that, that you could go to jail for. Corporations were clearing them up,
00:33:31.200
but four years of times up didn't change anything. And then we, we have, you know, uh, things happening
00:33:40.000
at ABC and, and where they're refusing investigations and outside investigators and Andrew Cuomo with this.
00:33:51.720
And I realized the discussion has to move to the enablers at ABC. It's clear.
00:34:02.020
They all knew what was going on. Well, why do you say that? Cause you, you didn't report it. I mean,
00:34:07.760
you only mentioned it to it. No, no, not me, not me. I'm saying the recent issues. No, nobody knew about
00:34:15.120
me. And again, I wouldn't have called this, uh, you know, I'd call for, for what happened to me.
00:34:23.280
Yeah. Yeah. There was a report. I should clarify. There was a report about a G, a GMA producer who
00:34:28.500
allegedly, uh, harassed some women. No, there's law, there's lawsuits. There are multiple lawsuits
00:34:35.080
against somebody who I knew and was quite fond of. And I actually wrote something like when the
00:34:44.240
harasser in the headlines is somebody you adore, that's happening to a lot of us that, you know,
00:34:52.800
that we didn't know something was going on. It's, um, but there were, you know, women at ABC reporting
00:35:02.980
things, you know, hostile environments and, and, you know,
00:35:09.380
So now we've seen it across the board is your point. We've certainly seen it at CBS. Yeah. And,
00:35:13.760
and, and, um, I just thought time's up, didn't work. Matt, the, the shame of the public shaming of
00:35:24.940
Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, that didn't change anything. So I, I want to move it for, I just want
00:35:33.920
to see it stop. I want to see it changed. So I proposed that, that CNN, you know, not take any
00:35:44.480
disciplinary action against Chris Cuomo, but instead give us, give him an assignment to study
00:35:55.260
and report on what sexual harassment is in the workplace, what gender bias is and have him go
00:36:06.440
on a journey and then do town meetings with experts and women. Who would watch that? I don't want to see
00:36:16.060
him do that. That would be so insincere. Oh no. You only do it if it's sincere. Yeah. You can't,
00:36:23.540
he can't take it. He hasn't stopped his bullying behavior though. You know, the latest report.
00:36:28.720
I think that every, I like to think that everybody can have a second chance,
00:36:33.940
that everybody can be rehabilitated, that everybody can be educated. I really go back to
00:36:43.500
the great Desmond Tutu and what could have been worse than taking a country through
00:36:53.060
the end of apartheid, where people were murdered because of the color of their skin. And he came
00:37:03.460
up with a truth and reconciliation plan that everybody, you can't hide it. You can't lie anymore.
00:37:13.920
You can't spin it anymore. Everybody has to come forward and tell the truth about what happened.
00:37:23.740
And then you, you reconcile. Well, that would have to require, as you say, sincerity and a true
00:37:30.540
change of spots. And that's just not what we're seeing with him at all. You know, from what he did
00:37:36.020
to you, to the lies he's told on the air about his COVID recovery, coming out of the basement,
00:37:41.620
pretending that was his first time out, which was a lie, pretending he hadn't already been
00:37:47.500
And then wait, and then let me just get to this. I don't want to lose Melanie Buck. Okay. This is a
00:37:51.780
female executive producer of his at CNN. You were at ABC. So, you know, I could almost see Jeff
00:37:58.300
Zucker saying, okay, that was years before he came to me. This is a woman who is at CNN,
00:38:03.160
and the female producer of his show, Cuomo Primetime, who reportedly, this is a page six
00:38:08.440
report, begged to leave his show after they clashed over significant differences. She felt
00:38:13.600
threatened by him, is the report. She asked to be removed from him because she couldn't work with
00:38:21.140
him anymore. They moved her over. Now she's going to be working on CNN Plus, which I think is just
00:38:25.440
their digital property. But, you know, it doesn't escape me, Shelley, that Melanie, so she has a
00:38:32.060
clash with him. She feels threatened by him. She's got to move to the digital side, as opposed to
00:38:36.500
this primetime post where she's the executive producer. It's a much more powerful role, as you
00:38:40.220
well know. The woman always gets moved off. That's what we saw with Andrew Cuomo, too.
00:38:47.900
I'm sick of it. I want to see him pay a price, not her.
00:38:50.720
Well, in addressing her, I read the page six item. I don't put a lot into page six because
00:39:00.240
I know that they have written many items that were all out just lies about me.
00:39:08.840
That's true, too. I've been there, too, I have to admit.
00:39:11.320
They have one source. So now the only interesting thing is that she hasn't denied it.
00:39:24.720
Now, although, you know, when I she said we ultimately had significant differences.
00:39:29.720
I asked to leave the show. I've moved on. I'm looking forward to my latest role with CNN Plus.
00:39:33.980
I spent two years as an EP on his show. I'm proud to have left it at number one.
00:39:37.340
CNN. There's only so much you can say when you're still working for the company. That's obvious.
00:39:40.360
Yeah, I feel that if it's true, I feel like she must be under so much pressure and terrified
00:39:48.440
about her job and everything. This can't be, you know, coming forward is is not for the faint hearted.
00:39:59.360
Mm hmm. You know, they will. They, you know, there are are dark forces that are, you know,
00:40:09.840
an invisible inner circle. People with, you know, trying to protect the company.
00:40:16.980
They it's it. It really I feel really scared for her.
00:40:22.820
Well, and here's the reality. I feel also CNN. You've got Jeff Zucker, who did not fire Jeffrey
00:40:28.300
Toobin for masturbating on the air while on a New York, a New Yorker Zoom call. But he was
00:40:35.400
employed at CNN. Yeah, not fire him. He did not get rid of Don Lemon, who's been credibly accused,
00:40:40.360
though Don denies it, with a third party independent witness, a guy who worked with
00:40:45.660
the accuser of sexually assaulting a man in a bar. You've got this against Chris Cuomo,
00:40:50.580
you plus this executive producer. I personally know somebody at CNN who I know has complained
00:40:56.180
about his bully tactics. It goes on and on. So I understand one incident here or there. And I
00:41:02.460
also understand people do like to accuse famous people of things that they haven't necessarily done.
00:41:06.280
But this is a pattern. And I really do wonder about the women inside of CNN and whether they
00:41:11.460
feel safe working around this guy and the other guys. I also feel badly for Brian Stelter,
00:41:19.740
who has been totally compromised. He is the chief media critic. He has a great resume.
00:41:27.780
He really is a good reporter. And he said nothing about it. And Brian Stelter knows me. He knows the
00:41:41.060
position of authority I held at, you know, multiple networks. He's interviewed me. He's actually done like
00:41:52.120
he wrote a New York Times feature about me when I took over the CBS early show. And I wrote an editorial
00:42:03.740
that was published in the New York Times that literally went viral. I've seen it picked up as far
00:42:14.100
away as the Taipei Times. It was trending on Twitter, you know, Twitter burn up. And these are all things
00:42:26.220
that are Brian Stelter's beat. Did he not report on this at all? No. And he came under fire for not
00:42:37.940
reporting on it. But that where Brian Stelter is compromised, is I read over the weekend, when, when the
00:42:48.700
House bill, you know, was going into the wee hours of the morning. And Brian Stelter did a column, how CNN and
00:42:58.440
MSNBC were live with the coverage for, you know, in Congress, as you know, one o'clock in the morning,
00:43:07.260
midnight. And, you know, even as early as 11 o'clock, he wrote that, that Fox News was, had programming on
00:43:18.240
tape. Well, I think that Brian Stelter lost his, his moral authority to quote on what other networks
00:43:31.180
cover and choose to cover and don't cover. Mm hmm. Yeah, well, you know, I would make the case that happened a long
00:43:39.360
time prior to your op ed. But I see your point. And it's, it's too convenient. Because if this had been an accusation
00:43:45.800
against Tucker Carlson, Brian Kilmeade, Brett Baer, you know, any of these guys at Fox, you can guarantee
00:43:53.140
Brian Stelter would have found his pen, and it would have been written about. Stand by, Shelly,
00:43:58.340
I want to pick it up with you in just one minute.
00:44:04.980
Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. Joining me today, Shelly Ross, a former executive producer for
00:44:10.180
many, many years at ABC News and at CBS News, who has accused CNN's Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing
00:44:17.420
her back in their ABC days together. So let me ask you this, given what we were just talking about,
00:44:24.780
what do you think the women at CNN, if there are other women who have had trouble with Chris Cuomo
00:44:30.100
or anybody else, but since we're talking about Cuomo, we'll leave it on him.
00:44:33.660
How can they complain, right? So when they have a management that doesn't seem too interested in,
00:44:40.600
in pushing back on this kind of behavior? They can't, they can't complain, because the person in
00:44:48.560
charge has made it clear that Chris Cuomo can do anything he wants with impunity. So how can he
00:45:00.040
complain? How can anybody complain without, uh, women are, are already terrified to come forward
00:45:10.560
and you don't want to get anybody in trouble on one hand. And on the other hand, uh, you know,
00:45:20.600
you're sort of, if you've been in the workplace any period of time, you know, it's going to reflect
00:45:27.980
badly on you. It's, it's, it's like the pendulum has swung us back into the dark ages where it's
00:45:34.820
like, where women, which is no longer allowed to happen, you know, used to be questioned if they
00:45:41.980
were reported a rape, well, what were you wearing? Like they invited it. And even in his most recent
00:45:51.920
comment to the New York times, Chris Cuomo, when, you know, when the New York times called him for a
00:45:59.020
response said, you know, as Shelley acknowledges, our interaction was not of a sexual nature. Well,
00:46:10.080
what I want to say is there was never our interaction. He's already gaslighting everybody in that response.
00:46:20.600
Right. Like you were, I was, I was not a participant. He walked into a room and grabbed
00:46:28.980
me. This is not our interaction. So he is very clever about parsing words. And like, I was some
00:46:39.900
kind of a, you know, a part of that. As opposed to women are of his behavior. Wait, let me stand you
00:46:47.600
by apologies. I've got to pay the bills. So I can do a squeeze in a break. We're going to come right
00:46:51.660
back with, with Shelley. I will say this. If you are a woman and you have a complaint, you can email
00:46:56.580
me, email me at devil may care questions, questions with plural. My executive producer is one who reads
00:47:01.860
those at devil may care media.com. Uh, more with Shelley Ross right after this.
00:47:08.600
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show. Joining me today is Shelley Ross. She's a former executive
00:47:17.760
producer at ABC and CBS who's accused CNN's Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her back in 2005 when
00:47:24.940
they were at ABC news. Shelley, that sadly was not your first foray into the world of sexual harassment.
00:47:31.440
And you came out publicly back in 2016 and told your story about being harassed by Roger Ailes. And as
00:47:42.080
the world now knows, I was also harassed by him very young in my career. So can we just spend a minute
00:47:48.620
on that? What, what did you do? He, he proposed a sexual relationship with you when you were young in
00:47:55.000
your career? Oh, this was, um, an interview for my first network job. And, uh, he had, you know,
00:48:07.280
offered the, we had the job interview in person in LA and it just went great. And, uh, at,
00:48:18.340
and he offered me the job. Um, and I accepted it and said to call business affairs and I got ahold of,
00:48:27.940
you know, we put everything in motion. And then he asked for a second meeting the following day,
00:48:34.520
you know, um, he was still in town and we would have a lunch. And in the second meeting, um,
00:48:43.540
very early on, he looked at me and said, how long have you known you were sexy?
00:48:53.740
And I was so shocked and embarrassed that I, I literally like couldn't make eye contact.
00:49:04.460
And I literally put my head down and I just, I remember staring at my feet and saying, this,
00:49:13.560
this is really embarrassing. And, uh, he continued and I tried to change the subject. I tried to,
00:49:26.220
you know, if you say to somebody, this is really embarrassing, I'd like to talk about the show.
00:49:33.320
You're sending a message back that you're embarrassed and you're not interested, but he
00:49:41.160
wanted to tell me his philosophy that how he believed in loyalty and career advancement and how
00:49:53.020
he felt having, and he used the word sexual alliance. You know, if we would have a sexual
00:50:01.340
alliance, it would be amazing for both of our careers, both of us would benefit.
00:50:11.960
This was 1981. This is 40 years ago, 40 years ago, which is unbelievable. And 40 years ago,
00:50:23.580
you know, there, there was no me too movement. You were there thinking that, I mean, I knew sexual
00:50:35.440
harassment existed. I hadn't really experienced it in such a way. Uh, so I really, um, I, he said,
00:50:49.280
think about it, you know, I'm here at this hotel over, you know, and, uh, call me and let me know.
00:50:58.440
And I, I just spoke, I said, you know, I don't even know you. I don't, you don't even know me.
00:51:06.980
We don't even know if we would like each other. I didn't know what to say.
00:51:10.500
Right. And he said, Oh, well, if you just, uh, if it's just that you need time to get to know me,
00:51:18.620
I can wait. And I said, well, what does that mean? You'll come into my office once a week,
00:51:26.920
once a month and say, are you ready yet? And you know, I could never work under those,
00:51:34.880
that kind of pressure. And I went and called the lawyer and we'll just fast forward to
00:51:45.000
that lawyer, you know, contacted NBC's lawyers and all hell broke loose in Roger Ailes world.
00:51:54.700
And he was put on a conference call with three of the biggest lawyers in entertainment business
00:52:01.380
who, you know, and the one thing about Roger is he never denied it. When they confronted him with
00:52:11.540
this, uh, you know, and he withdrew the, the job offer, by the way, at the end of the second meeting.
00:52:20.180
And, uh, you know, he, uh, his reaction to the, these three lawyers calling him out on this was,
00:52:32.460
Hey guys, I'm single. And he said, well, that means nothing in this conversation and whatever they
00:52:41.780
said or did, um, at the time, this is how, you know, 40 years ago, how it was handled was
00:52:50.440
let's, we have to make this scandal go away. And the best way to do it is to apologize,
00:52:59.500
Roger to apologize and get her to take the job offer.
00:53:05.120
And just jumping forward. Cause I, I, I don't have that much time with you and I have,
00:53:08.200
there's so much. So he, he apologized and you guys went on to have a good relationship and I
00:53:13.060
can relate to, well, not the apology to the, to, to the moving on and finding a way to have a good
00:53:18.340
relationship. Um, but it is interesting to me because some 25 years later, I would find myself
00:53:24.460
in an, in an office with Roger Ailes asking me about being sexy, being lectured to on the value
00:53:31.100
of loyalty, which led to a months long campaign to try to get me into bed. And ultimately him grabbing
00:53:37.980
me and trying to shove his tongue down my throat. Um, and here's what, here's what I wanted to get
00:53:42.920
your reaction to Shelly. I, this is, I've never asked anybody to hear this because I really thought
00:53:48.180
I would be that he would be so scared by these three lawyer, NBC lawyers, you know, and, you know,
00:53:58.820
putting the fear of God in him that I really thought I was the first and the last,
00:54:04.380
that I was going to go through the workplace and change one. Here's what I don't like one at a time.
00:54:11.400
You, you did what you could do. You went to a lawyer, you stood up for yourself in no world.
00:54:17.360
Once I found out that Roger was a serial harasser, I can speak for my pal, Janice Dean on this,
00:54:22.100
who was also one of his targets in no world. Did I ever look at you or Lori Loon or any woman who I
00:54:28.840
found out later had come before me and blame the woman? Never. Women have been dealing with this
00:54:35.320
for a long, long time, trying to navigate it as best they could against a system that was not on
00:54:40.180
their side. And this is, this is one of my objections to the movie bombshell where they
00:54:46.120
created a fictional character played by Margot Robbie, who at the end of the movie blamed her harassment,
00:54:52.340
not on Roger Ailes, but on me. And I wondered what your thought was on this weird Hollywood take
00:55:01.040
that, you know, somehow it always gets back to the women that, especially in media, it's always our
00:55:08.120
fault. It's all, there's always a way of blaming the woman. Well, nobody is to blame for Roger Ailes.
00:55:16.840
And I told him that. And I, you know, when I made a decision to go public, it was really to show that
00:55:27.520
this was such a, you know, my, I was probably the, you know, in 1981, I had to be at least among the
00:55:36.680
first. And that, you know, so many people were judgmental of Laurie Loon. Laurie Loon made,
00:55:46.960
you know, a Monica Lewinsky mistake, you know, Earl, as a young girl, impressionable girl,
00:55:55.160
she, she went along with it and literally had a breakdown over it. That's where it leads.
00:56:02.460
It never leads to a good place. And nobody, you know, she was exploited as a young girl. That's
00:56:10.940
why, you know, I want to say something. I have friends in the military and in the military,
00:56:17.440
they court-martial you for this. The military has strictest rules. It's called fraternization.
00:56:27.840
And you can't get romantically involved within the chain of your command because it destroys
00:56:38.960
military readiness. It destroys the team for all the reasons in the civilian world. It destroys
00:56:49.760
everything as well. The military is smart enough to actually court-martial you over it.
00:56:56.420
No questions. I mean, you go to a trial, but that's it. You're kicked out. There's a reason
00:57:05.800
this is not allowed. Our national security, they think that if people were allowed to fraternize,
00:57:15.040
that our national security would be impaired. It's that serious.
00:57:20.460
I mean, it's complicated because you, a lot of people meet their spouses at work. I mean,
00:57:25.560
maybe less so. That's not in the chain of command. That's right. But I mean, you got like the head
00:57:29.800
of babies. Oh, I had plenty of producers. We could go down the line. Plenty of producers who met and
00:57:35.900
married and had lived happily ever after and had babies. And there's one, you know, yeah. And I think
00:57:44.400
that that's a problem. I think that Bob Iger being married and then finding his true love
00:57:51.140
and having her stay there and Les Moonves and David Weston and Jeff Zucker and Roger Ailes,
00:58:04.140
I think, you know, it's, it's more accepted when the person, when they get married and it does happen.
00:58:14.660
But I think there clearly there were lines crossed on the way to that happy marriage. So I, you know,
00:58:28.000
I, I'm not the, the judge and jury, but I think it should be, um, you know, if it's true love,
00:58:38.840
then one person has to leave. Hmm. Last question. The king of England stepped down, right?
00:58:46.640
Right. Now we're going back. Um, I look at your career, you've accomplished so much. And
00:58:54.040
then I see, you know, you, you wound up leaving all, of course the, the, the necessary tabloid
00:58:59.980
reports come out that about some toxic relationship around you or bully culture. I've seen it happen to
00:59:05.420
virtually every woman who leaves our industry. You, me, Laura Logan, uh, Barbara Fidita just got
00:59:11.440
taken down. It's like, they won't let you leave without destroying you. Do you know what I mean?
00:59:16.420
And I wonder why you think our business is so disgusting to women in particular. And whether
00:59:23.060
I know you're a, you're a new grandmother now, whether this is ever an industry you could recommend
00:59:27.640
to your little granddaughter. Well, I wouldn't recommend the industry for other reasons and
00:59:37.520
more editorial, what it's become and how it's, how I would recommend journalism, real journalism to my
00:59:46.620
granddaughter. And all this, you know, the work I'm doing is really for, for future generations of
00:59:57.340
women and having this dialogue. And so many people by the social media comments I've gotten
01:00:05.340
really still don't understand, you know, it's like, what's the big deal? You know, no, I wasn't
01:00:15.260
traumatized by Chris Cuomo's actions, but I was belittled. And you, and it's, um, that's just one of
01:00:26.840
many things that went on to belittle female bosses. And I, I took, when I was at ABC, I took income
01:00:39.760
revenue from $19 million when I got to Good Morning America to nearly a hundred million dollars in five
01:00:48.960
and a half years. That's the gift that keeps on giving. I closed the gap with the, the competitors. We won
01:00:58.980
awards. I made turn Good Morning America into, you know, from a show where everybody went home at six o'clock
01:01:08.380
at night to a 24 seven news operation, um, that really had tremendous muscle. I brought
01:01:19.400
Charlie Gibson back and teamed him with Diane Sawyer and gave it a real news hep, you know, went to an, a year
01:01:31.680
before we went through nine 11 and anthrax attacks and wars. And I did a lot. Um, and when they can't
01:01:47.760
attack you on your talent, I worked five times as hard as anybody else there and put in all the hours,
01:01:58.260
you know, when you're fixing a show while you're have still have one on the air, you know, when I
01:02:06.620
got the first couple of years were 18 hour days, of course. And when they can't, and I wasn't a
01:02:16.340
perfect boss. I mean, part of no one is no, there wasn't, I was built into the cake. That's the thing.
01:02:23.160
Every, every article people see about what it's, it's, it's so often about a female boss or a female
01:02:28.800
powerful person in our industry. You remember, no, one's a perfect boss. You don't think you could
01:02:33.780
write a toxic or bully or what, you know, whatever they come at you with. You could write all that
01:02:38.520
stuff about any male in the industry, but the pattern in news is once you, once you get pushed
01:02:43.500
out, you don't just get pushed out. They destroy you. I talked about it with Laura Logan. It's disgusting
01:02:49.900
and people need to be aware that it's a dynamic by these powerful media organizations that continue
01:02:56.340
to do it with impunity. They continue to do it as they try to lecture the rest of us on morality.
01:03:05.080
No, Laura Logan is my hero and she got caught up in a bad story because CBS, which owned the
01:03:16.000
publishing company that did that book, had her do a book that was a conflict of interest in the
01:03:22.860
first place. Yeah, no, Laura, we had her on the show and it was a great, it was a great exchange and
01:03:28.000
it was a good expose of what this thing does to you. I don't know. I respect your accomplishments
01:03:36.900
I know you're continuing. I mean, you've got a great, we didn't even get to the Cure Alliance,
01:03:40.680
but it's a nonprofit group she's got going with scientists and researchers and they're trying to
01:03:44.900
end suffering by developing cures for fatal diseases. So on and on the effort to improve
01:03:49.940
our world goes. We'll continue to watch it and our love to David too, who emerges as the gentle
01:03:55.920
hero of the story. And we'll talk again. We've got Katie Kirk's book coming out.
01:04:01.600
Oh my God, you're booked. Consider yourself booked. There's a lot more to go over.
01:04:11.820
Wow. Wow. What an exchange. I want to, I want to, I need to have dinner with her. Not just,
01:04:16.100
this wasn't enough. Um, listen up next, we're going to get to another great journalist whose
01:04:20.740
name is Katie Herzog. And we're going to talk about how women are being erased from scientific
01:04:25.500
conversations. Um, it's actually getting really kind of scary now, including in the medical field
01:04:31.700
to the, to the danger of those patients involved. Uh, and what do you think about Shelley's
01:04:38.300
allegations against Chris Cuomo? Should he be fired? Call me at 833-44-MEGAN, M-E-G-Y-N. That's
01:04:49.800
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show. Everyone joining me now, journalist Katie Herzog. She's
01:04:53.780
the host of the blocked and reported podcast, which I really recommend and a writer on Substack
01:04:59.520
and other publications. And she's been doing incredible reporting on how woke ideology is
01:05:03.860
spreading in the medical industry and what that means for doctors, nurses, and all the rest of us.
01:05:08.920
Katie, great to have you here again. Thanks so much for having me back, Megan.
01:05:11.760
Okay. So you wrote, you're sort of visiting a visiting fellow on Barry Weiss's Substack and wrote
01:05:18.500
this barn burner of a report, um, after speaking to a woman, I think you called her Lauren in the
01:05:23.220
piece. Who's a med student at a top medical school who was telling you how concerned she was about woke
01:05:30.780
ideology, infecting medicine. I mean, actual science, uh, in a way that is really disturbing,
01:05:37.280
including not no longer willing to acknowledge the very real differences in health issues between men
01:05:44.480
and women, something women and their advocates have been trying to push for greater attention to
01:05:49.240
for decades. Yeah. That's sort of the irony here is that after decades of women arguing that our
01:05:56.320
health issues are not focused on, there's now this, this unfortunately sort of progressive movement
01:06:02.240
away from that where gender identity becomes, it's become this sacrosanct concept. So gender identity
01:06:07.960
has become more important in some places than biological sex. And so the student I spoke to,
01:06:13.420
um, this was at a top school at the, at the university of California system. She told me that her,
01:06:18.180
her professors will essentially get scolded, get shamed by their own students. If they talk about
01:06:24.100
biological sex. And she had lots of documentation to back this up. She sent me audio of a professor
01:06:29.860
saying profusely apologizing to his students for offending him, offending his students. Uh,
01:06:35.700
he sounded like he was about to cry and the offensive term that he used, uh, in his lecture was pregnant
01:06:41.060
women. So absurd. And it's not just him because just this week we saw the CDC use the term, uh,
01:06:49.700
pregnant people. Um, all the media seems to be going along with it. Now I saw you tweet out something
01:06:55.220
like, is this like a new style acceptance that we're no longer going to use the term women anymore,
01:07:01.700
anywhere. Cause it's what was it is NPR. I think ABC, um, a few publications just went along with
01:07:08.660
it. A lot of publications have gone along with it and it's happened remarkably quickly. It sort
01:07:12.900
of reminds me of the adoption of the term Latin X. And there's been polling on that term. And most
01:07:17.860
people who, who are considered Latin X by the media either don't know what that term is or don't like
01:07:22.740
that term. Right. I think the same thing is happening here. And I haven't seen any polling on the term
01:07:26.580
pregnant people versus pregnant women, but just intuitively there is something very bizarre about
01:07:31.580
this erasure of, of women within women's health. And yes, it's not just the CDC. It's not just the
01:07:37.460
media. It's organizations like Planned Parenthood, which, you know, should be able to use the term
01:07:41.900
women without a, without consequence. It's very strange. So it's to the point of like the danger
01:07:47.740
that's being posed now. Um, this is, I think this is from your report in 2019, the new England journal
01:07:54.600
of medicine reported the case of a 32 year old transgender man who, so transgender man, so
01:08:01.540
biological female, um, who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain and tell us what
01:08:08.860
happened. So this patient was assessed as an obese man suffering from complications of hypertension. He'd
01:08:15.720
quit taking his, his hypertension medication, um, because he, he identified himself as a trans man,
01:08:21.980
uh, the, his, his practitioners, the nurses in charge of him didn't sort of, they didn't realize
01:08:27.560
this woman in particular, didn't realize what was going on. And it turned out he was pregnant. Um,
01:08:31.860
and by the time they figured out what was happening, it was too late and the baby was gone.
01:08:35.700
And according to this report in the new England journal of medication, while this man had no idea
01:08:40.440
that he was pregnant, he was really devastated by this. Um, and something sort of the opposite of that,
01:08:45.240
of that has happened recently. A trans person is suing a, um, a hospital because they were,
01:08:50.720
a trans man is suing a hospital because he was, uh, he was given a pregnancy test and this was,
01:08:55.980
Oh, this is in Rochester, New York, right? This is right near my neck of the woods.
01:08:59.640
Yeah. Yeah. So this was considered very offensive to him and I can understand.
01:09:03.200
He's a biological female. He's in the hospital, but he lives his life as a man and they want to
01:09:08.300
give him a pregnancy test. Right. And, uh, and this patient says that his practitioners didn't use
01:09:13.360
his preferred pronouns. I think that's wrong, but if there's not an acknowledgement of biological
01:09:18.460
sex, people are going to, practitioners are going to miss things. Things are different with men and
01:09:24.220
women. When it comes to medication, dosages are different from different medications. Symptoms are
01:09:28.660
different from, uh, from different conditions. A female heart attack doesn't look like a heart
01:09:32.560
attack. It doesn't look like a male heart attack. And so in a case like this, you can see why the
01:09:36.540
practitioners would want to give everybody who, who is a female person, a pregnancy test, because if
01:09:42.100
you're like, let's say undergoing anesthesia, they need to know, and it can be a liability for these,
01:09:47.480
for these doctors, if somebody ends up being pregnant. Um, so I think there's a pretty easy
01:09:51.980
solution here, really. You can respect people's gender identity. You can respect their pronouns.
01:09:56.360
You can call them the name and the pronouns that they want, but you also need to indicate what
01:10:00.560
their biological sex is. And my wife, yeah, my wife is a, is a nurse in Seattle and at her hospital,
01:10:06.260
they have stopped marking down biological sex on intake forms. So what you get is gender identity.
01:10:11.980
It's incredibly dangerous. And, and the thing is like, this is done out of, I think some real,
01:10:18.220
some real sensitivity. People are trying to be inclusive. They are trying to do the right thing,
01:10:22.240
but there are consequences to this. And these consequences could end up hurting people,
01:10:26.180
end up hurting trans people, which is going to have the opposite of the intended effect.
01:10:29.180
Well, and, and even if you took the hardcore attitude of, well, it's only the trans community
01:10:33.160
that that's going to hurt itself by imposing these crazy rules on people. It's not true. So,
01:10:37.880
because first of all, the activists do not speak for the majority of trans people who are kind and
01:10:42.560
loving and don't want to follow all these nonsense rules or make the rest of us do it. And the second
01:10:46.580
thing is, what about that baby? Do we care about the baby who died because of this crazy PC nonsense?
01:10:51.540
Yes, we do. You know, I have to say, Katie, I, a couple of years ago, I had an ovarian cyst and it
01:10:56.700
had to come out and they said, um, we're going to take a look. And if it's, you know, wrapped around the
01:11:01.180
ovary, we'll take the ovary too. And I said, Oh, I want to take both ovaries. Cause then, you know,
01:11:05.000
I don't have to worry about ovarian cancer. And he said, that would put you into early menopause.
01:11:08.920
And Doug said the ovary stays because apparently, apparently you can worry about your sex drive
01:11:13.560
going down if you go to early menopause anyway. So, um, then the, the doctor said to me, it was a
01:11:18.560
cancer OBGYN doc. And he said, um, one thing I would recommend is while we're in there, we should
01:11:23.240
take the fallopian tubes. If you're not, if you're done having your kids, because the research shows
01:11:27.020
that virtually all or all of the most pernicious forms of ovarian cancer start in your tubes and your
01:11:32.320
fallopian tubes, I'm like, take them. I'm done. I'm so done. And, um, so I don't have any fallopian
01:11:37.740
tubes to this day. If I have to go in for some procedure, I still have to give him a pregnancy
01:11:42.280
test. I don't have any. I'm a lesbian. I can tell them there is absolutely no chance that I'm pregnant,
01:11:48.000
but you can see from a doctor's perspective, why the pregnancy test would be, it's a liability.
01:11:53.140
If you, if, you know, if I can tell a doctor, you know, I'm a lesbian. And what if it turns out
01:11:57.780
that I had a little tryst on the side and I'm pregnant and something happens. And then I sue the doctor.
01:12:01.660
This is like a pregnancy test is also not that invasive. It's not like a blood test. It's a P
01:12:08.740
test. It's crazy that we're skipping that out of a PC desire for trans, well, for biological women
01:12:15.880
who are presenting as men, trans, trans men. Right. Right. And there's this, the thing is like
01:12:21.380
within trans activism. And as you mentioned, this is not the majority of trans people. There are a
01:12:26.060
small number of basically hyper online trans people who are sort of pushing this is that they do not speak
01:12:31.460
for the majority of trans people at all. Most trans people acknowledge their own biological sex.
01:12:36.700
The thing that makes them trans is that they're trying to appear and live as the opposite sex,
01:12:42.640
but you still have to acknowledge your biological sex. You still have to take the medications every
01:12:46.400
week or every two weeks or whatever, you know, you get the surgeries, but there is this ideology
01:12:50.360
that it sounds ridiculous to even say this, but this idea that if you, that you are what you say
01:12:57.240
that you are. So if I say that I am a trans man, that means I am male. I am literally male,
01:13:02.760
which is just, it is a historical nonsense. It's not true. It's not true. You can be respectful
01:13:08.160
of somebody who is trans without signing onto that nonsense. And this, can you speak to, this is what
01:13:12.660
Lauren was trying to say to you as a med student, that she doesn't, she knows that there are medical
01:13:17.020
differences between men and women, you know, like we're women are more prone to X and men are more prone
01:13:21.560
to whatever. Um, heart disease is one of the things, you know, a heart attack presents differently
01:13:26.300
in a biological woman than it does in a biological man. But like she, she was making the point. I
01:13:30.520
don't have the time to, on my own, every single disease they present us with do the extra layer
01:13:37.220
of now let me on my own, figure out how it affects a man and a woman differently. And then when I meet
01:13:41.820
patients, spend the extra time trying to figure out, cause it's not on the chart, finding out whether
01:13:46.000
they have a biological, a different sex than how they're presenting. Yeah. She was very concerned
01:13:51.380
about this because she feels like in her school, and I should say, this is, this is just one, one
01:13:56.520
program at one school. I did hear from other students after the piece was published that
01:14:00.300
confirmed this and other, other medical schools around the country, but the piece really focused
01:14:04.860
on this one school. Um, and she was concerned that she isn't being, isn't getting instruction.
01:14:10.000
She needs on, on differences on how things present differently among, among the sexes.
01:14:15.500
And I can see why her professors would avoid this because their students act like little
01:14:20.600
stasi. I mean, they have these, uh, they have these online messaging platforms where they
01:14:25.180
give the instructors real-time feedback while they lecture. And if, if a, if a lecturer says
01:14:31.000
something problematic and that can be us using terms like male and female, the students will
01:14:35.440
complain about it. They had multiple petitions within the last year of this program, uh, trying
01:14:41.280
to basically reform these, reform these teachers, uh, their language use, you know, so they're
01:14:46.380
doing it. It's working. They're doing it and they're doing it. Yes. They are scared of their
01:14:50.700
students. Yes. You, you, um, you've got the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, Harvard
01:14:55.620
Medical School, all trying now to make the effort to divorce biological sex from gender identity,
01:15:01.140
um, and, and focus, emphasize on gender identity. Both matter. Both matter. You got the American
01:15:08.200
Psychological Association deeming terms like natal sex, birth sex, um, disparaging. Now it's only
01:15:15.400
assigned sex at birth as though biological sex is not relevant and maybe even offensive.
01:15:22.140
Right. And you can imagine a situation. So now in, in many States, maybe all States,
01:15:27.260
I'm not sure about this. You can get your, uh, your, your sex marker changed on your,
01:15:31.380
on your birth certificate and on your driver's license. So let's say a trans person, uh, gets
01:15:36.420
in a car accident and is unconscious and goes to a, goes to an ER. And then the ER, the, the
01:15:42.560
first responders there, they are, all they have is this driver's license. If the person has had
01:15:46.520
surgeries to look like a male or a female or whatever, they might not even realize the actual
01:15:51.680
biological sex of the person that they're working on. Because this, this official ID says that you
01:15:56.720
are this thing that you believe that you are. And again, you know, go back to what happened to
01:16:00.680
that baby. That baby died because they were unwilling to probe further. Uh, so this, we need
01:16:05.700
to care. I mean, this is, this is a problem and it's a problem even in the, in the psychiatric field
01:16:10.280
now too, more and more therapists are coming out and saying all people's problems are supposed to be
01:16:15.140
attributed to identity. It's no longer about Katie. What'd you go through? You know, did you have a
01:16:20.080
pain in the ass mother? Oh, well let's blame her. It's now all about, well, you're white. So you're
01:16:24.920
an oppressor. So that's probably the root of your depression. Right. And we should be careful not to
01:16:30.380
generalize too much. You know, therapists vary as much as any other, any other field, but yes,
01:16:34.940
there is this trend within, within the field of, of mental health to attribute, especially among,
01:16:41.120
among young natal females, teen girls to attribute various, you know, you go in complaining of,
01:16:47.120
of some problem. And then all of a sudden you're diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
01:16:50.860
And this isn't the first time we've seen these, these trends throughout history. There was during
01:16:55.560
the 1980s and 1990s, psychiatry, or I'm sorry, therapists were integral into the spread of the
01:17:01.140
repressed memory craze, which was widely debunked, but had all of these terrible consequences,
01:17:05.180
not just convincing people that they underwent horrific abuse, but also people actually went to jail.
01:17:10.620
Um, so yeah, it makes me very, very cautious to, uh, to ever see a therapist personally.
01:17:16.660
You don't want to leave with more problems than you came in with.
01:17:19.140
Well, and we've talked about this and I talked about it with Abigail Schreier and I know you,
01:17:22.160
you're familiar with her work, but you know, she pointed out how parents who have a child who
01:17:26.820
presents as trans, who never presented as trans before, you know, it's always a girl who's 15,
01:17:31.620
who was never no, no signs at all. And then a couple of her friends say that they're
01:17:37.900
non-binary or whatever it is. And suddenly their daughter's like, well, maybe I'm trans.
01:17:42.280
Abigail was sounding the alarm on be careful because the new standard in the psychiatric
01:17:46.480
field is affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm. And I've seen some of your reporting dovetail with that,
01:17:51.860
that like people go. And the first thing they're told is yes, your kid's actually a boy. And the
01:17:56.440
parents are like, wait, you know, she got bullied. You know, it could be any one of a number of things.
01:18:01.520
Right. Right. It's a real problem. And the standards of this have actually have,
01:18:04.180
have literally changed so that, so what the recommendations now are, are it's called
01:18:10.280
affirmative consent. So you basically tell a, tell a patient, tell the parents, you know,
01:18:15.700
there's some possibility you'll regret this, but you don't necessarily have to explore other issues
01:18:20.580
of what might be going on. Maybe issues with someone's sexual orientation or depression or
01:18:25.080
anxiety, or just like being a teen girl, which is difficult. And teen girls are notoriously prone to
01:18:30.560
social contagion and peer pressure. But it's, it's become this sort of progressive, not just talking
01:18:36.260
point, but this, this, this dogma that if someone comes and they say, I am trans, you cannot inspect
01:18:42.380
that. You cannot, you cannot ask them what else is going on. You just have to accept this. And this
01:18:47.100
is part of this is a backlash to very real gatekeeping within this field. So for decades, if you wanted to
01:18:53.380
transition, you had to live as your preferred sex, your preferred gender for two years before you were
01:18:59.660
given things like, like, uh, hormones or surgery that can be very onerous. Um, and so this is the
01:19:04.680
opposite of this. This is the, the, the backlash, the reaction to this is to basically take away all
01:19:08.880
gatekeeping. And for some people that's going to, that's going to be better. It's going to have
01:19:12.140
good outcomes, but for some people it's not, and there's going to be a certain number of false
01:19:15.860
positives who regret this. Well, and meanwhile, they're, they're performing mastectomies on girls
01:19:20.780
as young as 13, 13 double mastectomies to this called top surgery, uh, because we want to pretend
01:19:27.660
that somebody absolutely has it has gender dysphoria. And as soon as they express it,
01:19:32.100
that's what it really is. And we don't need to look further. And the reality is that the vast
01:19:37.120
majority, I mean, I've seen it, you tell me, but I've seen any place between 60%, 90% of kids who
01:19:42.460
have gender dysphoria grow out of it. And a very large percentage of them, if left to their own
01:19:49.040
devices and not perform surgery or gender, uh, hormones or any of that turn out to be gay or lesbian.
01:19:54.220
I would have been one of those kids. I was a classic tomboy and grew up to be a lesbian.
01:19:58.600
If I had been born 20 years later, I might be talking to you as a they, them, right? I probably
01:20:04.320
wouldn't be talking to you right now, but it might be a non-binary or trans right now. And, and you're
01:20:09.780
right. There's lots of studies that back up that the statistic varies, but the majority of kids,
01:20:14.900
if sort of left to their own devices will eventually grow out of this. That said, if you start
01:20:19.680
transitioning, if you start on, on hormone blockers or social transitioning, that number changes. So
01:20:25.460
people who start to go down this path are much, much likely to, the term is to cyst, but much,
01:20:30.120
much less likely to likely, excuse me, much less likely to grow out of it. If they're given some
01:20:34.520
sort of a medical intervention, you've been doing great reporting on how, if you do puberty blockers
01:20:41.140
into cross gender hormones, you, you will be infertile. Um, you can have all sorts of other problems,
01:20:47.900
but just the puberty blockers can be really problematic. Um, when it comes to, let's say
01:20:53.840
it's a girl who thinks suddenly that she's actually a boy, she takes puberty blockers. Um,
01:21:01.220
she's going to be, it's going to affect her height, right. For forevermore, like other
01:21:05.780
unforeseen consequences. These are not harmless drugs. Right. One of the clinicians I talked to told
01:21:11.220
me that in this person is skeptical of youth transition. Uh, so keep that in mind. But one of
01:21:15.260
the clinicians I talked to said, you know, the last thing that you want to do, if a girl wants to
01:21:19.860
appear to be a man, the last thing that you want to do is make her shorter. Right. And so these
01:21:24.760
people, the, the, the main puberty blocker that is given to, to natal females is Lupron, which is a
01:21:31.200
drug that's used to treat prostate cancer. And there are Lupron has been used. It's an off-label use,
01:21:36.780
but it's been used for precocious puberty. So, so girls who let's say get their periods or eight or
01:21:41.380
nine years old, it's been prescribed to them for a long time. And so we can look at the,
01:21:45.200
look at the side effects of this. There's bone density issues. As you mentioned, there's fertility
01:21:49.540
issues. Um, and this just, we just don't have good evidence that there aren't going to be
01:21:54.160
long-term side effects for people who are, who are using this now. And it's being prescribed and we
01:21:58.940
don't have great data on this, but just anecdotally it's being prescribed just much more widely than it
01:22:04.300
probably should be. Yeah. Like candy, because the standard is affirm, affirm, affirm. All right. I want to ask
01:22:08.920
you about some other reporting that you've been doing on a story that's been in the news and, and
01:22:12.620
to your credit, as usual, you're not afraid to push back against the narrative, capital T, capital N,
01:22:18.240
we're being fed, um, by some in the press. There is a story. Okay. This is not the Amy Cooper story
01:22:25.780
where she was walking the dog in Central Park. And, um, she got into a confrontation with a black man
01:22:31.540
also by the name of Cooper and they call her Central Park Karen. She lost her job. This is a different,
01:22:36.660
uh, story about a white woman and a black couple. And I think it also involves a dog.
01:22:43.980
So can you just set it up for us and set it up? What happened?
01:22:47.440
Dogs are the problem. Stay away from dog parks. Uh, that's, that's the message here. Um, so this
01:22:52.060
happened in, uh, sort of, uh, ironically named McCarran park in, in, uh, New York. This was a
01:22:57.240
couple of weeks ago. A woman named Emma Sarley, um, got into a confrontation with a man named Frederick
01:23:03.920
Joseph and the confrontation that was over his dog, which he thought was being aggressive.
01:23:09.580
Frederick Joseph is a, he's an influencer. He's an author. He does marketing. He does content
01:23:15.100
creation. He has a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. And he has this long history of turning
01:23:19.820
what he perceives as racial aggressions into content. So if you look back into his tweets,
01:23:25.240
like he posted a tweet some time ago, he took a picture of a woman on a, on an airplane with her
01:23:31.560
feet up on the seat back in front of her. And he said that this was a United flight. He said that
01:23:37.260
the, the flight attendant asked this woman to take her, her feet down. And she refused. And the
01:23:42.060
flight attendant offered her a thousand that United offered this woman a thousand dollars to do this.
01:23:46.700
Anybody who has flown, they make you pay to like, put your baggage in the overhead. They make you pay
01:23:51.780
to put, to have a seatbelt at this point. No airline is going to it's fine. And this is in,
01:23:55.540
this is not in first class. Nobody, no airline is going to do this. So he does stuff like this.
01:23:59.520
He posted another photo of a, of a man also on an airplane, laying a white man, laying his,
01:24:06.040
he was just laying, he had three seats to himself. So he's just laying down on the airplane. And
01:24:09.780
Frederick Joseph said, you know, a black man would never be able to do this. I don't know any airline
01:24:13.840
who would enforce that. That's just not a rule. Right. So he has this history. He, at one point he
01:24:18.780
accused, he stayed in an Airbnb and he accused the Airbnb of, of, of having all of this Satanist
01:24:24.680
iconography made it into a huge viral story. So this is what he does. And in this particular case,
01:24:30.080
he whipped out his phone during this confrontation or after the confrontation with this woman.
01:24:35.380
And he said, did you say, uh, to stay in my neighborhood? And she said, yes, the woman,
01:24:41.580
frankly, appeared to be a little bit drunk. Um, her behavior was also erratic and sort of bizarre.
01:24:46.900
And so he films this and then he puts this online and he said,
01:24:50.060
Okay. Now let me pause you there. Let me pause you there. Cause I think we have,
01:24:53.100
so the moment she allegedly says the thing about your hood or your neighbor,
01:24:57.000
that's not on camera, but the aftermath is let's watch it.
01:25:01.060
Stay in our hood. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
01:25:05.000
Stay in our hood. Stay in our hood. That's it. I'm sorry. What?
01:25:09.700
Stay in our hood. Stay in our hood. You just told us to leave the dog party and stay in our hood.
01:25:17.540
I'm sorry. You were right here. Watch this entire thing. Did she just not stay in here?
01:25:25.260
Tell us to stay in our hood. She did. She just told you just told us to stay in our hood.
01:25:32.020
Okay. So he takes that clip and he puts it online,
01:25:35.000
shows it to his hundreds of thousands of followers and he directs his followers to find this woman.
01:25:39.120
They go and do it. And then he figures out where she works and he tags her employer
01:25:43.840
and she is fired within a couple of hours. So Camille Foster really did some incredible reporting on this
01:25:51.380
and he interviewed witnesses. And what he found was that during this confrontation,
01:25:55.980
Frederick Joseph said that he lived in Long Island city. So this wasn't his neighborhood.
01:26:00.980
So it sounds as though what she's saying is go back to your... She probably shouldn't have used
01:26:06.640
the word hood. She might've been mirroring his language. I'm not sure, but she probably should,
01:26:11.580
you know, just like stay away from that term. She wasn't saying like, go back to the ghetto,
01:26:16.980
Your hood and the hood are two different things.
01:26:19.140
Right. Right. Like this is our dog park and at our dog park, we don't do this. Go back to your dog
01:26:23.880
park. Um, so Camille Foster found this out and, uh, he, he, he, he also realized something pretty,
01:26:30.840
pretty incredible here. So CBS local news, they interviewed some witnesses as well as Frederick
01:26:36.260
Joseph. Apparently the witnesses, the witness, as well as Frederick Joseph said this in the interview,
01:26:43.480
they said, they both said this. He said, I live in Long Island city. She said, go stay in your,
01:26:48.740
go back to your hood or go, we'll stay in your hood. CBS local news cut that part of the
01:26:53.860
interview. Why would they do it? Well, it's less salacious that way. So Camille got in touch with
01:26:58.840
the reporter. The reporter refused to talk to the, talk to him. He called the station. Nobody would
01:27:04.140
talk to him. They just have completely not answered to the fact that they left out this crucial bit of
01:27:09.020
information. Now is Emma racist? It's totally possible. I have no idea, but the question is,
01:27:14.940
should she have been fired from her job immediately because of this 32nd video out of context video where
01:27:22.160
nobody really knew what was hap, what happened to lead up to this conflict.
01:27:25.700
Oh my gosh. This is what, and she was fired because he made a point of tagging her employer.
01:27:34.280
I mean, this guy clearly wanted her fired. Contrast that with the central park situation where
01:27:39.420
the guy, though there are problems with that story too, at least he came out publicly and said,
01:27:44.220
okay, I, you know, I don't know that she should be fired over this and have her whole life ruined.
01:27:47.920
This guy was like, let's ruin her. Let's get her. And even Nicole Hannah Jones, you know,
01:27:53.560
of the 1619 project in the New York times came out and was like, I don't know if I'm okay with
01:27:57.620
this whole, let's fire everybody and let's fire this girl. And I mean, but that, but they did it.
01:28:02.280
She got, she lost her job. Yeah. And then, uh, and then the CEO of course got dogpiled for that
01:28:07.720
because as many people who thought he did the right thing, a number, you know, probably an equal
01:28:12.760
number of people thought that he did the wrong thing. So he should have just backed,
01:28:16.540
he shouldn't have said a word. He should have just backed up and like kept this internal.
01:28:20.780
And you know, there's another question here, which is why are our bosses adjudicating what we do
01:28:27.100
outside of work? I find that really deeply uncomfortable, right? If my employees, like
01:28:32.160
my co-host Jesse single, if my employee, uh, is doing something outside of work that I object to,
01:28:37.360
is it my, is it my business to regulate his, his, his behavior? Should I just, you know,
01:28:42.560
should I call his girlfriend? Should I call his dad and tell him it just doesn't make any sense.
01:28:46.360
And there are of course going to be exceptions to this. If somebody is like, you know, has like
01:28:50.880
a dog fighting ring in their basement or something. If it's a crime, sure. That's a different story.
01:28:56.500
But for these interpersonal interactions that really shouldn't be, this is a fight in a dog park,
01:29:02.000
right? And not even a very big fight. These interpersonal interactions should really just be
01:29:07.620
ignored or, or, or, or solved between the people. This doesn't need to be something that you run to the
01:29:12.700
boss. I mean, ironically, what Frederick Joseph did is the quintessential Karen move. He called
01:29:17.780
the manager. That's right. You're exactly right, but there's no grace and, and forget, you know,
01:29:24.600
this guy is an activist clearly who just wants to get, get people fired and sort of cause trouble.
01:29:29.780
I that's obvious based on what you've just told us, but for the employer to not take a moment and say,
01:29:35.980
yeah, obviously she was intoxicated, which by the way, is not illegal. Uh, and people do stupid
01:29:41.900
things when they get drunk and they say stupid things. And maybe she meant to say neighborhood,
01:29:44.920
who the hell knows? Um, you can't tell, but like, what, what did the investigation show?
01:29:49.580
Did they bother to do one or they just can her?
01:29:51.520
I mean, it was too fast. She was, she was fired within hours. There's no way that they could have
01:29:56.680
conducted any sort of real investigation. And the thing for Emma is that she's, she seems like a
01:30:02.040
young woman, you know, this will haunt her for the rest of her life. This will be at the top Google
01:30:06.680
results for the rest of her life. Unless she hires one of these, you know, services that cost a hundred
01:30:10.860
thousand dollars and they'll push your Google results down to page two or whatever. Um, but this will
01:30:16.120
look into that. Abby, make a note. Um, they're going to be working all the time for me, but you
01:30:25.120
know what? It's, it's kind of the same thing like that, that employer is doing the same thing that
01:30:29.980
those professors who are self editing in the medical schools who are not true believers are doing,
01:30:35.380
you know, they're just cowing, bowing to the woke mob, uh, because they're afraid they don't have
01:30:41.020
anything close to a steel spine. And they're just as complicit in the erosion of grace,
01:30:46.120
and kindness and understanding that humanity is complicated as the, as the angry activists who
01:30:52.660
I'm fighting against on this program are. Yeah, it's fear. And I, and I'm empathetic towards them
01:30:59.080
because, you know, if you have thousands of people calling for this woman's head, it takes incredible
01:31:03.720
resilience to not listen to them, especially if you're a business, especially if, you know, this
01:31:08.820
could, this could hurt your bottom line. If customers are calling you and saying you have to
01:31:12.180
fire this woman, I can understand why people would do that, but there needs to be some grace
01:31:18.420
period. There needs to be some way to resolve these. Cause the story that emerges online with
01:31:23.060
anything, almost anything with a 30 second video clip is much more complicated, much more nuanced
01:31:28.600
than, than, than what we're led to believe. And people should remember this after the Covington story.
01:31:33.660
And then immediately after that, the Jussie Smollett story, but there's this, this need to sort of act
01:31:39.240
immediately, um, that really doesn't serve people.
01:31:43.160
Hmm. Katie Herzog, such great reporting as always. We love Camille too. Uh, one of the co-hosts of the
01:31:48.880
fifth column he was on the show not long ago. And, uh, so we'll keep an eye on his reporting as well.
01:31:55.800
Up next, we're taking your calls. Would love to know your thoughts on Chris Cuomo.
01:31:58.720
I think he'll address Shelley's allegations. Will CNN, will Brian Stelter ever, do they give a
01:32:03.840
damn? What about Katie's reporting? Are you in the medical community dealing with these issues?
01:32:07.900
Or what do you think about this guy at the dog park trying to get this woman's job? Call me
01:32:19.780
Phone lines are open, everyone. Call me 833-44-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496. We're going to take our
01:32:32.040
first caller out of Brooklyn, New York. Hey, Brooklyn, what's your thought?
01:32:37.000
Hey, Megan, how are you? I just want to say thank you so much for providing some truth and substance
01:32:41.880
in an era of media that you rarely see that being done today, especially on a program that's CNN,
01:32:48.780
which, my God, that Chris Cuomo, what a terrible guy that is. I mean, he had his brother on,
01:32:56.360
you know, when the governor was doing well. He was so loved. And then next thing you know,
01:33:01.500
like 13, 14, 15 women come out, accuse him of sexual harassment. Chris Cuomo didn't say one
01:33:08.440
thing about his brother. Not one thing at all, because you knew that he had some skeletons in
01:33:14.200
his closet as well. So, and Shelly, what an interview today. Shelly seems pretty credible.
01:33:20.220
She seems pretty credible. I'm telling you, Megan. So, hey, thank you for providing her a platform.
01:33:25.880
CNN has been horrible lately. I mean, the truth is just not there. Brian Stelter,
01:33:31.520
don't get me started on that guy either. But Megan, geez, thank you so much,
01:33:37.500
Well, thank you for calling in with your thoughts. You know, it really does bother me because you know
01:33:42.600
very well that it's a double standard. And if this had been one guy at Fox, Brian Stelter would have
01:33:47.100
been writing all about it. And, you know, Chris Cuomo's got a pattern of bullying nonstop. And I'm
01:33:52.780
really kind of sick of it. And I think a lot of people are. I'm going to squeeze in one more
01:33:55.660
caller before we go. Jiffy Quick, Nancy in Indiana. What are your thoughts?
01:33:59.240
Megan, I just can't tell you how much I enjoy your podcast. Listen to them every time. But I was
01:34:04.640
wondering, do you think you'll ever interview Megan or Melania Trump or Donald?
01:34:10.360
Oh, definitely. Definitely. I would love to interview them. I'd love to talk to Melania
01:34:14.040
because I haven't done that yet. And Trump is a newsmaking machine. So, yes, I predict we'll get
01:34:18.340
him on the podcast and the show at some point soon. Thank you for listening. Thank you all for
01:34:22.300
listening tomorrow. One of my favorite people, people, Victor Davis Hanson is here. John Stossel,
01:34:27.660
too. And guess what? Ben Smith of The New York Times, who broke that story on Aussie media,
01:34:32.500
which is now imploded. He's coming on. So don't miss that. Check out our show at
01:34:36.560
youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. We'll see you tomorrow.