The Megyn Kelly Show - Sexual Harassment Allegation Against Chris Cuomo, and a Woke Push To Eliminate Biological Sex, with Shelley Ross and Katie Herzog | Ep. 173

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Shelley Ross, longtime ABC and CBS News executive, to talk about her allegation of sexual harassment against Chris Cuomo, the enablers of Chris and his brother Gov. Andrew Cuomo, sexual harassment widely in the media industry, why she doesn't want to see Chris Cuomo fired, and more. Also joining the show is Katie Herzog, journalist and co-host of the "Blocked and Reported" podcast, to talk about the woke push in the medical community to eliminate biological sex, the increase in trans identity, the real story about the Williamsburg dog park "racism" incident, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We have a big show for you today. Just a bit later, we're going to be joined by Katie Herzog. She's back with us to talk about some of her latest reporting on how woke ideology is spreading in the medical industry amongst MDs. That's not good. But joining me first for her first exclusive interview is Shelley Ross. She's a former executive producer at ABC News and CBS News who has publicly accused anchor Chris Cuomo of CNN of sexually harassing her during both of their time at ABC News. Shelley, great to have you here.

Thank you for being here. Thank you. So I thought it was fascinating that you came out with this and in a New York Times op-ed and just were given the chance to tell your story. And I did wonder whether the New York Times was the first one you went to or whether anybody else had passed on the opportunity to tell this story. Can I start with that? one of the magazines had a first person story that was very, very moving. And I contacted them and was in just a,

a half a discussion. And then came all of the, the harassment against Asians. And I thought, this is not a time to talk about sexual harassment in the workplace. This is a time to talk about harassment of Asian people because of the pandemic. And so it was a very brief. And I said, I'm going to end this you know this dialogue i'm gonna withdraw you know everything because i

think there's another more important dialogue to have yeah and that was just a very quick toe in the water nothing you know i was i got it was just sort of a, what do you think? How long were you his EP at ABC News? Well, I was first his, he was sort of a floating network correspondent. And so I was EP at Good Morning America for five and a half years. And he came to ABC, I don't know what date, but somewhere in that timeframe. So I put him on the air and assigned him stories out of a pool of correspondents. And he was a legal correspondent so i had him for instance covering the martha stewart trial if that gives you a time frame and um he um you know he was at on good morning america quite a bit and then in in 2004, I took over Primetime Live. And when I took over Primetime Live,

they had gone to, it had gone through a lot of ups and downs. It had been merged with 2020 and then unmerged with 2020. And it was, you know, magazine shows were sort of shrinking and trying to redefine themselves. And I came into Primetime Live and there were four anchors, Diane Sawyer, Cynthia McFfadden john kinyonis and chris cuomo so he was one of your anchors and you were his executive producer for how long a couple years um no it's about less a little less than a year okay and how did you what was his character like prior to the incident that we're going to get into what did how did you you know know him what did you think of him well you know he was a former fox guy um he was a roger ailes discovery interestingly enough um and he came to abc and he was just had a big personality um he was you know uh attractive looking on air but he was you know had the personality that

you've seen we've seen of a frat boy he was a guy's guy uh you know called people buddy and and uh and he he was uh very he was younger and arrogant he knew it all and didn't want anybody's advice. He didn't want anybody's direction. And he certainly didn't want anyone to touch the first draft of his script. Right. And when you're at network television, they do. I mean, it's not like cable at all. Having worked in both industries, I can say the executive producers, the producers are

much more involved in the final product at the broadcast level than on cable. And I'm not surprised to learn that even in the broadcast world, Mr. Chris Cuomo didn't think anybody should be touching his work. Even somebody who is a seasoned executive producer like you, there's a reason you ran GMA for almost six years. Okay. So that was the situation. I was at ABC News for 17 years. Yeah. So, and, you know, I, uh, I came up the ladder on merit, on breaking a lot of stories, winning a lot of awards. So I was respected. And it was interesting to have somebody show disrespect. So that's, and that is a form of disrespect early on,

but then you were no longer his executive producer. And take us to the night that you were at this bar on the Upper West Side. What were you all going there for? There was a going away party. I had moved on to the entertainment side of ABC. And I had just finished producing, I don't know if you remember David Blaine's Lincoln Center two-hour live special where he lived in a bubble for a week and he went for the breath hold world record. And I had produced that special, but someone from ABC was leaving Primetime Live and had invited me to the going away party. Now, I made it a habit not to go. I rarely did anything more than drop in to a going away party. I always felt that people's arrivals should be celebrated and not, you know, but I would always be up for

a respectful toast. I'd be there for the toast and wish them luck in the next chapter and leave. You know, I had no desire to, you know, spend a night drinking with people who worked for me. I was the boss. I felt that was not appropriate. But I was invited and I was honored to be invited because I wasn't there anymore. And I thought I would just drop in, have a quick toast, meet my husband there, because we were driving back to Connecticut from Manhattan together. So I thought we'd meet there. He usually would just pick me up, you know, outside the building. But I thought, let's meet here and then we can go together, go home. So you go into the bar and Chris Cuomo sees you and what happens?

He walked right into the bar, walked right over to me, gave me a bear hug, slipped one hand down my body to my buttocks and squeezed really hard on my cheek while saying, I can do this to you, as I pushed him away and stepped back, it revealed that my husband was sitting on a very low Ottoman, which you couldn't see him. You know, while I was talking to people I work with, he was just sitting there drinking a Diet Coke, waiting to leave. He didn't know anybody. And so he saw everything. It was right in front of him. Maybe even eye level. At this moment, here's this guy who's an anchor, a talent at the network. You're in a very well-respected position there. You've been there almost 20 years. And what goes through your head as this guy has the nerve to squeeze your ass? It was clearly a power trip to make me feel, you know, you're no longer my boss. I can do anything I want with you. You know, he knew he is something in his head said he couldn't do that when I was his boss.

Maybe he thought he would get, you he thought I would fire him or something. But it was meant to diminish. Chris Cuomo is over six feet tall. I'm 5'2". I'm under 100 pounds and it was uh it it was overpowering and I certainly didn't like it to me I feel like anyone who is that brazen with a female work colleague especially one who had just been above them on the power totem pole must have done it before. I just, that doesn't sound like somebody who's experimenting with that kind of behavior for the first time. What do you think? I really don't know.

I didn't discuss it, as you know, until now. So it's not like I was, you know, talking to everybody at work and that it was like the buzz. Then I just left, went home and I didn't report it. Did you talk to anybody about it there? Did you, you know, did you go to like a colleague and say holy cow i mentioned it to you know to a a close colleague at you know i had moved on and it was a prime time but i called a somebody that i had remained close to at good morning america one of the senior producers and said, you know, because people knew that he was just more of this arrogant frat boy personality.

And I said, you won't believe what happened. And so I talked to a friend at the time and just really talked to my husband about it. And my husband has always said, and it's interesting, I heard from another, you know, when the editorial was published, I heard from Brian Rooney, who was an ABC correspondent. And he said to me, he was the first person who called early in the morning and said, Shelly, I think there are two kinds of men in the workplace.

One who behaves like Chris Cuomo and the other has not, cannot fathom ever behaving like that yeah he said i just i can't imagine you know manhandling a one of my female colleagues you know and my husband always said that that he would like read about sexual harassment and he was was, you know, a boss who hired lots of women and lots of women vice presidents. He just could never believe either. Like, what am I the nerd? I mean, I don't get it. I don't get how people. He's the gentleman. He's a normal man. A normal man doesn't behave like this at the office. No. man, a normal man doesn't behave like this at the office. My husband too, is the CEO of a company

for a long time, would never dream of behaving this way. I think about my pal Janice Dean, married to a firefighter. He's around a lot of guys with a lot of testosterone. Never, never that most men do not behave like this. But Chris Cuomo, and as we now know, his brother Andrew, seem to behave differently and look at women differently. And your op-ed was very well-timed because not only did Chris defend his brother Andrew, we now know, but was actively involved in trying to diminish the women who accused him. And people said, ah, it's his brother. And I said, no, you advise your brother as a brother. You call him after hours and say, brother, you know, I'm here for you. You know, come over, let's have a beer. You don't actively enjoy, uh, join the strategy sessions, trying to tear down the women as just

cancel culture warriors. And he's been given a total pass for it by CNN. Well, that was the reason. It wasn't the timing. That's the timing I selected. I got a lot of pushback on social media, like, why did I wait 16 years? Well, I didn't wait 16 years, you know, I wasn't lying in wait. I just had something to say now. And what I had to say after 40 years of experiencing and advocating against harassment in the workplace, I saw a moment where people were being held accountable as the enablers. I wrote about Chris Cuomo in this editorial, not just to say he was my sexual harasser. I wrote about him really because he was Andrew Cuomo's enabler. And Andrew Cuomo, when women started to come forward from accuser number one, Andrew Cuomo wrapped himself in this protective shield of a crisis management team that he called his inner circle.

And his inner circle were people who used to be his chief of staff, people who had very big deal jobs outside of government. And they came back to help him manage this crisis and work with Andrew Cuomo's paid staff. But the inner circle was not paid. They were not government employees, so they could operate in any way they wanted, and they were not accountable to the taxpayers. And some of them literally, their first reaction was, let's have a smear campaign against accuser number one. I carefully read the AG's report, which was not just one volume. There are three volumes of evidence. And I read every email, every phone call, every spreadsheet of everything that they were doing, because I wanted to make

sure if I called somebody out as an enabler, that they really were. And Chris Cuomo actually came in and he may have come in before, but the evidence proves that Chris Cuomo actively came into the inner circle at the time of accuser number two. And that's when he went from being copied on emails to leading. This is what Andrew must say right away. And he must address this. And it was a strategy. And the strategy with accuser number two, which now the New York Times was on to, the strategy, Charlotte Bennett was accuser number one backfired when we launched a smear campaign. So let's be really nice to accuser number two. Let's make sure we say she is a valued member of the team. it's all a con game to them they don't they don't really know you know 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 a victim coming no one no one gives a damn whether andrew actually did it they're being managed and so the strategy for charlotte bennett is now say she's a valued member of the team and this is what you know chris is is you know promoting and but will still deny their claims well denying denying that there was ever sexual is calling them a liar it's saying you're a liar whether you you make it generic you're discounting what these women are saying of course Cuomo you know and his whole thing then he's again I apologize for it well there's just so much you can apologize these are big ethics breaches here's my you know and he played you can understand you know, and he played, you can understand, you know, I'm a brother and my family comes first. And everybody loved that.

And that seemed to satisfy everyone. What he did was he advised him without disclosing it and then went in the anchor chair night after night. And only when he got outed, he was outed as having advised Andrew Cuomo. Did he come on the air and then try to lecture us on how deeply he cares about women and sexual harassment? Here is that sound bite. It's number one for my team. You're straight with me. I'll be straight with you. Obviously, I'm aware of what's going on with my brother. And obviously, I cannot cover it because he is my brother. Now, of course, CNN has to cover it. They have covered it extensively, and they will continue to do so. I have always cared very deeply about these issues, and profoundly so. I just wanted to tell you that he cares very deeply about sexual

harassment profoundly so your reaction when you saw that well I knew he was lying I knew he was lying and that he was a good liar he was a convincing liar. And that really, that was, I believe it was March 1st. And that's when I sat down and really thought, I want to see what, if I wrote something about accountability, I want to see what it would look like. So I wrote my first draft after he said that. And would he take any real accountability, any responsibility? Because you tell me, Shelley, I mean, in your New York Times op-ed, you print his written apology to you after that night. He saw your husband. He knew he had stepped in it. He said, I can do this now that you're no longer my boss. And you said, no, you can't. So he knows he stepped in it.

And you printed his apology email to you. This is back on June 1st, 2005 at 6.30 PM. You can look it up online if you want to read it yourself. It says, now that I think of it, he writes to you, I'm ashamed, though my hearty greeting was a function of being glad to see you. And he goes on to say something about Christian Slater just got in trouble for this, although he had negative intent and I didn't. He says, so pass along my apology to your very good husband, right? The apology is to your husband. And I apologize to you as well.

He adds on afterward for even putting you in such a position. Next time I will remember the lesson, no matter how happy I am to see you. So he was going to remember the lesson. You tell me what you thought about that quote apology and whether he was embarrassed. There's one other sentence in there that I would, as a husband, I would have been upset seeing my wife padded as such. Well, as a lawyer, he's memorializing a false narrative. I was not patted. I was groped, grabbed. A pat is quite a different experience. And talking about his intent that you know he had pure intent what's interesting is that's that's gaslighting that is is what his intent was. And, you know, and I don't know what Chris Cuomo's intent was. I think personally that his intent was to belittle his former boss and to exercise some jungle, tribal, I'm the king of the jungle thing over a female boss. Talking about intent, if you really want to apologize to somebody, is really awkward. And then to say, to bring up Christian Slater.

So Christian Slater had been arrested the day before Chris Cuomo groped me. And it was all over the New York tabloids. It was the water cooler story of the day. Can you imagine? And up until that point, none of us knew that you could be arrested for grabbing a woman's butt in that way. Yeah. And Chris Slater was drunk and he grabbed some woman's behind on the street in New York and got arrested. Yeah. But he got arrested.

And we all learned. It was water cooler. Everybody was talking about it the next day that we all learned it was water cooler everybody was talking about it the next day that we all learned it's a third degree sexual assault and i just thought whoa like who knew that you know i certainly didn't feel like i was sexually assaulted, but under the law, that's, it's a chargeable offense. So if he, if Chris Cuomo knew that, why did he do it? And you're right to point out the size differential between the two of you, because that also, I mean, a man like that understands the physical advantage he has over a woman like you, though he didn't have the power advantage at ABC over you.

And there's no question in my mind that is that was a factor in his behavior. I can tell you, and you know this, too, and every woman listening to this and man knows we've all gone to work functions where we are overjoyed to see somebody that we haven't seen in a week or more. And you couldn't be more delighted. And we don't grab their backsides and squeeze it in front of a bunch of work colleagues. He was absolutely trying to diminish you. I 100% agree with this. And I've been down this road enough times to know. And that's the man who reared his ugly head when his brother got caught doing that same stuff to women who worked for him his first instinct was not yes let's find out whether this is a problem and these women actually have an issue my brother maybe has an issue it was get

them get them and cnn has failed to reconcile with the reality of the man they have sitting in that anchor chair at 9 p.m. Instead, they've sicked him on women on his staff and within the organization who are now one by one coming out talking about his bully behavior. And we'll get to the latest one right after this quick break. So much still to go over with Shelley, former executive producer at ABC, also executive at ABC, accusing Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her. Up next, we'll get to some of what I just mentioned, along with the Me Too reckoning and our own shared history when it comes to Roger Ailes. Joining me today is shelly ross she's a former executive producer at abc 17 years she was there and cbs executive producer as well who has accused cnn's chris cuomo of sexually harassing her when they were both at abc back in 2005 so let me just jump back to that 2005 moment. And he sent you that email. Shelly, did you respond to that email either with your own email or in person? and colleagues said things that were wrong, got a little too, you know, handsy, having a drink.

And it was different. It was people who respected me and then said, did I really say that last night? Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. And it's different when somebody really is your friend and if they do something overboard, if they're happy to see you, I think you don't get like a legal note of apology to your husband. You get like a phone call that says oh i just i'm so embarrassed i don't know why i i was such a knucklehead or you walk into somebody's office he walks into your office that's the more likely reasonable scenario and say oh my god please forgive me what a dope but this yes this was a cya because he recognized he had offended you he'd done it in front of witnesses and it could come back to haunt him i've got to

ask you about your husband david because your poor husband must have been like what on earth husband was we were both shocked i have to say we just left we don't even remember like i i remember my husband standing up and looking at him and i remember looking at chris and i'm sure something was said and we just left we neither of us remember anything but like getting out of that room very quickly and heading home it was just well look that some people online are like why didn't your husband deck him? It's like, okay, have you seen Chris Cuomo with his weird steroid-infused muscles putting out videotape of himself but threatening to beat up everybody? I mean, please. And David was a gentleman. He got his wife out of there, and you did the right thing. Well, it's so funny because some of the backlash and a lot of the social media comments of like, you know, well, what about

the husband? How could he just sit there? Why didn't he do something? And my poor husband looked at me the other day and said, when did I become the bad guy? No, he's not the bad guy. My husband's never lifted his hand or resorted to violence in his entire life, nor would he. Nor should he have been put in that position to begin with. I'll note for the record, I don't know that it's a fact Chris Cuomo has taken steroids. It just looks like that to me. I want to ask you this. So you come out with this op-ed and one of the things you add and you felt it was important to add was that you don't want to see Chris Cuomo fired from his job at CNN. I had Tucker Carlson on the show the other week, and I disagreed with you because I think he's had a pattern of bullying, dishonest behavior. But why don't you want to see him fired. I've been in this fight for equality in the way people are, women and men are treated in the workplace. It's 40 years now and nothing's worked. You know, calling lawyers didn't work. A sexual harassment, corporate training for sexual harassment hasn't worked for times up

where you know where people were getting fired you know within 36 hours up for some deserved it because they were really sexually assaulting women and things that you could go to jail for. Corporations were clearing them up. But four years of time up didn't change anything. And then we have things happening at ABC and where they're refusing investigations and outside investigators and andrew cuomo with this and i realized the discussion has to move to the enablers at abc it's clear they all knew what was going on well why do you say that because you you didn't report it i mean you only mentioned it to it no no not me not me i'm saying the recent issues okay no nobody knew about me and again i wouldn't have called this you know i'd call for for what happened to

me yeah yeah there was a report i should clarify There was a report about a GMA producer who allegedly harassed some women. No, there's law. There's lawsuits. There are multiple lawsuits against somebody who I knew and was quite fond of. And I actually wrote something like when the harasser in the headlines is somebody you adore that's happening to a lot of us that you know that we didn't know something was going on it's um but there were you know women women at ABC reporting things, you know, hostile environments and, and, you know. No, we've seen it across the board is your point. We've certainly seen it at CBS and on and on Fox.

Yeah. And I just thought Time's Up didn't work. Matt, the shame of the public shaming of Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, that didn't change anything. So I want to move it forward. I just want to see it stop. I want to see it changed. that CNN not take any disciplinary action against Chris Cuomo, but instead give him an assignment to study and report on what sexual harassment is in the workplace, what gender bias is, and have him go on a journey and then do town meetings with experts and women. Who would watch that? I don't want to see him do that. That would be so

insincere. Oh, no. You only do it if it's sincere. He can't fake it. He hasn't stopped his bullying behavior. You know the latest report. I like to think that everybody can have a second chance, that everybody can be rehabilitated, that everybody can be educated. I really go back to the great Desmond Tutu and what could have been worse than taking a country through the end of apartheid where people were murdered because of the color of their skin. And he came up with a truth and reconciliation plan that everybody, you can't hide it. You can't lie anymore. You can't spin it anymore. Everybody has to come forward and tell the truth about what happened. And then you, you reconcile. Well,

that would have to learn this. As you say, sincerity and a true change of spots. And that's just not what we're seeing with him at all. You know, from what he did to you, to the lies he's told on the air about his COVID recovery, coming out of the basement,

pretending that was his first time out, which was a lie, pretending he hadn't already been expressed. And then then wait and then let me just get to this i don't want to lose melanie buck okay this is a female executive producer of his at cnn you were at abc so you know i could almost see jeff zucker saying okay that was years before he came to me this is a woman who is at cnn the female producer of his show, One Well Primetime, who reportedly, this is a page six report, begged to leave his show after they clashed over significant differences. She felt threatened by him, is the report.

She asked to be removed from him because she couldn't work with him anymore. They moved her over. Now she's going to be working on CNN Plus+, which I think is just their digital property. But, you know, it doesn't escape me, Shelley, that Melanie, so she has a clash with him. She feels threatened by him. She's got to move to the digital side as opposed to this primetime post

where she's the executive producer. It's a much more powerful role, as you well know. The woman always gets moved off. That's what we saw with Andrew Cuomo, too. Yes, totally. I'm sick of it. I want to see him pay a price, not her. Well, in addressing her, I read the page six item.

I don't put a lot into page six because I know that they have written many items that were all out just lies about me. That's true, too. I've been there, too, I have to admit. They have one source. So now the only interesting thing is that she hasn't denied it. She gave a statement on the record.

She did give a statement on the record you know when i she said we ultimately had significant differences i asked to leave the show i've moved on i'm looking forward to my latest role with cnn plus i spent two years as an ep on his show i'm proud to have left it at number one cnn there's only so much you can say when you're still working for the company that's obvious yeah i feel that if it's true, I feel like she must be under so much pressure and terrified about her job and everything. This can't be, you know, coming forward is not for the faint hearted. You know, they will, they, you know, there are dark forces that are, you know, an invisible inner circle, people with, you know, trying to protect the company. It's, it really, I feel really scared for her. Well, and here's the reality. I feel also CNN. You've got Jeff Zucker, who did not fire Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating on the air while on a New York, a New Yorker Zoom call.

But he was employed at CNN. Yeah, not fire him. He did not get rid of Don Lemon, who's been credibly accused, though Don denies it with a third party independent witness, a guy who worked with the accuser of sexually assaulting a man in a bar. You've got this against Chris Cuomo, you plus this executive producer. I personally know somebody at CNN who I know has complained about his bully tactics. It goes on and on. So I understand one incident here or there. And I also understand people do like to accuse famous people of things that they haven't necessarily done. But this is a pattern. And I really do wonder

about the women inside of CNN and whether they feel safe working around this guy and the other guys. I also feel badly for Brian Stelter, who has been totally compromised. He is the chief media critic. He has a great resume. He really is a good reporter. And he said nothing about it. And Brian Stelter knows me. He knows the position of authority I held at multiple networks. He's interviewed me. He wrote a New York Times that literally went viral. I've seen it picked up as far away as the Taipei Times. It was trending on Twitter, you know, Twitter burn up.

And these are all things that are Brian Stelter's beat. Did he not report on this at all? Brian Stelter is compromised is I read over the weekend when the House bill was going into the wee hours of the morning. And Brian Stelter did a column how CNN and MSNBC were live with the coverage for you know in congress as a you know one o'clock in the morning midnight and you know even as early as 11 o'clock he wrote that that fox uh news was had programming on tape well i think that brian stelter lost his moral authority to quote on what other networks choose to cover and don't cover. Yeah, well, I would make the case that happened a long time prior to your op-ed, but I see your point. And it's too convenient because if this had been an accusation against Tucker Carlson, Brian Kilmeade, Brett Baer, you know, any of these guys at Fox, you can guarantee Brian Stelter would have found his pen and it would have been

written about. Stand by, Shelley. I want to pick it up with you in just one minute. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. Joining me today, Shelly Ross, a former executive producer for many, many years at ABC News and at CBS other women who have had trouble with Chris Cuomo or anybody else, but since we're talking about Cuomo, we'll leave it on him. How can they complain, right? So when they have a management that doesn't seem too interested in, in pushing back on this kind of behavior? They can't. They can't complain because the person in charge has made it clear that Chris Cuomo can do anything he wants with impunity. So how can he complain? How can anybody complain without, uh, women are, are already terrified to come forward and you don't want to get anybody in trouble on one hand. And on the other hand, uh, you know, you're sort of, if you've been in the workplace any period of time, you know, it's going to reflect badly on you. It's like the pendulum has swung us back into the dark ages,

where it's like, where women, which is no longer allowed to happen, you know, used to be questioned if they were reported a rape, well, what were you wearing? Like, they invited it. And even in his most recent comment to the New York Times, Chris Cuomo, when the New York Times called him for a response, said, as Shelley acknowledges, our interaction was not of a sexual nature. Well, what I want to say is there was never our interaction. He's already gaslighting everybody in that response. Right. Like you were a willing participant. I was not a participant. He walked into a room and grabbed me. This is not our interaction. So he is very clever about parsing words. And like I was some kind of a, you know, a part of that as opposed to women are of his behavior wait let me stand you by apologies got to pay the bills so i do squeeze in a break we're going to come right back with with shelly i will say this if you are a woman and you have a complaint you can email me email

me at devil may care questions questions with plural my executive producer is one who reads those at devil may caremedia.com. More with Shelly Ross right after this. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. Joining me today is Shelly Ross. She's a former executive producer at ABC and CBS who's accused CNN's Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her back in 2005 when they were at ABC News. Shelley, that sadly was not your first foray into the world of sexual harassment. No. And you came out publicly back in 2016 and told your story about being harassed by Roger

Ailes. And as the world now knows, I was also harassed by him very young in my career. So can we just spend a minute on that? What did he do? He proposed a sexual relationship with you when you were young in your career? Oh, this was an interview for my first network job. And he had offered that we had the job interview in person in LA, and it just went great. And he offered me the job. And I accepted it and said to call business affairs. And I got a hold of, you know, we put everything in motion. And then he asked for a second meeting the following day. You know, he was still in town and we would have a lunch. And in the second meeting, very early on, he looked at me and said, how long have you known you were sexy? And I was so shocked and embarrassed that I literally couldn't make eye contact.

And I literally put my head down, and I remember staring at my feet and saying, this is really embarrassing. And he continued, and I tried to change the subject. I tried to, you know, if you say to somebody, this is really embarrassing, I'd like to talk about the show, you're sending a message back that you're embarrassed and you're not interested. But he wanted to tell me his philosophy, how he believed in loyalty and career advancement, and how he felt having, and he used the word, sexual alliance. If we would have a sexual alliance, it would be amazing for both of our careers. Both of us would benefit. What year was this, would you say?

This was 1981. This is 40 years ago. 40 years ago, which is unbelievable. And 40 years ago you know there there was no me too movement you were there thinking that i mean i knew sexual harassment existed i hadn't really experienced it in such a way. So I really, he said, think about it. I'm here at this hotel and call me and let me know. And I just spoke, I said, I don't even know you. You don't even know me. We don't even know if we would like each other. I didn't know what to say. And he said, oh, well, if it's just that you need time to get to know me, I can wait. And I said, well, what does that mean? You'll come into my office once a week, once a month and say,

are you ready yet? And I could never work under that kind of pressure. And I went and called a lawyer and we'll just fast forward to that lawyer, you know, contacted NBC's lawyers and all hell broke loose in Roger Ailes' world. And he was put on a conference call with three of the biggest lawyers in entertainment business who, you know, and the one thing about roger is he never denied it when they confronted him with this you know and he withdrew the the job offer by the way at the end of the second oh wow meeting and you know he his reaction to these three lawyers calling him out on this was, hey, guys, I'm single. He said, well, that means nothing in this conversation. And whatever they said or did at the time, this is how, you know, 40 years ago, how it was handled was. We have to make this scandal go away.

And the best way to do it is to apologize. Roger to apologize. Yeah. And get her to take the job offer. And just jumping forward because I don't have that much time with you and i have there's yeah then it goes away so he he apologized you guys went on to have a good relationship and i can relate to well not the apology to the to the moving on and finding a way to have a good relationship um but it is interesting to me because some 25 years later i would find myself in in an office with Roger Ailes asking me about being sexy, being lectured to on the value of loyalty, which led to a months-long campaign to try to get me into bed and ultimately him grabbing me and trying to shove his tongue down my throat.

And here's what I wanted to get your reaction to Shelly. I, this is, I've never asked anybody to hear this because I really thought I would be that he would be so scared by these three lawyer, NBC lawyers, you know, and, you know, putting the fear of God in him that I really thought I was the first and the last, that I was going to go through the workplace and change one at a time. You did what you could do. You went to a lawyer. You stood up for yourself. In no world, once I found out that Roger was a serial harasser, I can speak for my pal

Janice Dean on this, who was also one of his targets. In no world did I ever look at you or Lori Loon or any woman who I found out later had come before me and blame the woman. Never. Women have been dealing with this for a long, long time, trying to navigate it as best they could against a system that was not on their side. And this is one of my objections to the movie bombshell where they created a fictional character yeah played by margot robbie who at the end of the movie blamed

her harassment not on roger ailes but on me and i wondered what your thought was on this weird hollywood take that you know somehow it always gets back to the women that especially in media it's always our fault it's all there's always a way of blaming the woman well nobody is to blame for roger ailes and i told him that and i you know when I made a decision to go public, it was really to show that this was such a, you know, my I was probably the, you know, in 1981, Ial of laurie loon laurie loon made you know a monica lewinsky mistake you know earl as a young girl impressionable girl she she went along with it and literally had a breakdown over it that's where leads. It never leads to a good place. And nobody, you know, she was exploited as a young girl. That's why, you know, I want to say something. I have friends in the military. And in the military, they court-martial you for this. The military has strictest rules. It's called fraternization. And you can't get

romantically involved within the chain of your command because it destroys the team. For all the reasons in the civilian world, it destroys everything as well. The military is smart enough to actually court-martial you over it. No questions. I mean, you go to a trial, but that's it. You're kicked out. There's a reason this is not allowed. Our national security, they think that if people were allowed to fraternize, that our national security would be impaired. It's that serious.

I mean, it's complicated because a lot of people meet their spouses at work. I mean, maybe less so in the chain of command. That's right. But I mean, you got like the head of producers, we could go down the line producers who, who met and married and had lived happily ever after and had babies. And there's one, you know, yeah. And I think that that's a problem i think that bob eiger being married and then finding his true love um and having her stay there and less moonves and david weston and jeff zucker and roger i mean and ro Ailes. I think, you know, it's more accepted when the person, when they get married and it does happen. But I think there clearly there were lines crossed on the way to that happy marriage. So, you know, I'm not the judge and jury,

but I think it should be, you know, if it's true love, then one person has to leave. Last question. The King of England stepped down, right? Right. Now we're going back. I look at your career, you've accomplished so much. And then I see you wound up leaving all, of course, the necessary tabloid reports come out about some toxic relationship around you or bully culture. I've seen it happen to virtually every woman who leaves our industry. You, me, Laura Logan, Barbara Fadidi just got taken down. It's like they won't let you leave without destroying you.

Do you know what I mean? And I wonder why you think our business is so disgusting to women in particular. And whether I know you're a, you're a new grandmother now, whether this is ever an industry you could recommend to your little granddaughter? and how it's how I would recommend journalism, real journalism to my granddaughter. And all this, you know, the work I'm doing is really for future generations of women. And having this dialogue and so many people by the social media comments I've gotten really still don't understand. You know, it's like, what's the big deal? You know, no, I wasn't traumatized by Chris Cuomo's But I was belittled. And that's just one of many things that went on to belittle female bosses. And when I was at ABC, I took income revenue from $19 million when I got to Good Morning America to nearly $100 million in five and a half years. That's the gift that keeps on giving. I closed the gap with the competitors. We won

awards. I turned Good Morning America into from a show where everybody went home at six o'clock at night to a 24 seven news operation that really had tremendous muscle. Charlie Gibson back and teamed him with Diane Sawyer and gave it a real news hept. You know, a year before we went through 9-11 and anthrax attacks and wars. And I did a lot. And when they can't attack you on your talent, I worked five times as hard as anybody else there and put in all the hours. You know, when you're fixing a show while you still have one on the air, you know, when I got the,

the first couple of years were 18 hour days. Of course. And when they can't, and I wasn't a perfect boss. I mean, part of no one is, no, there wasn't.

I was built into the cake. That's the thing. Every, every article people see about what it's so often about a female boss or a female powerful person in our industry. You remember no one's a perfect boss. You don't think you could write a toxic or bully or whatever they come at you with. You could write all that stuff about any male in the industry. But the pattern of news is once you get pushed out, you don't just get pushed out. They destroy you. I talked about it with Lara Logan. It's disgusting. And people need to be aware that it's a dynamic by these powerful media organizations that continue to do it with impunity. They continue to do it as they try to lecture the rest of us on morality. I got to go. I'll give you a quick last word. No, Lara Logan is my hero. And she got caught up in a bad story because CBS, which owned

the publishing company that did that book, had her do a book that was a conflict of interest in the first place. Yeah. No, Lara, we had her on the show and it was a great, it was a conflict of interest in the first place yeah no laura we had her on the show and it was a great it was a great exchange and it was a good expose of what this thing does to you i don't know i respect your accomplishments so much shelly thank you i know you're continuing i mean you've got a great way to even get to the cure alliance but it's a non-profit group she's got going with scientists and researchers and they're trying to end suffering by developing cures for fatal diseases. So on and on the effort to improve our world goes. We'll continue to watch it and our love to David too, who emerges as the gentle hero of the story. We've got Katie Couric's book coming out. Oh my God, you're booked.

Consider yourself booked. There's a lot more to go over. We've got a lot to talk about. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Wow. Wow. What an exchange. I need to have dinner with her. This wasn't enough. Listen, up next, we're going to get to another great journalist whose name is Katie Herzog, and we're going to talk about how women are being erased from scientific conversations. It's actually getting really kind of scary now, including in the medical field, to the danger of those patients involved. And what do you think about Shelley's allegations against Chris Cuomo? Should he be fired? Call me at 833-44-MEGAN, M-E-G-Y-N. That's 833-446-3496.

Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show, everyone. Joining me now, journalist Katie Herzog. She's the host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, which I really recommend, and a writer on Substack and other publications. And she's been doing incredible reporting on how woke ideology is spreading in the medical industry and what that means for doctors, nurses and all the rest of us. Katie, great to have you here again. Thanks so much for having me back, Megan. after speaking to a woman, I think you called her Lauren in the piece, who's a med student at a top medical school who was telling you how concerned she was about woke ideology infecting medicine. I mean, actual science in a way that is really disturbing, including no longer willing to

acknowledge the very real differences in health issues between men and women, something women and their advocates have been trying to push for greater attention to for decades. Yeah, that's sort of the irony here is that after decades of women arguing that our health issues are not focused on, there's now this unfortunately sort of progressive movement away from that where gender identity becomes, it's become this sacrosan away from that where gender identity becomes, it's become this sacrosanct concept. So gender identity has become more important in some places than biological sex. And so the student I spoke to, this was at a top school at the University of California system. She told me that her professors will essentially get scolded, get shamed by their own students if they talk about biological sex. And

she had lots of documentation to back this up. She sent me audio of a professor saying, profusely apologizing to his students for offending him, offending his students. He sounded like he was about to cry. And the offensive term that he used in his lecture was pregnant women. So absurd. And it's not just him because just this week we saw the CDC use the term pregnant people. All the media seems to be going along with it now. I saw you tweet out something like, is this like a new style acceptance that we're no longer going to use the term women anymore anywhere? Because it's what was It was NPR, I think ABC. A few publications just went along with it. A lot of publications have gone along with it,

and it's happened remarkably quickly. It sort of reminds me of the adoption of the term Latinx, and there's been polling on that term, and most people who are considered Latinx by the media either don't know what that term is or don't like that term. I think the same thing is happening here, and I haven't seen any polling on the term pregnant people versus pregnant women. But just intuitively, there is something very bizarre about this erasure of women within women's health. And yes, it's not just the CDC. It's not just the media. It's organizations like Planned Parenthood, which should be able to use the term women without consequence. It's very strange so it's to

the point of like the danger that's being posed now um this is i think this is from your report in 2019 the new england journal of medicine reported the case of a 32 year old transgender man who so transgender man so biological female who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. And tell us what happened. So this patient was assessed as an obese man suffering from complications of hypertension. He'd quit taking his hypertension medication because he identified himself as a trans man. His practitioners, the nurses in charge of him, they didn't realize, this woman in particular didn't realize what was going on. And it turned

out he was pregnant. And by the time they figured out what was happening, it was too late and the baby was gone. And according to this report in the New England Journal of Medication, while this man had no idea that he was pregnant, he was really devastated by this. And something sort of the opposite of that has happened recently. A trans person is suing a hospital because they were, a trans man is suing a hospital because he was given a pregnancy test. And this was- Oh, this is in Rochester, New York, right? This is near my neck of the woods. Yeah. So this was considered very offensive to him. And I can understand- So he's a biological female. He's in the hospital. Right.

And so there are life as a man and they want to get a pregnancy test. Right. And and this patient says that his practitioners didn't use his preferred pronouns. I think that's wrong. But if there's not an acknowledgement of biological sex, people are going to practitioners are going to miss things. Things are different with men and women when it comes to medication dosages are different from different medications. Symptoms are different from, uh,

from different conditions. A female heart attack doesn't look like a heart attack. It doesn't look like a male heart attack. And so in a case like this, you can see why the practitioners would want to give everybody who, who is a female person, a pregnancy test, because if you're like, let's say undergoing anesthesia, they need to know, and it can be a liability for these, for these doctors, if somebody ends up being pregnant. So I think there's a pretty easy solution here. Really. You can respect people's gender identity. You can respect their pronouns. You can call them the name and the pronouns that they want, but you also need to indicate what their biological sex is. And my wife, yeah, my wife is a nurse in Seattle and

at her hospital, they have stopped marking down biological sex on intake forms. So what you get is gender identity. It's incredibly dangerous. And the thing is like, this is done out of, I think, some real, some real sensitivity. People are trying to be inclusive. They are trying to do the right thing, but there are consequences to this. And these consequences could end up hurting people, end up hurting trans people, which is going to have the opposite of the intended effect. Well, and even if you took the hardcore attitude of, well, it's only the trans community that's going to hurt itself by imposing these crazy rules on people. It's not true. So because first of all, the activists do not speak for the majority of trans people who are kind and loving and don't want to follow all these nonsense rules or make

the rest of us do it. And the second thing is, what about that baby? Do we care about the baby who died because of this crazy PC nonsense? Yes, we do. You know, I have to say, Katie, I, a couple of years ago, I had an ovarian cyst and it had to come out and they said, um, we're going to take a look. And if it's, you know, wrapped around the ovary, we'll take the ovary too. And I said, oh, I want to take both ovaries. Cause then, you know, I don't have to worry about ovarian cancer. And he said, that would put you into early menopause. And Doug said the ovary stays because apparently, apparently you can worry about your sex drive going down if you go early menopause. Anyway. So, um, then the, the doctor said to me, there's a cancer OBGYN doc. And he said, um, one thing I

would recommend is while we're in there, we should take the fallopian tubes if you're done having your kids, because the research shows that virtually all or all of the most pernicious forms of ovarian cancer start in your tubes and your fallopian tubes. I'm like, take them. I'm done. I'm so done. And so I don't have any fallopian tubes. To this day, if I have to go in for some procedure, I still have to give them a pregnancy test. I don't have any fallopian tubes. I'm a lesbian. I can tell them there is absolutely no chance that I'm pregnant, but you can see from a doctor's perspective why the pregnancy test would be, it's a liability. If you, if you know, if I can tell a doctor, you know, I'm a lesbian. And what if it turns out that I had a little tryst on the side and I'm pregnant and something happens. And then I sue the doctor. This is like a pregnancy test is also not that invasive.

No. It's not a blood test. It's a P test. It's crazy that we're skipping that out of a PC desire for trans. Well, for biological women who are presenting as men, trans, trans men. Right. Right. And there's this.

The thing is, like within trans activism. And as you mentioned, this is not the majority of trans people. There are a small number of basically hyper online trans people who are sort of pushing this is that they do not speak for the majority of trans people at all. Most trans people acknowledge their own biological sex. The thing that makes them trans is that they're trying to appear and live as the opposite sex, but you still have to acknowledge your biological sex. You still have to take the medications every week or every two weeks or whatever. You know, you get the surgeries. But there is this ideology that it sounds ridiculous to even say this, but this idea that if you that you are what you say that you are. So if I say that I am a trans man, that means

I am male. I am literally male, which is just, it is a historical nonsense. It's not true. It's not true. You can be respectful of somebody who is trans without signing onto that nonsense. And this, can you speak to, this is what Lauren was trying to say to you as a med student, that she doesn't, she knows that there are medical differences between men and women, you know, like where women are more prone to X and men are more prone to whatever. Heart disease is one of the things, you know, a heart attack presents differently in a biological woman than it does in a biological man. But like she was making the point, I don't have the time to on my own, every single disease

they present us with, do the extra layer of now let me on my own figure out how it affects a man and a woman differently. And then when I meet patients, spend the extra time trying to figure out because it's not on the chart, finding out whether they have a biological different sex than how they're presenting. Yeah, she was very concerned about this because she feels like in her school, and I should say this is just one program at one school. I did hear from other students after the piece was published that confirmed this and other medical schools around the country. But the piece really focused on this one school. And she was concerned that she isn't getting instruction she needs on

differences on how things present differently among the sexes. And I can see why her professors would avoid this because their students act like little Stasi. I mean, they have these online messaging platforms where they give the instructors real-time feedback while they lecture. And if a lecturer says something problematic, and that can be, yes, using terms like male and female, the students will complain about it. They had multiple petitions within the last year of this program, trying to basically reform these teachers, their language use. And they're doing it.

It's working. They're doing it. And they're doing it. Yes. They're scared of their students. Yes. You've got the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, Harvard Medical School, all trying now to make the effort to divorce biological sex from gender identity

and emphasize on gender identity. Both matter. Both matter. You've got the American Psychological Association deeming terms like natal sex, birth sex disparaging. Now it's only assigned sex at birth, as though biological sex is not relevant and maybe even offensive. Right. And you can imagine a situation. So now in many states, maybe all states, I'm not sure about this. You can get your, uh, your, your sex marker

changed on your, on your birth certificate and on your driver's license. So let's say a trans person gets in a car accident and is unconscious and goes to a, goes to an ER. And then the ER, the first responders there, they are, all they have is this driver's license. If the person has had surgeries to look like a male or a female or whatever, they might not even realize the actual biological sex of the person that they're working on. Because this official ID says that you are this thing

that you believe that you are. And again, go back to what happened to that baby. That baby died because they were unwilling to probe further. So this, we need to care. I mean, this is, this is a problem and it's a problem even in the, in the psychiatric field now too. More and more therapists are coming out and saying all people's problems are supposed to be attributed to identity. It's no longer about Katie, what'd you go through? You know, did you have a pain in the ass mother? Oh, well, let's blame her. It's now all about, well, you're white, so you're an oppressor. So that's probably the root of your depression.

Right. And we should be careful not to generalize too much. Therapists vary as much as any other field. But yes, there is this trend within the field of mental health to attribute, especially among young natal females, teen girls, to attribute various, you know, you go in complaining of some problem, and then all of a sudden you're diagnosed with gender dysphoria. And this isn't the first time we've seen these trends throughout history. There was during the 1980s and 1990s, therapists were integral into the spread of the repressed memory craze, which was widely debunked, but had all of these terrible consequences, not just convincing people that they underwent horrific abuse, but also people actually went to jail. So yeah, it makes me very, very cautious to ever see a

therapist personally. You don't want to leave with more problems than you came in with. Well, we've talked about this. I talked about it with Abigail Schreier, and I know you're familiar with her work. But you know, she pointed out how parents who have a child who presents as trans who never presented as trans before you know it's always a girl who's 15 who was never no no signs at all and then a couple of her friends say that they're non-binary or whatever it is and suddenly their daughter's like well maybe i'm trans abigail was sounding the alarm on be careful because the new standard in the psychiatric field is a firm, a firm, a firm, a firm. And I've seen some of your reporting dovetail with that, that like people go and the first thing they're told is, yes, your kid's actually a boy. And the parents are like, wait, you know, she got bullied.

You know, it could be any one of a number of things. Right, right. It's a real problem. And the standards of this have actually have literally changed. So what the recommendations now are, it's called affirmative consent. So you basically tell a patient, tell the parents, you know, there's some possibility you'll regret this, but you don't necessarily have to explore other issues of what might be going on. Maybe issues with someone's sexual orientation or depression or anxiety, or just like being a teen girl, which is difficult. And teen girls are notoriously prone to social contagion and peer pressure. But it's become this sort of progressive, not just talking point, but this dogma that if someone comes and they say, I am trans, you cannot inspect that. You cannot ask them what else is going on.

You just have to accept this. And this is part of this is a backlash to very real gatekeeping within this field. So for decades, if you wanted to transition, you had to live as your preferred sex, your preferred gender for two years before you were given things like hormones or surgery. That can be very onerous. And so this is the opposite of this. This is the backlash. The reaction to this is to basically take away all gatekeeping. And for some people, that's going to be better. It's going to have good outcomes. But for some people, it's not. And there's going to be a certain number of false positives who regret this. Well, and meanwhile, they're performing mastectomies on girls as young as 13,

13 double mastectomies. It's called top surgery because we want to pretend that somebody absolutely has it, has gender dysphoria. And as soon as they express it, that's what it really is. And we don't need to look further. And the reality is that the vast majority, I mean, I've seen it, you tell me, but I've seen any place between 60% and 90% of kids who have gender dysphoria grow out of it. And a very large percent of them, if left to their own devices and not perform surgery or gender hormones or any of that, turn out to be gay or lesbian. I would have been one of those kids. I was a classic tomboy and grew up to be a lesbian. If I had been born 20 years later, I might be talking to you as

a they, them. I probably wouldn't be talking to you right now, but it might be a non-binary or trans right now. And you're right. There's lots of studies that back up that the statistic varies, but the majority of kids, if sort of left to their own devices, will eventually grow out of this. That said, if you start transitioning, if you start on hormone blockers or social transitioning, that number changes. So people who start to go down this path are much, much likely to, the term is to cis, but much, much less likely to grow out of it if they're given some sort of medical intervention. You've been doing great reporting on how if you do puberty blockers into cross-gender hormones, you will be infertile. You can have all sorts of other problems, but just the puberty blockers into cross gender hormones, you you will be infertile. You can have all sorts of

other problems. But just the puberty blockers can be really problematic. When it comes to let's say it's a girl who thinks suddenly that she's actually a boy, she takes puberty blockers. She's going to be it's going to affect her height, right? Forevermore, like other unforeseen consequences. These are not harmless drugs. Right. One of the clinicians I talked to told me that in this person is skeptical of youth transition. So keep that in mind. But one of the clinicians I talked to said, you know, the last thing that you want to do, if a girl wants to appear to be a man, the last thing that you want to do is make her shorter, right? And so these people are not the main puberty block blocker that is given to natal females is Lupron, which is a drug

that's used to treat prostate cancer. And there are Lupron has been used, it's an off label use, but it's been used for precocious puberty. So, so girls who let's say get their periods are eight or nine years old, it's been prescribed to them for a long time. And so we can look at the side effects of this. There's bone density issues. As you mentioned, there's fertility issues. And we just don't have good evidence that there aren't going to be long-term side effects for people who are using this now. And it's being prescribed. And we don't have great data on this, but just anecdotally, it's being prescribed just much more widely than it probably should be. Yeah, like candy, because the standard is affirm, affirm, affirm. All right, I want to ask you about some other reporting that you've been doing on a story that's been in the news.

And to your credit, as usual, you're not afraid to push back against the narrative, capital T, capital N, we're being fed by some in the press. There is a story. Okay. This is not the Amy Cooper story where she was walking the dog in Central Park and she got into a confrontation with a black man also by the name of Cooper and they call her Central Park Karen. She lost her job. This is a different story about a white woman and a black couple. And I think it also involves a dog. So can you just set it up for us and set it up? What happened? Dogs are the problem. Stay away from dog parks. That's the message here. So this happened in a sort of ironically named McCarran Park in New York. This was a couple of

weeks ago. A woman named Emma Sarley got into a confrontation with a man named Frederick Joseph, and the confrontation was over his dog, which he thought was being aggressive. Frederick Joseph is a he's an influencer. He's an author. He does marketing. He does content creation. He has 100000 followers on Twitter and he has this long history of turning what he perceives as racial aggressions in the content. So if you look back into his tweets, like he posted a tweet some time ago, he took a picture of a woman on a, on an airplane with her feet up on the seat back in front of her. And he said that this was a United flight. He said that the, the flight attendant asked this woman to take her, her feet down and she refused. And the flight attendant offered her a thousand that united offered this woman a thousand dollars to do this anybody who has flown they make you pay to like put your baggage in the overhead they make you pay to put to have a seat belt at this point

no airline is going to it's like and this is then this is not in first class nobody no airline is going to do this so he does stuff like this he posted another photo of a of a man uh also on an airplane laying a white man laying his uh he was just laying he had three seats to himself so he's just laying down on the airplane and frederick joseph said you know a black man would never be able to do this i don't know any airline who would enforce that that's just not a rule right so he has this history he at one point he accused uh he stayed in an airbnb and he accused the airbnb of of having all of this Satanist iconography made it into a huge viral story. So this is what he does.

And in this particular case, he whipped out his phone during this confrontation or after the confrontation with this woman. And he said, did you say to stay in my neighborhood? And she said, yes, the woman, frankly, appeared to be a little bit drunk. Her behavior was also erratic and sort of bizarre. And so he films this and then he puts this online and he says, OK, now let me pause you there. Let me pause you there, because I think we have. So the moment she allegedly says the thing about your hood or your neighbor, that's not on camera. But the aftermath is.

Let's watch it. Stay in our hood? No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to invite everyone. Stay in our hood? Stay in our hood. I'm sorry, what? Let's watch it. i'm sorry you were right here watch this entire thing did she just not stand here tell us to stay in our hood she did she just told you just told us to stay okay go ahead pick it up okay so he takes that clip and he puts it online shows it to his hundreds of thousands of followers and he directs his followers to find this woman they go and do it and then he figures out where she works and he tags her employer and she is fired within

a couple of hours. So Camille Foster really did some incredible reporting on this and he interviewed witnesses. And what he found was that during this confrontation, Frederick Joseph said that he lived in Long Island city. So this wasn't his neighborhood. So it sounds as though what she's saying is go back to your, she probably shouldn't have used the word hood. She might've been mirroring his language. I'm not sure, but she probably should, you know, just like stay away from that term. She wasn't saying like, go back to the ghetto, but apparently what she was saying- Your hood and the hood are two different things.

Right. Right. This is our dog park and at our dog park, we don't do this. Go back to your dog park. So Camille Foster found this out and he he also realized something pretty, pretty incredible here. So CBS Local News, they interviewed some witnesses as well as Frederick Joseph. Apparently, the witnesses, the witness, as well as Frederick Joseph, said this in the interview. They said they both said this. He said, I live in Long Island City. She said, go back to your hood or stay in your hood. CBS Local News cut that part of the interview. Why would they do it? Well, it's less salacious that way. So Camille got in touch with the reporter. The reporter refused to talk to him. He called the station. Nobody would talk to him. They just have completely not answered to the fact that they left out this crucial bit of information.

Now, is Emma racist? It's totally possible. I have no idea. But the question is, should she have been fired from her job immediately because of this 30-second video, out-of-context video, where nobody really knew what happened to lead up to this conflict oh my gosh this is what and she was fired because he made a point of tagging her employer i mean this guy clearly wanted her fired contrast that with the central park situation where the guy though there are problems with that story too at least he came out publicly and said okay i you know i don't know that she should be fired over this and have her whole life ruined. This guy was like, let's ruin her. Let's get her. And even Nicole Hannah Jones, you know,

of the 1619 project in the New York times came out and was like, I don't know if I'm okay with this whole, let's fire everybody and let's fire this girl. And I mean, but that, but they did it. She got, she lost her job. Yeah. And then, then the CEO, of course, got dogpiled for that, because as many people who thought he did the right thing, a number, you know, probably an equal number of people thought that he did the wrong thing. So he should have just back. He shouldn't have said a word. He should have just backed up and kept this internal. And, you know, there's another question here, which is why are our bosses adjudicating what we do outside of work? I find that really deeply uncomfortable. Right. If my employees like my co-host, Jesse Singel, if my employee is doing something outside of work that I object to, is it my business to regulate his behavior?

Should I just, you know, should I call his girlfriend? Should I call his dad and tell him? It just doesn't make any sense. And there are, of course, going to be exceptions to this. If somebody is like, you know, has like a dog fighting ring in their basement or something. If it's a crime, sure, that's a different story. But for these interpersonal interactions

that really shouldn't be, this is a fight in a dog park, right? And not even a very big fight. These interpersonal interactions should really just be ignored or solved between the people. This doesn't need to be something that you run to the boss. I mean, ironically, what Frederick Joseph did is the quintessential Karen move. You're exactly right. But there's no grace. And forget, you know, this guy is an activist, clearly, who just wants to get get people fired and sort of cause trouble. That's obvious based on what you've just told us. But for the meant to say neighborhood, who the hell knows? You can't tell, but like what did the investigation show? Did they bother to do one or they just can her? I mean, it was too fast. She was, she was fired within hours. There's no way that they could have conducted any sort of real investigation. And the thing for Emma is that she's, she seems like a young woman, you know, this will haunt her for the rest of her life.

This will be at the top Google results for the rest of her life, unless she hires one of these services that cost $100,000 and they'll push your Google results down to page two or whatever. But this will haunt her for the rest of her life. Look into that. Abby, make a note. Yeah, big business. They're going to be working all the time for me. But you know what? It's kind of the same thing. Like that employer is doing the same thing that those professors who are self-editing

in the medical schools who are not true believers are doing. You know, they're just cowing, bowing to the woke mob because they're afraid. They don't have anything close to a steel spine. And they're just as complicit in the erosion of grace and kindness and understanding that humanity is complicated as the as the angry activists who I'm fighting against on this program are. if you have thousands of people calling for this woman's head, it takes incredible resilience to not listen to them, especially if you're a business, especially if, you know, this could, this could hurt your bottom line. If customers are calling you and saying, you have to fire this woman, I can understand why people would do that, but there needs to be some grace period. There needs to be some way to resolve these because the story that emerges online with anything, almost anything with a 30 second

video clip is much more complicated, much more nuanced than what we're led to believe. And people should remember this after the Covington story. And then immediately after that, the Jussie Smollett story. But there's this need to sort of act immediately that really doesn't serve people. Katie Herzog, such great reporting. As always, we love Camille too, one of the co-hosts of The Fifth Column. He was on the show not long ago. And so we'll keep an eye on his reporting as well.

Great to see you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Up next, we're taking your calls. Would love to know your thoughts on Chris Cuomo. You think he'll address Shelley's allegations? Will CNN, will Brian Stelter ever? Do they give a damn?

What about Katie's reporting? Are you in the medical community dealing with these issues? Or what do you think about this guy at the dog park trying to get this woman's job? Call me 833-44-MEGAN, M-E-G-Y-GYN that's 833-446-3496 we're going to take our first caller out of brooklyn new york hey brooklyn what's your thought hey megan how are you i just want to say thank you so much for providing some truth and substance. And in every media that you really see that being done today, especially on a program that CNN, which, uh, my God, that Chris Cuomo, what a terrible guy that is. I mean, he had it, he had his brother on, you know,

when the governor was doing well, he was so loved. And then next thing you know, for like 13, 14, 15 women come out, accuse him of sexual harassment. Chris Coleman didn't say one thing about his brother. Not one thing at all. Cause you knew that he had some skeletons in his closet as well. So, and Shelly,

what an interview today. Shelly seems pretty credible. She seems pretty credible. I'm telling you, Megan. So, Hey, thank you for providing her a platform. CNN has been horrible lately. I mean, the truth is just not there. Brian Stelter, don't get me started on that guy either. But Megan, geez, know, very well that it's a double standard. And if this had been one guy at Fox, Brian Seltzer would have been writing all about it.

And, you know, Chris Cuomo's got a pattern of bullying nonstop. And I'm really kind of sick of it. And I think a lot of people are. I'm going to squeeze in one more caller before we go. Jiffy Quick, Nancy in Indiana. What are your thoughts? Megan, I just can't tell you how much I enjoy your podcast. Listen to them every time.

But I was wondering, do you think you'll ever interview Megan or Melania Trump or Donald? Oh, definitely. Definitely. I would love to interview them. I'd love to talk to Melania because I haven't done that yet. And Trump is a newsmaking machine. So, yes, I predict we'll get him on the podcast and the show at some point soon. Thank you for listening. Thank you all for listening. Tomorrow, one of my favorite people, Victor Davis Hanson is here. John Stossel, too. And guess what? Ben Smith of the New York Times, who broke that story on Aussie media, which has now imploded.

He's coming on. So don't miss that. Check out our show at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. We'll see you tomorrow. you