Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin wrote this week about being a sexual assault survivor, in an incident that predated her time as a local reporter and anchor at NBC29 in Charlottesville.
As Baldwin recounted on her “Unraveling With Brooke Baldwin” Substack, when she was 21, she was sexually assaulted by two men she believed slipped something into her drink at a hotel bar.
“I woke up on the cold, hard bathroom tile floor of my Los Angeles hotel room with a man I did not know. For years, I did not have language for what I believed may have been done to me,” Baldwin said.
The timing of this would have been when Baldwin was still a student at the University of North Carolina; she graduated from UNC in 2001, and started her first job in TV at NBC29 later that year.
Baldwin was at NBC29 for two years, moving on to WOWK in Charleston, W.Va., then WTTG in Washington, D.C., before landing at CNN in 2008.
ICYMI
While at CNN, where she was a reporter and news-show host through 2021, she seemed to hint at her experience as a sexual assault survivor in a monologue during coverage of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was, you may remember, accused of assault by Christine Blasey Ford in 2018 during Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings.
“We all have our stories — the spiked drink, waking up on a cold hotel bathroom floor, the uncertainty, the shame,” Baldwin said on that 2018 show, of the Blasey Ford story, which Kavanaugh continues to deny.
In her Substack, Baldwin wrote that the monologue “just poured out of me.”
“The very next day at work, with my heart pounding, I closed my show with it. But there was something I did not say that day. I wasn’t ready then. I am now,” she wrote.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
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Chris Graham
