The Head of CNN Quits When He's Caught Sleeping with One of His Executives. And it Was Chris Cuomo Who Outed Him.

Paul Zimmerman. Getty Images.

If there's one thing we know about the world of TV news, it's that working at one of the major networks makes you horny. 

Left, right or center, the one ideological leaning they all seem to share is the kind where you lean someone over a desk and get behind them. Everyone it seems is the Channel 4 News Team, looking at every female colleague like they're Veronica Corningstone, hired just so the guys can invite them to the pants party. Whammy. 

I mean, how many sex- and sexual assault scandals has the industry had just in the past few years? Matt Lauer of NBC reportedly had a remote "rape lock" put on his office door. Charlie Rose of CBS apparently hid a world class creep under his kindly, grandfatherly, outer layer. They made a movie about the sexual politics going on at Fox News:

And CNN might as well have a sign that reads "This Workplace Has Been Sex Scandal-Free for [  ] Days." And it would rarely get up into the double digits.

Famously there was Jeffrey Toobin who ended a Zoom call with coworkers to start jagging it with his camera still on. For that he was given the punishment of a vacation:

A CNN producer named John Griffin is facing monstrous charges, including paying a mother $3000 to sexually harm her 9-year-old. Possibly most famously of all, the man who had his name in the title of a show Griffin worked on, Chris Cuomo, was fired after a woman accused him of unwanted groping right in front of her husband, and she had Cuomo's admission of guilt in writing to prove it.

And now, not only does that Workplace Safety sign need to get reset at CNN because of the sexual shenanigans of the CEO, we have Cuomo himself to thank for it. 

Source - Ousted Chris Cuomo forced Jeff Zucker's resignation from CNN by blowing the whistle on his years-long, open-secret affair with staffer Allison Gollust while fighting for his $18million severance pay, according unnamed media sources.  

In a statement on Wednesday, Zucker said he was stepping down for failing to disclose his relationship with Gollust when he was being interviewed as part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo. 

He and Gollust claim the romance started during COVID, but media sources tell DailyMail.com it long predates the pandemic and was an open-secret in the CNN offices. …

Chris was fired in December last year after an internal investigation found he had helped his brother Andrew, former Governor of New York, navigate through a sexual misconduct scandal, while still working as a CNN host. …

According to Politico's sources, Cuomo's team said it was hypocritical for Zucker to fire Chris for a conflict of interest when he has one of his own in his relationship with Gollust.

Holy moly. Is there just no end to this? Andrew Cuomo has a bad history of being pervy to his young and attractive subordinates. His brother Chris is caught giving him and his legal team advice on how to smear the accusers, and inside information on how it's being covered. Then it turns out Chris is getting handsy with a woman who wants no part of that. So the boss investigates him, and he himself gets outed by for secretly carrying on with one of his executives. It's like every guy creeping on female co-workers or having "consensual" sex with them (as Zucker and Gollust describe it) is a domino in a row of about a thousand of them. And once you tip the first one over, the whole line of them falls.

Even if you want to give Zucker the benefit of the doubt because he and Gollust are two consenting adults, those are not the rules of the game anymore. This isn't the "Mad Men" days any more. Just ask your HR Department. A boss-employee relationship opens you up to all sorts of accusations of favoritism and conflict of interest. At the very least, you have to declare these things and sign all the proper forms and so on. Which you'd think you'd learn by the time you make it to the top of the corporate ladder. And keeping secrets is a bad look for anyone when the whole point of the corporation the run is ostensibly to deliver the news. 

But that's just the thing. Something about delivering TV news must make these guys feel entitled to whatever sexual craving they want, with whomever they want. And if you're going to fire someone for trying to cover up his brother's sex harassment scandal while having a sexual harassment scandal of his own, you'd better hope he doesn't find out you're hiding a (consenting) sexual relationship of your own. Otherwise, you'll end up in the unemployment line with him. 

I suppose that it used to be so much simpler for TV news men.