In a statement, Batali told Eater that he apologized “to the people I have mistreated and hurt.” ABC said it was reviewing the allegations and had asked Batali to step down from “Chew.”
“We have asked Mario Batali to step away from ‘The Chew’ while we review the allegations that have just recently come to our attention,” an ABC spokeswoman said. “ABC takes matters like this very seriously as we are committed to a safe work environment. While we are unaware of any type of inappropriate behavior involving him and anyone affiliated with the show, we will swiftly address any alleged violations of our standards of conduct.”
Batali has been one of four co-anchors of ABC’s daytime cooking and lifestyle series “The Chew” since its inception in 2011.
Beverly Young Nelson, one of several women who have accused Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, told Tom Llamas of ABC News today that it “sickens” her to think that Moore will get elected to the U.S. Senate.
According to Nelson, Moore accosted her after her waitress shift when she was 16-years-old.
“It sickens me to wonder what may go on with him if he gets into office,” said Nelson. “Maybe, you know, he could be doing this still. We don’t know. And then again I hope that he’s changed. I pray that he’s changed. I really do.”
And to those who say none of the allegations matter as much as keeping a Republican in the Senate seat for Alabama, Nelson asks, “Is the party more important — really — than what happened?”
ABC News points out that Moore denies even knowing any of his accusers, and his supporters call the women liars.
The report also includes news of a quote from Moore on the campaign trail when Moore was asked for his opinion on when the last time America was “great.”
Moore’s response: “I think it was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery—they cared for one another. Our families were strong, our country had a direction.”
A top Broadway casting director has been fired from his agency after being accused of inappropriate behavior.
Justin Huff, who is openly gay, was dismissed as a senior staffer at powerhouse casting firm Telsey + Company.
Huff had been involved in casting major Broadway productions like Kinky Boots, Newsies, On Your Feet!, Honeymoon In Vegas, and The Color Purple,
On November 30, agency founder Bernard Telsey announced Huff’s firing.
“I was given reports of inappropriate behavior which I took very seriously,” agency founder Bernard Telsey told Variety, “and once I was able to get some information, it was very clear he had to leave this office.”
Without providing any details, Telsey admitted there were allegations of sexual misconduct.
Huff is married to actor Mo Brady, whom he cast in the short-lived Broadway musical, Catch Me if You Can.
Matt Lauer, has been fired from his position as host of NBC’s The Today Show after a “detailed complaint” was filed with the network’s human resources department.
“On Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer,” Andrew Lack, the NBC News president, said in a memo to the staff.
He said the allegation against Mr. Lauer “represented, after serious review, a clear violation of our company’s standards. As a result, we’ve decided to terminate his employment.”
“While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident,” Mr. Lack said.
Ari Wilkenfeld, a civil rights lawyer with the firm Wilkenfeld, Herendeen & Atkinson in Washington, said he represented the woman who made the complaint to NBC, but declined to publicly identify her. In a statement provided to The New York Times, he said:
“My client and I met with representatives from NBC’s Human Resources and Legal Departments at 6 p.m. on Monday for an interview that lasted several hours. Our impression at this point is that NBC acted quickly, as all companies should, when confronted with credible allegations of sexual misconduct in the workplace.
Lauer had served as the host of the morning news show since 1997.
He follows other high-profile firings such as Charlie Rose of CBS’s The Early Show and Bill O’Reilly, formerly of Fox News.
The Times piece goes on to say the newspaper spoke to the woman on Monday but she apparently was not ready to come forward publicly at that time.
Matt Lauer has been terminated from NBC News. On Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer. As a result, we’ve decided to terminate his employment. pic.twitter.com/1A3UAZpvPb
Variety had been investigating reports of complaints by women regarding Lauer. After today’s news, Variety published their article. Here’s the beginning:
As the co-host of NBC’s “Today,” Matt Lauer once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present. It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her, which left her mortified.
On another day, he summoned a different female employee to his office, and then dropped his pants, showing her his penis. After the employee declined to do anything, visibly shaken, he reprimanded her for not engaging in a sexual act.
He would sometimes quiz female producers about who they’d slept with, offering to trade names. And he loved to engage in a crass quiz game with men and women in the office: “f—, marry, or kill,” in which he would identify the female co-hosts that he’d most like to sleep with.
These accounts of Lauer’s behavior at NBC are the result of a two-month investigation by Variety, with dozens of interviews with current and former staffers. Variety has talked to three women who identified themselves as victims of sexual harassment by Lauer, and their stories have been corroborated by friends or colleagues that they told at the time.
Matt Lauer lost his job. Charlie Rose lost his job. Mark Halperin lost his job. Glenn Thrush lost his job. Billy Bush lost his job. Harvey Weinstein lost his job. Kevin Spacey lost his job. But in politics… Conyers still in Congress. Moore still running. Trump still President.
Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.” But when will the top executives at NBC & Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s past!
Representative John Conyers Jr., the House’s longest-serving lawmaker, is stepping aside as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee amid an investigation into allegations that he sexually harassed former aides.
“After careful consideration and in light of the attention drawn by recent allegations made against me,” Mr. Conyers said in a statement on Sunday, he is stepping aside on the Judiciary panel “during the investigation of these matters.”
The announcement came five days after the revelation that Mr. Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, had settled a complaint in 2015 by a former employee who had said she was fired because she rejected his sexual advances. The House Ethics Committee has opened an investigation into the matter.
“I deny these allegations, many of which were raised by documents reportedly paid for by a partisan alt-right blogger,” Mr. Conyers said in the statement. “I very much look forward to vindicating myself and my family before the House Committee on Ethics.”
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this morning, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Conyers deserved “due process” and advised she believed he would “do the right thing.”
The embattled Roy Moore campaign in Alabama attempted to blur the claims of sexual misconduct by Moore by asserting accuser Leigh Corfman didn’t live at the address she claimed when he allegedly sexually assaulted her.
Unfortunately for Moore, there happened to be a police report from the time period that proved Corfman’s claims.
The campaign has claimed to have found documents that show Leigh Corfman lived more than a mile from the intersection where she said Moore picked her up for dates in 1979, when she was 14 and he was 32. She says he took her to his house and touched her inappropriately. Moore has denied knowing Corfman.
“According to records the media has not bothered to look at, we’ve been able to find that Corfman’s supposed pickup place was almost a mile away from her mother’s house and would have been across a major thoroughfare,” Ben DuPré, a longtime aide to Moore, said at an event Tuesday in Montgomery. “This is yet another improbable fact in Leigh Corfman’s own words and story that the media has not bothered to investigate.”
Corfman and her mother, Nancy, told The Washington Post that they lived at the time on Whittier Street in Gadsden, Ala., around the corner from Alcott Road and Riley Street, where Leigh says she met Moore.
Nancy Corfman said she kept that address from 1974 until February 1981, when she relocated with her new husband to a house on Dogwood Circle in Gadsden, which is about a mile away across a major thoroughfare. A police report about property theft published in the Gadsden Times on March 31, 1980, listed Nancy Corfman’s address on Whittier Street.
#Busted
Moore’s campaign, in a tempestuous tantrum, responded saying, “The Washington Post is a worthless piece of crap that has gone out of its way to railroad Roy Moore. There is no need for anyone at the Washington Post to ever reach out to the Roy Moore campaign again because we will not respond to anyone from the Post now or in the future. Happy Thanksgiving.”
The New York Daily News on Donald Trump’s support for Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore:
Nothing’s worse than a liberal Democrat, according to President Trump — not even an accused sexual molester like Roy Moore.
Trump all but endorsed the Alabama Republican’s Senate bid on Tuesday, as the President made his first direct remarks on the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore that surfaced nearly two weeks ago.
“Roy Moore denies it. That’s all I can say,” Trump told reporters on his way from the White House to his Florida resort for the Thanksgiving holiday.
“We don’t need a liberal person in there,” the President said, in a jab at Doug Jones, Moore’s Democratic challenger in the special election Dec. 12 for Alabama’s open Senate seat.
Trump has repeatedly dodged questions about Moore since two women came forward and told the Washington Post he groped and sexually harassed them decades ago when they were in their teens and he was in his 30s.
Finally addressing the ongoing sexual misconduct allegations of Alabama Republican Roy Moore, Donald Trump defended Moore’s candidacy by saying “You don’t need someone who’s soft on crime like Doug Jones.”
“We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat, Jones. I’ve looked at his record. It’s terrible on crime. It’s terrible on the border. It’s terrible on military,” Trump said. “I can tell you for a fact we do not need somebody who’s going to be bad on crime, bad on borders, bad for the military, bad for the Second Amendment.”
Trump repeatedly emphasized that Jones has denied the allegations brought against him.
Trump declined to say whether he believed Moore’s denials, but when asked he again pointed to the denials.
“Well, he denies. I mean, he denies. I mean, Roy Moore denies it. And by the way, it is a total denial. And I do have to say 40 years is a long time. He’s run eight races and this has never come up. Forty years is a long time,” Trump said, pointing to the amount of time that has passed since the alleged behavior.
It’s worth noting that Doug Jones successfully prosecuted two of the four Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four African-American girls during church service in September 1963.
Not very “soft on crime” in my book.
Watch the Trumpster’s comments below.
Trump, commenting on Roy Moore sexual assault allegations: “You don’t need someone who’s soft on crime like [Doug] Jones.” pic.twitter.com/CdnZZhRTSh
CBS suspended Rose shortly after The Washington Post published a 5,000-word story on Monday about alleged harassment, based on interviews with eight women who described “unwanted sexual advances.”
Rose said in a statement that he “deeply apologized” for what he admitted was “inappropriate behavior.”
After the initial Post story came out, other women came forward with additional allegations of sexual misconduct. By Tuesday morning, CBS executives determined that it was impossible for him to return to “CBS This Morning,” the daily broadcast he has co-hosted for the past five years.
CBS did not immediately name a replacement for Rose on the program.
Not long after CBS’ announcement, PBS made its own.
“In light of yesterday’s revelations, PBS has terminated its relationship with Charlie Rose and cancelled distribution of his programs. PBS expects all the producers we work with to provide a workplace where people feel safe and are treated with dignity and respect,” it said in a statement.
On Tuesday’s “CBS This Morning,” co-hosts Norah O’Donnell and Gayle King addressed the matter in frank detail.
“Charlie does not get a pass here. He doesn’t get a pass from anyone in this room,” King said. “We are all deeply affected. We are all rocked by this.”
I heard about the allegations last night but didn’t have time to read the extremely detailed article by the Washington Post until this morning.
In that I have always regarding Rose as a top-shelf journalist, I’m floored reading all the many allegations.
What’s is equally surprising is the fact that many of these women went to Rose’s long-time executive producer, Yvette Vega, who would apparently respond to the reports with, “That’s just Charlie being Charlie.”
In the Washington Post piece, Vega seems chagrined at her lack of due diligence saying, “I should have stood up for them. I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.”
See Charlie Rose’s full statement and apology via Twitter below.
Just hours after the story broke that Sen. Al Franken had forcibly kissed a radio host during a USO skit 11 years ago, Donald Trump weighed in on the issue tweeting, “The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps? …..”
The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps? …..
Now, I’m not sure this is the smoothest move for a man who has not only been silent on Alabama Republican Roy Moore’s similar predicament, but also has his own fair share of sexual impropriety leveled at him in addition to a certain video tape from Access Hollywood.
This is the kind of moment you put your head down and focus on eating your salad and hope no one notices you’re in the room.
Predictably, the Twitterverse was happy to chime in:
Trump has more than a dozen, on-the-record, allegations of sexual assault against him, and was caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault. This is a dangerous game for him to play. https://t.co/seUnYcBuhU
Seriously, Trump supporters, at what point did you start caring about sexual assault? Trump is accused by 16 women and one 13-year-old girl, Al Franken is accused by one woman. Explain your math. pic.twitter.com/VrWitGLB6U
Donald Trump has been accused of raping a 13-year-old, raping his ex-wife and attempting to rape a female business associate, among at least 17 other accusations of sexual assault. https://t.co/Vr4RH02lu9
