Fired CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin blew the whistle on herself… she said she left out the most important part of her controversial 2018 monologue attacking then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Baldwin, who hosted CNN Newsroom for nearly a decade before being fired from the network in 2021, wrote this week that the monologue she delivered during Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings was actually about her own experience.
“We all have our stories,” Baldwin said on air in 2018 as Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Kavanaugh gripped the nation. “The spiked drink. Waking up on the cold tiles of a hotel bathroom floor. The uncertainty. The shame. The thought, ‘I somehow brought this on myself.'”
Ford later dropped her legal allegations against Kavanaugh and declined to help investigators pursue a criminal investigation, but still maintains her story and in 2024 tried to profit from it through a memoir critics described as a “fever dream.”
All the alleged witnesses Ford had named in her initial allegations all denied any knowledge of the event happening, and prosecutors described the allegations as “weak.”
Ford’s lawyer later said in public that her client was “motivated” to accuse Kavanaugh to protect the now-overturned Roe v. Wade ruling from a conservative Supreme Court.
Baldwin said this week her 2018 monologue about Ford’s allegations was actually describing her own life.
In the Substack post, Baldwin said she woke up on the bathroom floor of a Los Angeles hotel room after a night at the bar during a spring break trip her senior year of college and was alone with a man she did not remember.
“I woke up on the cold, hard bathroom tile floor of my Los Angeles hotel room with a man I did not know,” Baldwin wrote. “For years, I did not have language for what I believed may have been done to me.”
“Journalists are trained to shine the light outward, never on ourselves. And yet even then, some small voice inside me whispered: Brooke. This matters,” she wrote. “Your story matters, too. And yet there I was — on my own show — inching right up to the edge of my own truth, and still holding back from naming what had been done to me.”
She said she is sharing it now not for attention, but in hopes of reaching other women and encouraging them to come forward.
“I am sharing this story not for sympathy. Not for drama or clicks. And not because my story is the story here,” Baldwin wrote. “I am sharing it because… it matters… and maybe somewhere… There is a woman reading this right now and wondering about her own experience: Wait, was that assault? Did something happen to me, too?”
Baldwin’s revelation comes after a bitter and public firing from CNN. In a 2024 Vanity Fair essay, she disclosed that her departure was actually engineered by then-CNN chief Jeff Zucker after a dispute over a producer on her team.
“Jeff wanted me out. No explanation. Just out,” Baldwin wrote in that piece, adding that she “got told no a lot” as CNN had “become a male-dominated team.”
Baldwin worked at CNN for 13 years before her 2021 departure.