A former CNN anchor has revealed the backstory behind her memorable monologue on sexual assault.
Brooke Baldwin, a longtime host of CNN Newsroom who previously blasted her firing from the news network, has revealed the personal emotions behind her 2018 on-air comments on sexual assault allegations that now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced during his confirmation process.
On air, Baldwin said: “We all have our stories. 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.’”
But in a post to her personal Substack, Baldwin revealed that the story felt much more personal to her than she felt comfortable sharing on air at the time.
“When I delivered the final section of that monologue… you can see it in my eyes and hear it in my voice. But there was one pronoun I intentionally left out: ‘I,’” she wrote.
“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 then revealed that she believed her drink had been spiked by a man during her senior year in college while she and her friend went to Los Angeles for spring break.
“I woke up on the cold, hard bathroom tile floor of my Los Angeles hotel room with a man I did not know,” she explained.
“For years, I did not have language for what I believed may have been done to me,” she added.
Baldwin said at the time she did a “frantic check of my body,” and was overcome by a sense of “relief” after “believing penetration hadn’t happened.”
“Shock was the only word for it. And shame,” Baldwin recalled. “I am sharing this story not for sympathy. Not for drama or clicks. And not because my story is the story here.”
Baldwin’s reveal comes after she has been highly critical of the way in which she was fired from CNN in 2021.
In an op-ed published in Vanity Fair in 2024, she said she was fired by then-CNN boss Jeff Zucker after developing a combative relationship with an unnamed executive producer, which resulted in a contentious relationship between herself and Zucker.
In that piece, she wrote that she told Zucker she wanted the producer removed from her team, but said she was “denied.” She wrote that that was the beginning of the end of the “lovely relationship” she shared with Zucker.
“Jeff wanted me out. No explanation. Just out,” she wrote, adding, “And the worst part? I had to lie to my team, my friends and family, and my viewers.”
