Project Veritas on Tuesday released undercover video in which CNN employees accused a longtime producer of sexual misconduct with their co-workers.
In footage captured by Project Veritas, senior producer Rick Saleeby is seen accusing supervisor Steve Brusk of sexual misconduct during a party for a colleague.
“So, like, there is this girl that was twenty-one. She’s actually a good friend of mine. She had just gotten hired after being an intern… And she was getting… There was a going-away party for a co-worker. We were all having a really good time… She was very well-liked. We were getting drunk. He started, like, staying close to her… Arm around her,” Saleeby recalled.
“She had a skirt on. I could see the hand. I, like, grab her. It looked like I was being the assaulter because I grabbed her so aggressive… To keep her from him. Like, go around her and go, ‘Come over here’ and looked at him because I could flatten him,” the CNN producer added. “I wouldn’t do it because then I would be the one who got fired… He would have absolutely been like, ‘get in a cab with me later.’”
“He had already been accused of the things prior, which I found out later,” he added.
Saleeby later suggests that CNN would have fired Brusk due to today’s “#MeToo” environment, in which “people are afraid to do shit.”
In the second half of the video, CNN media coordinator Nick Neville is seen telling Project Veritas’ “CNN insider” Cary Poarch — a satellite technician who went undercover while working as a contractor at CNN’s Washington, D.C., office — that Brusk picked a female staffer over him to be on his team. According to Neville, the unnamed girl signaled the decision to join Brusk was “hush-hush.”
“There was this other girl who was like an [News Assistant], I feel like we basically had the same level of experience…and a job just kind of like appeared out of nowhere…and it was never posted online, and this girl always worked pretty closely with Steve, like all of us on the desk would help Steve out with stuff,” said Neville.
“But this other girl works pretty closely with him and he would email her, I mean, he emails all of us, but he would email and was very friendly to her, the staffer continued. “And then she just like got a job like working on his team and she was like, oh it’s hush-hush. The job was never posted anywhere. I was like, what is it? I just thought it was a little strange. Was there an agreement? What happened there?”
“Like I’m saying, that’s open knowledge, but it just kind of like goes along with what he said,” he added.
Project Veritas’s Tuesday’s video is part of a series in which the group is releasing undercover footage from inside CNN aimed at further exposing the network’s bias. Last Monday’s video showed a CNN media coordinator saying Zucker has a “personal vendetta” against President Donald Trump, while another video showed a CNN staffer stating the network is “totally left-leaning.