Report: Jeff Zucker Silently Suspended CNN Contributor Mary Katharine Ham for Criticizing Masturbator Jeffery Toobin

Former CNN president Jeff Zucker reportedly silently suspended conservative contributor Mary Katharine Ham for publicly criticizing the network’s embrace of legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin after he had been caught masturbating during a company Zoom meeting.

In a Substack post on Thursday, Mary Katharine Ham said that she learned of her quiet suspension in July of this year, roughly seven months after she mysteriously disappeared from the network following her public argument with fellow colleague Andrew Kaczynski. Though the argument centered on CNN’s treatment of the January 6 riot versus the congressional baseball shooting, she eventually hammered the company for welcoming Jeffrey Toobin back on air despite his offense.She wrote on Substack:

It came to my attention in July that I had been punished under old CNN leadership— kept off air since January— for tweeting about Jeffrey Toobin in a Twitter dust-up with Andrew Kaczynski (another CNN employee) regarding our network’s coverage of the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting.

According to Ham, she had no idea that CNN under Jeff Zucker’s leadership issued a quiet suspension against her until new leadership informed her. The suspension reportedly did not stem from her criticism of CNN’s coverage of the congressional baseball shooting or her public argument with a fellow colleague, but specifically from her comments about Toobin.

Rather, I’m told, “when it got to the comments about Jeffrey Toobin…everyone wanted a bit of a breather.”

Well, everyone but me, who had no idea there was a breather in effect. I was never informed of my punishment until it was rescinded recently by new management. No one called me or my representation about it. There was no announcement of a suspension, or notification of in-house disciplinary action, which I would have preferred, even welcomed by comparison to serving a secret sentence.

Toobin was suspended from CNN for just eight months, just one month more than Mary Katharine Ham allegedly was for criticizing his Zoom masturbation offense.

As to why she chose to airthis story publicly, Mary Katharine Ham said she did not want friends and colleagues to believe she had not been seen on CNN for some serious violation.

“My takeaway was that I wanted younger women to see that I spoke up about my treatment when warranted and survived, even thrived,” she concluded. “Among those young women are my three daughters. I can’t tell them this story in good conscience if it ends with ‘Mom went right back to work with a smile on her face after that.’ I don’t get a rehabilitation interview to reflect on my absence or to plug a book, as Toobin did, but I can write this.”