Over the last two weeks, CNN has been hit with two major, headline-grabbing scandals. First, there was the culmination of the growing cont...
Over the last two weeks, CNN has been hit with two major, headline-grabbing scandals.
First, there was the culmination of the growing controversy over the extent to which the network’s top anchor, Chris Cuomo, helped his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, respond to allegations of sexual harassment.
In light of new information that Cuomo was, in his capacity as a journalist, reaching out to other news outlets to try to determine what kind of dirt they may have had on his then-governor brother, the network placed him in indefinite suspension only to fire him a few days later, after it was revealed that an anonymous former coworker had issued allegations of sexual harassment on his part.
Interestingly, just a year ago, the two Cuomo brothers were at the peak of their respective careers, as the younger led CNN’s prime time lineup and the elder was made the face of the Democratic Party response to the pandemic as New York became one of the hardest-hit localities in the nation.
CNN turned this into a ratings-magnet schtick where Chris would interview older brother Andrew — but it wouldn’t be long before Chris was helping Andrew’s PR team craft responses to the growing number of allegations that the governor got way too grabby with his female staff.
Andrew Cuomo resigned as governor in August, and it would be less than four months before Chris Cuomo was out at CNN.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
This brings us to our second major CNN scandal of the last two weeks.
On Friday, a producer was arrested over allegations that he enticed a minor into illegal sex acts, the full details of which are abhorrent and nauseating.
John Griffin is accused of directing the purported mothers of underage girls into online “training sessions” to teach their daughters to be “sexually subservient” to men, as well as flying a mother and her 9-year-old daughter out to his Vermont ski lodge where he allegedly engaged in illegal sex acts with the child.
Since Griffin once worked as a producer on the show “New Day” at the same time as Chris Cuomo, it wasn’t long before concerned members of the public began to wonder just how close the now-disgraced and sex-scandal-embroiled anchor and this allegedly sickeningly perverted former producer really were.
Now, just because two men from the same network are accused of sexual impropriety in a span of two weeks and once worked together doesn’t necessarily mean they have anything to do with each other, of course.
In this case, however, there’s ample digital evidence that the two had quite a lot to do with each other and appear to have been very chummy, as it happens. In fact, according to Griffin, Chris Cuomo was his “boy.”
Ruh-roe.
It didn’t take long for clever netizens to dig through Griffin’s Twitter account, which is still active as of this writing.
It appears that while Griffin and Cuomo worked together on CNN’s “New Day,” which Cuomo left in 2018 to star in his own prime time slot, the two were quite good friends.
They exchanged considerate, personalized gifts:
They joshed around:
They talked about how amazing and modest Chris Cuomo was:
And on Griffin’s part, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, he issued a heartfelt, deeply personal message of support for Cuomo when the latter tested positive for COVID-19 in 2020, in which he referred to his former boss as his “boy.”
Interestingly, Griffin’s most recent tweet is from 2019, suggesting that perhaps there has been deleting going on.
But the Mail reported that on March 31, 2020, Griffin wrote, “Praying for my boy Chris Cuomo even if, purely technically at least, he isn’t my boy anymore. But as he said on tonight’s broadcast, please don’t worry for him. Watch him closely when he says, with a positive Corona diagnosis don’t forget, what HE’S worried about: his kids — and he nearly starts crying. I saw that time and time again.”
“He has never, and won’t ever, give a flying crap about himself if someone near him is more vulnerable and in need, period,” the adoring producer continued, going on to brag that he had spent five years “traveling the world, shoulder-to-shoulder, squeezed in, both physically and emotionally, with this tree-trunk of a man.”
“He once picked up all 200, flabby daddy pounds of me like I was a feather and THREW me to safety the MILLISECOND he THOUGHT I might get hit by a tree in a hurricane,” Griffin reportedly added, making this, oddly, the second indication that Chris Cuomo had once picked up the producer.
Griffin finished by declaring Cuomo would issue an “uppercut” to the then-novel virus which would then “run away squealing like a little you-know-what, BELIEVE ME, it’s him.”
This would be a bit nauseating even if it didn’t involve these two skin-crawling men. *Shudder*
As you can imagine, Twitter users were quick to note that none of this looked good for Cuomo, as indeed it does not.
Whoever has been deleting tweets from Griffin’s profile doesn’t seem to have done a very thorough job.
There’s no getting around it — CNN has a sex abuser problem, and John Griffin just became a major problem both for the network and its recently-ousted top anchor.
No comments