You Owe Me $125 Million

Ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s ouster from the network in December had already turned ugly even before his lawyers this week formally asked for $125 million on his behalf as part of an arbitration filing, arguing he was wrongfully terminated from the network.

The whole messy affair also includes allegations of sexual misconduct against Cuomo (which Cuomo has denied and which at this point feel like a footnote in the story). In the arbitration demand that his lawyers filed this week, Cuomo goes on to blast CNN’s leadership as opportunists who took advantage of his program’s strong ratings, then unceremoniously scapegoated and cut him loose after the sexual misconduct allegations emerged. And it just gets worse from there.

The network’s internal investigation into Cuomo, for example, also contributed in part to the abrupt departure of erstwhile CNN head Jeff Zucker last month. The CNN boss acknowledged that he’d failed to disclose a consensual relationship with a subordinate, CNN’s former CMO Allison Gollust. The same Gollust used to work for Cuomo’s brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And she apparently was an intermediary between the governor and the news network, which — with Zucker’s blessing — allowed the younger Cuomo to conduct fawning interviews of the governor during the early days of the Covid pandemic. The interviews quite often included cringe-inducing moments, such as the brothers at one point bantering over which one of them was more loved by their mother.

Then came sexual misconduct allegations against the former governor. The younger Cuomo shared advice with him behind the scenes, a fact that was also more or less why CNN said it was cutting ties with him — with the network, to be more specific, claiming that the younger Cuomo hadn’t been forthright about the degree to which he was advising his brother. On the contrary, the younger Cuomo claimed; not only had he not kept anything secret, but he insisted that Zucker knew what he was doing all along.

Chris Cuomo’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, reiterated as much in a statement he shared with me on Thursday as well as with other news outlets. It reads, in part: “It should by now be obvious to everyone that Chris Cuomo did not lie to CNN about helping his brother. In fact, as the limited information released from WarnerMedia’s investigation makes clear, CNN’s highest-level executives not only knew about Chris’s involvement in helping his brother but also actively assisted the Governor, both through Chris and directly themselves.

“As CNN has admitted, network standards were changed in a calculated decision to boost ratings. When those practices were called into question, Chris was made the scapegoat.”

Zucker himself resigned over an unrelated issue, but it was ostensibly brought to the surface thanks to the Cuomo investigation. That left CNN anchors like Jake Tapper practically seething, with Tapper reportedly going so far as to raise an especially pointed question during a tense CNN staff meeting last month. Tapper’s line of questioning focused on whether Zucker got simply caught up in the Cuomo blast radius, implying that the punishment in the form of Zucker’s resignation was unnecessarily harsh. And that, perhaps, this was simply a case of “the bad guy winning” (the bad guy, as Tapper put it, referring to CNN’s Cuomo).

“Chris Cuomo hires a high-powered lawyer who has a scorched-earth policy, who then makes it very clear to the world that unless Jeff gives Chris Cuomo his money, they’re going to blow the place up,” Tapper said at one point to Jason Kilar, the outgoing CEO of CNN parent WarnerMedia, during the aforementioned meeting held in February in CNN’s Washington bureau.

A recording of that meeting was obtained by the site Puck News.

“Stuff starts getting leaked to gossip websites about Jeff and Allison … and then weeks later, Jeff comes forward, discloses this and resigns,” Tapper continued. “An outside observer might say, ‘Wow, it looks like Chris Cuomo succeeded.

“He threatened, Jeff said we don’t negotiate with terrorists, and he blew the place up.”

That comment, in particular, brings us back to the rest of Freedman’s statement on behalf of Cuomo. “The legal action filed today makes clear that CNN wrongfully terminated Chris and further violated the express terms of his employment agreement by allowing its employees to disparage him. Chris is owed a full apology from those responsible.”

And not just an apology, of course. The calculation that Cuomo’s lawyers feel he’s owed $125 million stems from the $15 million remaining on his CNN contract when he was fired, plus “future wages lost as a result of CNN’s efforts to destroy his reputation.” CNN, by the way, declined to comment to me about this filing.

But, as we noted from the outset, this just keeps getting uglier. CNN anchor Don Lemon — who once seemed to share something of an on-air bromance with Cuomo, with the latter often referring to him as D-Lemon — said at one point during all this (according to Cuomo’s arbitration filing) that Cuomo broke with journalistic standards “and then [was] paid handsomely for it.”

Cuomo’s team wasn’t going to let that go. They accuse Lemon, essentially, of doing a version of the same thing (only not getting punished for it).

From the arbitration filing: “In November 2021, CNN anchor Don Lemon was widely criticized for a flagrant breach of journalistic ethics when actor Jussie Smollett testified at trial that Lemon had texted him to warn him that Chicago police did not believe Smollett’s allegations of suffering a racist, homophobic attack. Lemon had covered Smollett’s accusations and his subsequent investigation and prosecution, so intervening in the ongoing investigation by texting Smollett was an inexcusable breach of ethics. Yet CNN did nothing; Lemon was not disciplined in any way.”

The postscript here is that, as this legal affair works its way toward an inevitable settlement, the conclusion will in fact be one more turning of the page that moves CNN into a new chapter for the network. A successor for Zucker has already been named, for example, and he reportedly wants to shift the network away from red-hot liberal-friendly resistance programming and personality-driven takes — and back toward more hard news. In less than two weeks, CNN will also launch what had heretofore been a project that Zucker was leading, the debut of the CNN+ streaming service.

New faces, new leadership, and a new direction at the network — at a time when, thanks to the soon-to-be-complete merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, it’s also getting all-new corporate oversight soon.