Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin is ready to open up about her experience as a sexual assault survivor.
“This is a big one, friends,” the journalist, 46, wrote on the Monday, May 3, edition of her “Unraveling With Brooke Baldwin” Substack. “I’m about to tell you a story I’ve held in silence for 25 years.”
The alleged incident occurred when Baldwin was 21 years old and visiting Los Angeles. She claimed that she was sexually assaulted by two older and unidentified men she believed slipped something into her drink at a hotel bar.
“I woke up on the cold, hard bathroom tile floor of my Los Angeles hotel room with a man I did not know,” she shared. “For years, I did not have language for what I believed may have been done to me.”
Baldwin struggled to recall what happened that previous night, noting that since then her memories have come “only in flashes.”
“There was a deep, kind of grogginess the next day that I did not understand,” she recalled.
Baldwin checked her body at the time and felt that “penetration hadn’t happened.”
“At least that was the story I told myself,” she wrote.
Baldwin explained that she decided to come forward all these years later after interviewing fellow sexual assault survivors Jennifer Wilenta and Zoe Watts. She shared that her experience was “not a comparison to either of their experiences.”
“There is no equivalence. None. Their stories are their own. Their bravery, however, stirred something in me. It opened a door I had slammed shut,” she said. “While preparing to interview them — reading, reporting, immersing myself as seriously as I would have for any interview on my CNN show — something happened. My body remembered.”
Baldwin previously hinted that she was a victim of a sexual assault when current Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford in 2018 during Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings. (Kavanaugh has vehemently denied Ford’s allegations.)
“We all have our stories — the spiked drink, waking up on a cold hotel bathroom floor, the uncertainty, the shame,” Baldwin said during a 2018 monologue while covering Ford’s allegations and Kavanaugh’s denial on CNN. (The National Sexual Assault Hotline received a 147 percent increase in calls during the confirmation hearings.)
Baldwin shared on Monday that while she wasn’t ready to talk about her experience eight years ago, she felt empowered enough to say something now.
“I remember going home that night after our wall-to-wall coverage, buzzing, sitting in front of my computer. This monologue just poured out of me,” she reflected. “The very next day at work, with my heart pounding, I closed my show with [the monologue]. “But there was something I did not say that day. I wasn’t ready then. I am now.”
Baldwin was an anchor for CNN from 2008 to 2021.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
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