‘You’re Going to Pay for It’: Don Lemon Reportedly Tormented Female Colleagues for Years

A stunning exposé published Wednesday revealed that CNN has stuck by Don Lemon through thick and thin. The anchor has allegedly threatened his female colleagues and he has also made a steady stream of provocative and erratic comments.

The news comes as Lemon is under increased scrutiny over his behavior towards women after saying presidential candidate Nikki Haley, 51, “isn’t in her prime.” He’s been battered from the right and from the left, from Haley herself, and from prominent media figures. Lemon was forced to undergo “formal training” for his comments. Actress Michelle Yeoh even referenced Lemon at the Oscars when she won Best Actress. “Ladies, don’t let anybody ever tell you you are ever past your prime. Never give up,” Yeoh asserted.

But Lemon’s issues with women surfaced well before the Haley comments, according to the Variety report.

“Now you’ve crossed the line, and you’re going to pay for it,” read a text that then-CNN journalist Kyra Phillips received from an unknown source. Phillips, who is now a correspondent at ABC, had recently returned from a high-profile gig in Iraq that Lemon had coveted for himself.

Phillips was rattled by the text and quickly enlisted CNN’s higher ups to identify the sender. Two sources told Variety that after a human resources investigation was launched, two threatening messages were traced back to Lemon. However, the anchor was not fired, instead being demoted from his position co-anchoring a weekday show with Phillips to a weekend show. Remarkably, it wasn’t even Lemon’s first incident with Phillips. When she was in Iraq, he vented his disappointment at being passed over by tearing up pictures and notes on top of and inside Phillips’ desk in the news pod they shared, according to the Variety sources.

Regarding this allegation and several other allegations reported by Variety, National Review was told by a CNN spokesperson that the entertainment outlet “provides no actual proof, and instead relies on anonymous sources and unsubstantiated claims from 10 to 15 years ago. CNN is unable to corroborate the alleged accounts.”

Kyra Phillips’s nightmare was only the tip of the iceberg, however. Lemon called one of his female producers fat to her face, Variety reported. He mocked Nancy Grace on the air by mimicking her. Lemon was so upset that another colleague, Soledad O’Brien, landed the gig of hosting CNN’s high-profile Black in America docuseries, that he suggested O’Brien wasn’t black in an editorial call attended by roughly 30 staffers, according to two witnesses.

A CNN spokesperson told National Review that “Don, Soledad, and others, have in the past correctly referred to her Afro-Cuban heritage as it is a unique part of her personal story. But Don denies making any related remark in a derogatory way.”

Lemon, who recently lost his coveted primetime spot and is now hosting CNN’s This Morning alongside two female hosts, also has a history of eyebrow-raising incidents that made him difficult to work with. The anchor reportedly name-dropped famous friends. He bragged about his litigiousness, though Variety could not confirm a lawsuit Lemon claimed to have pursued against Chicago PD for racial profiling. Lemon also began dating a 22-year-old male staffer fresh out of college. The anchor was 41 at the time.

“As fast as you could make a rule, Don would bend it,” one then-senior executive told Variety.

Despite CNN’s backing, the anchor constantly disrespected the network, skipping editorial calls and showing up late to the newsroom, the entertainment outlet reported. When he got the coveted gig of covering the Michael Jackson funeral from within the Staples Center, Lemon is said to have complained Anderson Cooper was getting more air time.

Variety reported that when Goldie Taylor, a former CNN consultant who appeared frequently as a guest on Lemon’s weekend show, critiqued his erratic behavior, she was promptly blacklisted.

“I’m never surprised when Don gets in trouble,” Taylor explained to the entertainment outlet. “It makes me neither happy nor sad to see him undermine his own success. There was a time when it appeared that Black people were most often the subject of his ire. Now, it seems to me that when he says something offensive, there’s almost always a woman on the other side.”

CNN declined “to weigh in on the network’s booking practices of unpaid guests a decade ago,” as the spokesperson phrased it to National Review.

In another incident, Lemon told a Bill Cosby rape accuser that she should have just fought back and bit Cosby’s member. Separately, some colleagues questioned his journalistic ethics when he refused to surrender his phone to authorities after he communicated with Jussie Smollett regarding his concocted hate-crime, telling Smollett the police doubted his story. National Review was told by CNN that the “interaction was an act of journalism as Don was attempting to prompt a response from Mr. Smollett and book him for his show.”

The anchor has nevertheless managed to charm his superiors, with CNN standing by him over and over. He fostered a close friendship with Turner Broadcasting System chairman and CEO Phil Kent, who oversaw CNN’s parent company from 2003 to 2013. Jeff Zucker also tolerated the anchor’s excesses, not disciplining Lemon while he fired popular anchor Chris Cuomo. Zucker’s replacement as president of CNN, Chris Licht, condemned Lemon for his Haley comments and was the one to force the anchor to undergo formal training.

Lemon’s stock rose in the Trump era after the former president called him “dumb as a rock” in 2016. However, he has since been demoted from primetime to a morning show that has lower ratings.

His colleagues on CNN’s This Morning are two female journalists, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. Harlow fled the set after Lemon’s Haley comments and Collins followed Harlow to try to talk to her fellow anchor, Variety reported.

In a statement obtained by National Review, a Lemon spokesperson expressed his disappointment with Variety’s report as a whole.

“The story, which is riddled with patently false anecdotes and no concrete evidence, is entirely  based on unsourced, unsubstantiated, 15-year-old anonymous gossip.  It’s amazing and disappointing that Variety would be so reckless,” the statement read.

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