Jordan,

When, over just a short period I interviewed in New York for the job I had long been working toward at CNN, you proposed and I accepted, I accepted the job, and you alerted me that your boss at our company wanted to make me a counter-offer to stay in Atlanta and join your team without very much discussion, I felt uneasy, especially as we had not been dating long and you had been warned not to take the position. (We had both applied preliminarily for this job much earlier, but I had practically dismissed the idea after your boss told you its management would be undesirable and my boss agreed to approve my request to move to New York.) But all you and your friends said and did in front of the entrance to my church in proposing had been so incredible and the job offer so sudden (your telling me your boss was interested in hiring me, my being offered an express phone interview, and then being offered the job in a request for me to rescind my acceptance of the New York role, took just hours altogether), and I wanted to do the right thing. I felt deeply uncomfortable taking back a job acceptance I had worked toward and dreamed of for so long, was incredibly excited about, and that involved a commitment to my boss. But I remember that your boss, who was a VP at our company, told me this was not for me to worry about and that she would take care of my boss. It had been less than two years since I moved to Atlanta, and as much as I truly cared about you, joining your team felt all wrong. I’d asked you not to propose because so much was going on all at once.

I remember you wanted me to move into your apartment right away, but when I said I didn’t feel right about this outside of marriage you said it was important to you that I at least move closer to your condo, and I agreed to rent an expensive apartment near your neighborhood. Although, when you laid out my expenses to prove that I could afford this and told me that if I ever couldn’t cover all of the rent you would make up the difference, it appeared at least close to right, a lot was not accounted for, and the financial obligation ended up being impractical. (You were very frugal, in contrast, with your own money, renting out a spare room in your condo before moving into your boss’s basement for free.) I also remember that starting the day I moved into the new apartment you began treating me with much less respect than before, monitoring text messages on my phone for seemingly anything at all from a man, and I greatly wished I had my regular job and home back again. Even though it was absolutely ridiculous, I felt like I lost considerable confidence and I even almost completely stopped painting for several years starting at this time because of the way in which you began to criticize me and even my artwork. You said that I was the only girl you had ever been good to, which was not comforting and did not feel true to me; but it was more difficult that at this time you seemed to act as though so many boundaries, like the privacy of my cell phone and diary, which had felt obvious and unspoken before, no longer existed.

I was embarrassed, just after I’d moved closer to your neighborhood, that at a work party a friend threw at her home, I drank a smoothie she made without knowing it contained, I believe, fully four servings of alcohol – a lot more than I wanted. I remember, again embarrassingly, bursting into tears and telling many of our colleagues that I wasn’t sure about our engagement and didn’t know what to do. After you learned what I had said, you told me in a frightening moment that you had relayed this to your (and my new) boss, and I felt even more trapped because you talked often about how important marriage was to her. It had added pressure that you told me CNN refrained from taping an episode of Larry King Live in order to make our engagement go smoothly.

I remember that when you were told your job was moving to Washington and asked me to move there as well, it felt wrong, but you said you feared you would never find another girl who had my qualifications in Washington. You told me I was more talented than you were, and that I would be likely be given opportunities for as long as I wanted but that this was going to be your only opportunity to make it truly big and that if I had moved to start the position I’d accepted in New York and we had drifted apart, you would not have been able to survive it. But when you received a voicemail letting you know that your move would actually involve a promotion and told me that you could not prioritize personal relationships at the same level as professional growth and ended our engagement within a few minutes, I felt hurt and afraid, because I felt like I had both given up my professional dream and inadvertently burned important professional bridges in order to join your team. I sobbed to you that I had felt devastated about having given up New York in order to agree to join your team, which I did not feel like me at all, but you just smiled. You said the way to look at it was that our engagement had been good in that had gotten us both jobs on the talk show team given how important marriage was to Carrie. (I felt you saw your promotion as a result of my hire.) But I hadn’t seen my new job as an improvement at all compared to what I had given up. (The New York job I had accepted before all this had felt much more progressive, I didn’t want to join the talk show team after learning about it, and I also didn’t feel right about the bases on which hires there seemed to be made, including family relationships and who did and didn’t have what you said was called “the look.”)

After the new program began to air and we found out what it was going to be like, I remember feeling heartbroken and sobbing to you that it seemed like the program was making entertainment of children’s suffering and felt like a wrong environment; but you smiled and nodded. Being forced to do research for your team was terrible. When I told you this was like having knelt down along the side of a river to get water only to have my head held under I remember you agreed. You at least told me you would talk to our boss to help me be released back into a normal job like my regular one, before I met you, at the company, but I never knew whether you actually did this as she lived in another city and, between the two of us, you were the only one who knew her. I felt betrayed again when you began publicly mocking my new assignment, especially as it had felt wrong for me from the beginning. When I approached our boss (in one of the only times we ever met in person) to let her know I was surprised by the first episode of the new program and very much wished to return to regular journalistic work, she did not indicate that you had spoken to her, and she did not offer to help me transfer back out of the team into a regular job. (I remembered that you and one of your colleagues, Todd, mentioned several times that she considered hiring me away from the New York team to have solved all of her problems; but I felt like almost no one considered the numerous problems this would cause.) When I told you I felt like a sacrifice for all the awful things your team was doing I believe you nodded, and it hurt that you bragged about finally being able to identify with the Rolling Stones song Under My Thumb when it first appeared I would not be able to get away from the Larry King group without help.

Because your boss placed me and my new colleague in a somewhat isolated part of our building (surrounded by empty offices in a wing that was practically completely dark except for our room just about all of the time), it was frightening for me if you would show up and ask him to leave our office, shut the door, and scold me about a rumor I had been seen walking in public with another man, even though you and I had long since broken up. You said this was a surprising indication that I was not a very good person. It was also frightening when you would enter the control room to which my colleague and I were assigned and order him to take off his headphones and plug his ears so that you could speak to me angrily again, since it was usually just the two of us in there.

I remember that the morning you actually moved to Washington, you showed up unannounced and unexpected at my apartment and insisted on reuniting. I remember that you were extremely insistent on getting physical, and trying to get pregnant, that day even though this was not something I had ever done, and something I was intensely uncomfortable with outside of marriage, not to mention outside of a healthy relationship. But I was terrified. I went on to greatly regret consenting to this out of fear, especially as you disappeared immediately for six months after telling me you would call me after lunch. (Months later you said you’d felt certain a pregnancy had resulted.) I lost a lot of weight during those months, trying to reestablish a sense of control in my life by taking up running very seriously and working practically every day towards finding an alternate job, even pleading for any demotion that might help get me away from the Larry King group. It felt terrible suddenly living in an unmanageably expensive apartment near your condo, working for your boss, and not knowing if or when I would ever see or hear from you again. During these months I feel like I cried so much on practically a daily basis that I could almost forget I was crying, and I partly lost my voice for about four months. So often looking down at my desk, looking down at the floor, or looking down even in the control room, there seemed to be two predictable puddles from so very many silent tears. I worried about the amount of tears I cried into CNN’s control room circuitry.

Since you and I were the only two people who knew all that was going on, I remember feeling like I had been trapped under the floorboards of a house in which everyone else, including you, was living their normal lives, and, apart from reaching out to CNN’s human resources and senior leaders, which I did for so long, I didn’t feel I knew how to get out of the situation. I missed my friends, and even though they were only on the other side of the building, it felt like they might as well have been in another country.

When you attempted to restart our relationship again, you sent me numerous letters that all ended with a promise that if I did not respond they would be the last one; but there always seemed to be another letter anyway. It was devastating to me when you then sent a package that said it was from Larry King to my mother in the hope of gaining her support in persuading me to see you again, largely because she was not fully aware of what I had been through during the previous six months. (You said that you had one of Larry’s interns physically write my mother’s name and address so that she would not recognize your handwriting and refuse to open the mail.) You argued that the hesitance I felt to trust you (which I don’t think I had ever really experienced with any other person and was partly occasioned by a general warning about you I received when I first arrived at CNN) was due to my parents’ divorce when I was in elementary school and indicated you were giving me an opportunity to prove I was not damaged by this. Having been told only a little about my family’s history, you told me to try to see you as my dad coming back to my family when I was little. But when I agreed to see you again, you began treating me like less than a person. You indicated that my intuition was not reliable because of my parents’ divorce; and partly because so much of my professional, physical, and financial life had begun to appear like an equation only our getting back together could solve, it started to feel difficult to discern between fear and love. You told me before that years prior you had made an unannounced trip to Africa to surprise a girlfriend while dressed in a tuxedo not really because of your feelings for her, but more because you wanted to see the country where she was working. I knew this was just the behavior of a young man, but I still felt like I experienced something similar to what that girl had, except with practically all the power of Larry King Live behind it. Partly because I could not afford the apartment you had wanted me to rent after joining your team, every month I felt more and more trapped; and I despised feeling pressured by your team to listen to the most horrendous criminal court proceedings with what felt like an assignment to find television value in these even though I argued (very frequently) for what I felt would be more ethical approaches to journalism. I felt that, because it felt almost impossible to focus on anything but getting away from your team and into a normal job again, our conversations around this time were underscored by your assurance that you would help me leave your team and rejoin a normal one.

I believe we both knew that the physical experience we had the morning you moved to Washington was deeply wrong. But pretending we were in a normal relationship did not make this understanding go away, and the situation felt frightening and abusive.

I accepted anyway when you invited me to go to dinner with you and your mom when you visited Atlanta around this time, but you deliberately tried to make me look bad in front of her by attributing to me one of your own self-criticisms (that being an only child had affected your personality in a negative way) that I didn’t think I had ever repeated, in what was one of the most shocking and humiliating moments of my life. I pretended to feel guilty in order to help protect your mom’s opinion of you, which I am embarrassed now to admit. You said that I needed to experience atonement, presumably because I had been too judgmental of your sexual history at CNN the first time we dated, which I had been, and you treated me terribly in front of one of your more degrading friends from Holy Innocents, it seemed, just to impress him. I remember you became increasingly demanding and disrespectful, even getting angry with me if I stepped away from my cell phone long enough to take a bath, and I articulated the ending of our relationship. But even though we said words that I guess people normally say when ending a relationship (and only a few words from both of us), this did not feel like a normal break-up.

Within weeks I was offered a very good job with a reputable organization in Boston but am sorry to say I turned it down, not fully appreciating how difficult it would be to leave my role (even though I did eventually realize you were not helping by talking to your boss as you said you would, I did not understand how aggressively attempts by employees to leave the talk show team were being thwarted) and re-establish some semblance of my life. I went on to regret this deeply and my job search went on for several more months.

You once mentioned that part of the reason your boss and her boss had formed this new team in the first place had been to reassign a manager who was complained about a lot. While I never got to know this team lead well, he was incredibly enthusiastic when offering me special opportunities, like the chance to report on-air, which I turned down, but reacted with semi-public rage when I expressed an interest in working with other teams. (He and a senior producer yelled at me terribly over the phone when I told them I wanted to volunteer on weekends for CNN’s International desk but, just moments later, he called me privately and apologized, telling me to attribute this to his being Italian and that he wanted me to know how much everyone there loved me.) While, when we met in person during one of my few visits to the team in New York, this man calmly supported me and my decision to try working for another department as I let him know I had not found the talk show team a good fit (he indicated he appreciated the information and politely asked that I simply give him plenty of notice when I found my next position), I was, much later, alerted by an HR representative that he was making aggressive attempts to prevent me from leaving, despite what was later repeatedly described to me as considerable interest by others to bring me onboard. This HR rep assured me she was going to help me separate myself from him and suggested I apply for what was then called the CNN Passport as a means of doing so. (A senior manager who oversaw this particular merit-based opportunity let me know after the application process that I had been identified as her team’s top choice candidate but that, even though I had gotten his permission to apply, my boss had informed them he would not release me for any period.) Just after our dialogue, my HR representative, who had been very helpful, let me know she was not supposed to talk about this anymore, and that I would now only be able to talk by phone to the talk show team’s HR representatives in New York, as I understand, at their request. I seemed for so long able to get close to the point of hire for new opportunities within our company about which I was very enthusiastic, but that things would fall apart around the last moment. My later understanding was that this was not an unusual experience at all for members of the team trying to leave.

I eventually gave my notice, and, weeks after this but before my last day, received a review that, while not negative, was still surprisingly average as I felt, and was consistently told, I had always done my jobs at the company extraordinarily well, and this was reflected in all of my prior reviews. When asked about this, my immediate supervisor let me know that her boss had instructed her not to allow any of my marks to exceed a prescribed threshold. I believe this was out of considerable resentment he had expressed weeks earlier, moments after I had given my notice, that I had never really wanted to be a part of his team. I reported this to a CNN HR representative, I believe twice, over a period of several years but only received a reply from her when I carbon copied a group of former colleagues, which I did not want to do.

Not long after this period, I worked briefly alongside a much older man who talked openly in a group setting about having committed violence before. At one point immediately afterward, I felt he tried to intimidate me wrongfully because I would not meet with him alone at my hotel room (he said this was very disrespectful of me, even though we had no need to meet together for any reason, much less alone), I guessed to address what I had heard. But, after my prior experience, I do not remember believing it was possible a media company could care about my safety, and I did not report until years later.

I have given a lot of thought to who, if anyone, to tell about the severity of this experience, which I kept hidden for a long time having believed that perhaps it had only been the Larry King Live variable that had been so harmful, and that no one had ever experienced anything like I had before. I also, quite embarrassingly, questioned my decisions – both to you and to CNN.

—

After I reached out to several colleagues about my experience during the metoo movement, as I remember, CNN’s representative asked me to tell her what I wanted, saying they would see if they could get it for me. While at first I blurted out that I wanted to have my life back, I thought about it and proposed the following policies. But I never received any meaningful reply. I requested that:

– there be some sort of opportunity provided for well-meaning HR representatives to respond helpfully to an employee’s requests to return to her normal job whenever abuse results after a boyfriend exercises undue control over her career. (In my case, my HR contact alerted me to undesirable aspects of my situation and offered to help me get away before letting me know she would be prevented.) I believe there should be solutions in such cases rendering the careers appropriately separate and without resulting in career or professional mobility loss for the woman.

– manager reassignments due to complaints be more carefully handled. (Although I was told by my then-boyfriend that his boss started a new team in order to reassign a manager about whom she complained, when I asked for her help getting away from the reassigned manager’s team, neither this leader nor HR helped.)

– job talks only be introduced (or re-introduced, or carried out) through formal channels and not through a dating partner. (I believe this should especially be the case when the person being offered a job has just requested, and especially if she has already accepted, a transfer to another city, as was the case in my situation.)

– job offers involving programming changes greatly out of character with a television company’s normal productions disclose this information whenever possible, particularly when the person making the offer has a vested interest in the personal life decisions of the person being made the offer. I believe one reason the programming changes CNN’s talk show team introduced seemed to open the door to much broader-scale changes at the company over the long term was that they tended not to be acknowledged out loud.