Brooke Baldwin

And I just remember, like, at that time, we can all try to think back to 2018 and watching her testify, like, men and women were calling in a C-SPAN, like, you know...

plugging up their phone lines of all these people feeling this need to like share their own story of rape and sexual assault so that was extraordinary it was a time of like belief and memory and owning their stories and so i i had like a 20 something year old producer who worked on my show come into my you know office at that time and shared her story of rape from college i had another producer friend of mine call me up and she wanted to tell me and so i was

honored to be this trusted space.

And also really brought up something that I had buried from when I was 21.

And so I had written this monologue that I read on my show at the end of one of those days.

And I, and I tiptoed just as a journalist does, it was like, I wanted to abide by the rules of journalism, which is you never talk about you never make it about yourself.

So I like tiptoed just up to the edge of telling my full truth.

But I there was one pronoun I intentionally avoided.

And it was the word I like, I experienced or this was done to me.

And I remember feeling emotional at the time.

And people who were paying attention, you can hear when you listen to the clip, you can hear it in my voice, you can hear my tone change, my eyes got just watery, but I didn't want to make it about me, I we got

phone calls to CNN PR was Brooke talking about herself.

And I was like, I don't want to talk to anyone that's as far as I'm going to go.

And I wrote my sub stack this past weekend because

I have been so moved by the courage of these women in this Rape Academy story and having interviewed them on my Substack, something like, you know, the book, The Body Keeps the Score.

It was like, I hadn't thought about this.

My intellect hadn't thought about this thing that was done to me when I was 21 until I started doing all this research and my body just started to like vibrate with truth.

and i decided that now 25 years later you know i wanted to share the story of when i was a i was a 21 year old just shy of graduating the university of north carolina you know on my carolina blue robe and going out in the world to see if i can make it as a tv reporter and i was sitting at the beverly hills hotel with a good girlfriend of mine at the time and

you know, we're on spring break and I was 21 and college and we'd had maybe a drink, maybe two, and she wanted to go home and,

And I didn't, and she left me.