‘SEX’ PROBE AT ABC
News boss takes action
ABC News President Kim Godwin is calling for an independent investigation into how the network handled allegations of sexual assault against a former executive producer of “Good Morning America,” according to a report.
The Wall Street Journal said Godwin relayed the request on a conference call to staffers Thursday, a day after a lawsuit was filed against Michael Corn, who is accused of sexually assaulting a current ABC News staffer and a former network employee in separate incidents.
Corn, who held the top producing role at ratings behemoth “GMA” until April, has denied wrongdoing and called the claims “fabrications,” citing collegial e-mail exchanges with both women shortly after the incidents were alleged to have occurred, the Journal reported.
ABC, also named in the lawsuit, “swept the sexual assault under the rug” to protect Corn, and “did not publicly acknowledge” the producer’s actions, which include complaints of misconduct by several other women, the suit claimed.
“We can’t have us investigating us. We need an independent person,” Godwin said via a recording of the conference call that was leaked to the Journal. “The process has to be independent.”
Godwin, who joined ABC in May from CBS News, wasn’t at the network when Corn departed. She assured ABC News staffers who were involved in handling complaints against Corn that they would get due process, but their roles would be investigated.
Godwin, who lived through CBS’s own scandal-ridden past of sexual-misconduct complaints against then-CEO Les Moonves, told ABC staffers she isn’t going to allow “sweeping this under the rug.”
She said she has heard from enough people over the past day “to know we have a problem.”
ABC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The network, is accused of doing nothing to protect an employee who complained about the alleged assault when learning of it in 2017.
Kirstyn Crawford, 31, a producer for George Stephanopoulos on “GMA,” claims in court papers that Corn sexually assaulted her after a work party in LA with the team covering the Oscars.
ABC learned of the alleged assault in 2017, but court papers claim it “did nothing to protect plaintiff or removed Corn from his position of power.”
Corn is also accused of sexually assaulting Jill McClain, who was working for Diane Sawyer at the time on “World News Tonight.” The suit gives lurid details of a flight from LA to New York in 2010.
A year later, while in London covering the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, a drunken Corn barged into McClain’s hotel room and sexually assaulted her, court documents state.