Former Fox reporter Megyn Kelly has named and interviewed the woman fired from CBS for allegedly leaking a hot mic tape of an anchor complaining ABC had unfairly killed her exposé on sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Emmy-winning producer Ashley Bianco insists she did not leak the footage in the interview, posted by Kelly on Friday. It represents something of a comeback for Kelly, who left her most recent post at NBC under a dark cloud after defending blackface in Halloween costumes on the air, having “gone mainstream” in 2017 after a popular, if controversial, stint with Fox News.
Bianco claimed she is not the leaker, that she merely saved a clip on the internal system. “It never left the system,” she pleaded. “I’m a video editor. I clip off moments all the time.” She “loved” working at ABC and “hadn’t even heard of Project Veritas until this.”
“I didn't know what I had been accused of. It was humiliating. It was devastating,” Bianco, 25, told Kelly in an emotional moment.
I begged, I pleaded, I didn't know what I had done wrong and I...wasn't even given the professional courtesy to defend myself.
She had been at CBS just four days when Veritas dropped the video and said she left ABC only because the other network offered her a better contract. As for who might have leaked the clip, she pleaded ignorance: “Everybody saw it...everybody was freaked out by what she was saying.”
“I’m not the whistleblower. Sorry to ABC,but the leaker is still inside.”
Bianco contacted Kelly directly for the interview, according to sources cited by the Daily Mail, after she was fired by CBS on Thursday. ABC, where Bianco had previously worked, informed her new employer that she was behind the leak of footage that showed Good Morning America co-anchor Amy Robach tearing into the network for shelving a story on Epstein three years ago, complete with an interview with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of his most well-known victims.
Robach suggested network executives had killed the story because they were implicated in Epstein’s crimes, and said she was “100 percent” sure he had not killed himself.
Also on rt.com MSM execs part of ‘network of people’ that covered for Epstein – Project Veritas founder to RTABC warned CBS of the "traitor" in their midst “as a courtesy,” after discovering Bianco had the footage in her possession - though at the time it was unclear whether she had leaked it to conservative muckraking outlet Project Veritas herself, or passed it on to someone who leaked it.
Project Veritas published an anonymous statement from the “ABC insider” denying they were Bianco and expressing sympathy for “those wrongfully accused,” attempting to lift their spirits by promising “you will have prosperous careers.”
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