Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin says she believes she was sexually assaulted by two older men who slipped something into her drink at a Los Angeles hotel more than two decades ago.
Baldwin, 46, detailed the alleged incident in a Substack post published Monday, saying it happened when she was 21 years old.
“I woke up on the cold, hard bathroom tile floor of my Los Angeles hotel room with a man I did not know,” she wrote.
“For years, I did not have language for what I believed may have been done to me.”
Baldwin said she and a friend had traveled to Los Angeles for spring break.
She said she was “[a]lone at a very adult bar in Beverly Hills” when “two much older men appear[ed] beside me” and offered to buy her a drink.
Baldwin said she has struggled to recall exactly what happened and that the memories come “only in flashes.”
She recalled seeing a black SUV before waking up half-dressed on the bathroom floor of the famous Chateau Marmont hotel.
“There was a deep, kind of grogginess the next day that I did not understand,” she recounted.
Baldwin said she checked her body and believed “penetration hadn’t happened.”
“At least that was the story I told myself,” she wrote.
“I am sharing this story not for sympathy. Not for drama or clicks,” Baldwin said, adding that she hoped other women questioning their own experiences might feel less alone.
“Wait, was that assault? Did something happen to me, too?”
Baldwin also linked her experience to Christine Blasey Ford’s 2018 allegations against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“We all have our stories — the spiked drink, waking up on a cold hotel bathroom floor, the uncertainty, the shame,” Baldwin said during a 2018 monologue on Ford’s allegations.
Ford alleged in 2018 that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during a small high-school gathering in suburban Maryland in the early 1980s.
She claimed he drunkenly pinned her to a bed, groped her, tried to remove her clothing and covered her mouth when she attempted to scream before she escaped.
Kavanaugh, who was later confirmed to the Supreme Court, strongly denied the allegations.
In April 2024, Baldwin penned an essay for Vanity Fair describing the circumstances of her exit from CNN.
She wrote about what she describes as years of silence, self-censorship and feeling “muzzled” during her time at CNN, particularly after a deteriorating relationship with an executive producer and clashes with then-network boss Jeff Zucker.
She alleges Zucker denied her request in 2019 to remove the producer from her team, later threatened her career and eventually pushed her out of the network in 2021 without explanation.
“Jeff wanted me out. No explanation. Just out,” Baldwin wrote in Vanity Fair.
Baldwin framed the experience as part of a broader personal “unraveling” tied to childhood trauma, people-pleasing and learning to “find my voice” after leaving CNN.
She divorced British producer James Fletcher in 2023 and later revealed she had entered a “new relationship” as part of what she described as a personal “rebirth” following the end of her marriage.
The Post has sought comment from Baldwin and Zucker.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
