Nearly 20 years ago, a television producer stood up for CNN’s Alisyn Camerota when, she says, a reporter sexually harassed her as an intern.
Camerota finally thanked Rosemary Freitas Williams on Thursday at CNN’s sexual harassment town hall, and asked her why she did it. Williams’ response was a master class in how to challenge the cycle of complicity in which harassment thrives.
“It happened on my watch. I felt somewhat responsible — this was my correspondent,” Williams said.
Moreover, she knew she had to do it for Camerota. “Empowerment breaks the cycle,” she said.
Harassment over breakfast
Camerota had a college internship at a news bureau in DC in 1988. A famous reporter and producer from a big-time station were coming in to cover the Iran Contra Hearings, and she was assigned to help them.
“I was over the moon,” she said. “This was my big chance to make important contacts for a future job.”
Her job was to take notes on the hearings to help the correspondent put together his piece for the evening news. They were at the Hill waiting for the hearing to begin when he started pestering her to have dinner with him, she said.
“Part of me thought that might be good for my career,” she said. “But he seemed too aggressive. So I said, no thank you. I told him I’d have to be up early.”
Then he asked her to have a drink with him at his hotel. Again, she said no thank you. The next morning at breakfast, he stared at her as she spread cream cheese on a bagel and lifted it to her lips.
He leaned over and whispered into her ear, “Never before in my adult male life have I ever wished I was a bagel,” she said.
Laughable now, perhaps. But in the moment, Camerota said she was horrified.
‘You did not deserve to be treated that way’
She got up, threw the bagel in the trash and ran to her cameraman. “Save me from this guy,” she remembered saying. “He’s really creepy.”
Her cameraman told others, and word got to the correspondent’s producer. One week later she got a phone call from the Williams. Camerota refused to get on the phone, terrified that Williams would berate her for “making her reporter look bad.”
Finally, Camerota’s boss made her take the call. It was not what she was expecting.
“Alisyn, I heard what happened and I am so sorry,” Camerota recalled her saying. “There is no excuse for what he did and I’ve told him that. You did not deserve to be treated that way.”
Williams assured Camerota that she did a great job, and told her to call her if she ever needed anything.
Camerota never called her until this week.
‘Women need to help each other’
Williams still remembers the blue dress and matching shoes Camerota wore, as well as her eagerness to impress.
She remembered learning about what happened to Camerota from an executive who told her to keep it to herself. But Williams knew she couldn’t let it go.
“You weren’t just harassed, you were humiliated,” she said. “There were other men at the table, and then you have to spend the rest of the day with these men.”
“I felt like there was a duty to warn,” Williams said.
Williams said she had a one-way conversation with the man, who went on to become an award-winning journalist.
Williams’ actions not only alleviated the shame and embarrassment of the incident, it helped her move forward, Camerota said.
“Women need to stand up for each other,” she said.