On Friday afternoon, journalist Megyn Kelly interviewed a recently-fired CBS employee named Ashley Bianco, who was allegedly canned for leaking a video clip of ABC News anchor Amy Robach complaining that the network killed her story on registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein three years ago.
But according to Bianco, CBS fired an innocent woman.
Working as a producer and video editor, Bianco told Kelly that she did indeed clip the video of Robach, but denied leaking it to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, the group that dropped the story this week. Bianco said she had never heard of O’Keefe before the story broke, and O’Keefe has denied that Bianco was his source.
“Did you leak the tape?” Kelly started the interview.
“I did not,” answered Bianco, who recently left ABC and started working for CBS this week.
She cut the clip and saved it in the internal system, she explained, because that was part of her job.
After Robach made the remarks, Bianco said she went to her manager and asked if Robach knew she was “on a hot mic.” “She knew she was being broadcasted to all the affiliates,” Bianco was told.
“I just clipped it off; I essentially marked it in the system and it never left the system. We do it all the time,” she emphasized.
“I did it just for office gossip you know,” the producer added.
“So this week you’re sitting at CBS doing your job, and what happens with Project Veritas?” Kelly asked.
“They released the video, you know, and I was shocked but I didn’t think anything of it,” answered Bianco.
She was promptly fired and never given a chance to defend herself, she said.
“I didn’t know what I had done wrong and I just, you know, I wasn’t even given the professional courtesy to defend myself,” Bianco claimed. “I didn’t know what I had been accused of. It was, you know, humiliating. I was devastated.”
“Do you regret clipping that moment now?” questioned Kelly.
“I do. Had I known, I would have never clipped it. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t leak it. Anyone else could have clipped it off.”
Kelly noted, “Even James O’Keefe has come out now saying you are not the leaker, that you were not the insider who gave this to him.”
“I just want my career back,” Bianco told Kelly.
During the hot mic clip, Robach claims ABC News killed the story for a multitude of reasons, including threats from Prince Andrew.
“I’ve had the story for three years. I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air,” the ABC anchor says. “… The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will, that also quashed the story. And then Alan Dershowitz was also implicated in it because of the planes. She told me everything. She had pictures, she had everything. She was in hiding for 12 years. We convinced her to come out. We convinced her to talk to us. It was unbelievable what we had, Clinton, we had everything.”
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