Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the letter from Don Lemon’s attorney as a legal complaint. It is a letter. The article and its headline have been corrected.
CNN host Don Lemon’s attorney has sent a letter to Megyn Kelly for doing what CNN and other media outlets have done for decades: Invite people on to discuss their sexual misconduct accusations against public figures.
Radar Online obtained the letter, sent by an attorney representing Lemon, which accuses Kelly of giving a “lopsided and inaccurate” version of the encounter between Lemon and his accuser, Dustin Hice. The letter comes after Kelly invited Hice onto her SiriusXM radio show to discuss his allegations against Lemon.
Hice has accused Lemon of sexually harassing him in 2018, before Lemon announced his engagement to his partner. Hice alleges that at one point, Lemon “had his hand in his [Lemon’s] pants rubbing himself aggressively, and he shoved two fingers underneath” Hice’s mustache. Hice filed a lawsuit a year after the incident, claiming he has suffered “feelings of shame, humiliation, anxiety, anger, and guilt.”
As The Daily Wire reported in 2019, Hice’s boss at the time of the alleged incident, George Gounelas, came forward to corroborate the allegations.
“Dustin worked for me as a bartender [and] we went out after work one night. We were standing there and he said, ‘Hey, that’s Don Lemon,’” Gounelas told Fox News in August 2019. “Murf’s is a place you go to drink after you’ve been out drinking. We had just gotten off of work. So that’s why we ended up there, because we worked in the restaurant business. So by the time everything is done, we can only hit a late-night spot.”
Gounelas then said that Hice offered to buy Lemon a drink but Lemon declined. Lemon, according to Gounelas, later approached him and Hice.
“Don Lemon has now come around the corner and is standing face to face with us,” Gounelas added. “There is a beam, a pole, in the place. Don’s standing up against the pole, face to face with Dustin, I turn around and I’m standing right there between the two of them. He’s saying, ‘So you like me? Is that why you’re bothering me?’”
“Nah, man, I just wanted to say, ‘What’s up?’” Hice responded, according to Gounelas.
Gounelas then said Lemon “put his hands down his pants, inside his board shorts, grabbed his [genitals], and then came out with two fingers and, like, clipped Dustin’s nose up and down with two fingers asking ‘do you like p**** or d***?’”
The Daily Wire reported that a “source close to Hice’s attorney says that Lemon offered a six-figure settlement to resolve the matter before discussions failed and Hice filed the lawsuit.”
Lemon has vehemently denied the allegations and accused Hice of having “previously displayed a pattern of contempt for CNN on his social media accounts.”
Hice reiterated his allegations against Lemon on Kelly’s radio show. Lemon’s attorney, in her letter to Kelly, says the conservative host “permitted Mr. Hice’s statements to go unchallenged during your broadcast, clearly out of a vendetta you have against Mr. Lemon.”
Lemon’s attorney, Caroline Polisi, further accused Kelly of paying “lip service to journalistic ethics.”
“Although you advertise your podcast as featuring ‘honest’ conversations without ‘BS’ or ‘agenda,’ your podcast today, in which you interviewed Dustin Hice, reveals that you only pay lip service to journalistic ethics,” the letter said.
Polisi added in the letter that filings on the public docket “substantially undermines Mr. Hice’s credibility and as well as the outlandish story he fabricated about Mr. Lemon.” Polisi also claimed that “Mr. Lemon has presented evidence of Mr. Hice offering to bribe a witness and that he intentionally destroyed and withheld material evidence that both is directly relevant to his purported claims and that severely undermines his credibility.”