The sexual assault allegations that surfaced last week against CNN’s Don Lemon appear to be gaining more credibility as the alleged victim’s boss has come forward claiming that he witnessed the incident.
Last week, Dustin Hice filed a lawsuit reportedly seeking $1.5 million from Lemon after he claimed that Lemon sexually assaulted him in July 2018 after Hice offered to buy Lemon a drink at the bar.
Now, George Gounelas, who was Hice’s boss at the time, has come forward and corroborated the allegations that his former employee has made against the CNN host.
“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. “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 said that Hice approached Lemon and offered to buy him a drink, Lemon declined, and that Lemon later approached the two men.
“Don Lemon has now come around the corner and is standing face to face with us,” Gounelas told Fox News. “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 told Fox News that Lemon appeared to be drunk and that he said something to Hice that was “along the lines of ‘Do you like me? Is that why you’re bothering me, because you wanna f*** me?'”
“He 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***?'” Gounelas told Fox News.
Gounelas’ account of what happened closely matches the claims made by Hice in his lawsuit, which was first reported by Mediaite.
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.
Don Lemon has denied the allegations and CNN has defended him, saying: “The plaintiff in this lawsuit has previously displayed a pattern of contempt for CNN on his social media accounts.”
This incident involving Lemon is latest in a series of embarrassing incidents with which the far-left network has had to contend in recent weeks.
A bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan reportedly removed a local journalist from an event in a manner that was described as being violent, according to Fox News. CNN host Chris Cuomo also had an embarrassing incident to contend with last week after a video of him went viral where he threatened to throw a man down a flight of stairs after the man called him “Fredo.”