Thursday, October 26, 2017

DO YOU THINK HALPERIN HARASSED ANY OF HIS CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVE INTERNS?

The most grotesque Mark Halperin story to emerge so far involves Dianna May, formerly Dianna Goldberg, who, The Washington Post tells us, was a young ABC News researcher in the mid-1990s. She asked Halperin for help on a story. He invited her to his office -- then demanded that she sit on his lap. She complied. He was sexually aroused. This happened several more times to her.

May is the seventh woman who's claimed to be a Halperin harassment victim. CNN quoted five unnamed women, and a sixth, reporter Emily Miller, identified herself as a Halperin victim on Twitter.

I keep thinking back to a moment in 2006 when Halperin, while promoting The Way to Win, a book he wrote with John Harris, appeared on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and attempted to ingratiate himself with Hewitt and his audience by denouncing mainstream journalism as infested with liberal bias and proclaiming himself unbiased. Near the end of the interview, there was this exchange:
HH: ... The media keeps hiring from the Harvard Crimson. It keeps self-perpetuating from self-elected elites.

MH: Can I introduce you to my interns from Bob Jones University?

HH: I’m glad that you have one. They must feel like a stranger in a strange world.

MH: No, because within my unit, we’re all about being fair and non-partisan.
Halperin had one or more interns from the famous evangelical school, or at least he claimed he did. So did he ever sexually assault one of those Christian interns?

I'm not sure whether the exposure of Halperin is news in Christian conservative circles, which means that victims among those interns might not be speaking up now. But I hope an enterprising reporter tries to track some of them down to ask what they experienced.

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