5 Wildest Details From NY Magazine’s Expose on Pat Kiernan, Jamie Stelter and NY1’s Bitter Infighting
A new and explosive exposé on New York City’s local news station NY1 has unleashed a trove of details on the bullying, infighting, and career sabotage that has apparently consumed the news channel in recent years.
New York Magazine published a piece by Caitlin Moscatello that took an extensive dive into the lawsuit brought against NY1’s parent company, Charter Communications, back in 2019. The lawsuit, brought forth by NY1 anchors Roma Torre, Kristen Shaughnessy, Amanda Farinacci, Vivian Lee, and Jeanine Ramirez, claimed they were shunted aside due to age and gender discrimination, as well as other problems at the company.
Each of these women was ensnared by a toxic workplace culture at NY1, driven by its most prominent news figures and producers, according to excruciating details presented in the article. The piece also goes into depth on NY1’s changing business model and the revolving door that seeks to bring in younger staffers. We’ve compiled some of the most incendiary claims involving the network’s biggest stars.
1. Pat Kiernan
As NY1’s morning news anchor, Pat Kiernan is one of the network’s most recognizable faces, and he was Torre’s counterpart when she used to anchor midday programming. According to New York Magazine, the lawsuit brought by Torre and her co-anchors alleged Kiernan “made significantly more money than Torre despite having similar responsibilities and was given more resources.”
Current and former colleagues of Keirnan told New York that as his public profile grew over the past decade, he became “increasingly difficult to work with.” The article contains instances of Kiernan allegedly harassing and verbally abusing female colleagues when they ticked him off:
Margaret Menefee, a former writer and producer at NY1, says there were “incidents where he berated people kind of harshly.” As multiple colleagues tell it, one particularly memorable blowup was aimed at executive producer Leslie Martelli-Hines, allegedly after she and Kiernan disagreed on where to send a reporter. When Martelli-Hines walked away, they say, Kiernan came up close behind her, shouting. “So Leslie goes into the women’s restroom, thinking, Of course he’s not going to follow me, and he followed her to the women’s restroom and stood out there in the hallway stalking her, waiting for her to come out,” says a former producer. “It was extremely intimidating,” says another witness. (Martelli-Hines, who left NY1 in 2017 after 21 years, declined to be interviewed. Kiernan claims he never followed her.) On another occasion, a producer “made the cardinal sin” of telling Kiernan to wrap. “We were trained, ‘Don’t you dare wrap Pat Kiernan,’ ” says a former staffer. When they cut to a commercial, “Pat struts out of his anchor chair … He hovered over her and just verbally castrated her.”
“He was a diva,” says Menefee. “I don’t know how else to put that. He liked things a certain way, and if they’re not what he wanted, he was very vocal about that.”
The piece also reported that when NY1 invested in revamping Mornings on 1, Kiernan “often referred to the grand morning-show studio as ‘my studio.’ Colleagues say he became irate on multiple occasions when he discovered that someone had sat in his chair.”
2. Jamie Stelter
As Kiernan’s Mornings on 1 co-host and wife to CNN’s Brian Stelter, it’s no surprise that Jamie Stelter also came under the microscope. Sources told New York Magazine that Stelter and her co-host, Annika Pergament, acted like “high-school bullies,” gossiped about their colleagues on hot mics, and made “snide comments” about how their co-workers looked or what they were reporting.
“A lot of people don’t like working with Jamie,” one source said. “People would avoid her,” said another.
One of the more alarming allegations against Stelter and Pergament was how they treated former weather anchor Stacy Ann Gooden:
Ten current and former employees say Gooden was ostracized by the three co-anchors. Insiders say Gooden was often excluded from meetings, and Stelter and Pergament would talk disparagingly about her on set. During roundtable discussions on air, Gooden was often left out of the conversation, and when she was given the opportunity to speak, “it was very short, abrupt,” says John Friia, a former producer. In 2018, when Gooden, who is Black, interviewed New York City’s First Lady, Chirlane McCray, for a Black History Month segment, “one of the questions Pat and Jamie wanted Stacy-Ann to ask was how Dante” — McCray’s son with Mayor Bill de Blasio — “got his Afro so big,” says a former producer. (A second former producer confirms this account. Kiernan and Stelter deny it.) “It got to the point where Stacy-Ann couldn’t take it anymore because they were just outwardly rude,” says a former colleague. A former crew member says Gooden reported the behavior to HR. When nothing changed, Gooden quit.
3. Steve Paulus
One of NY1’s founders, Steve Paulus spoke to New York Magazine and provided insights on how the network changed after it was bought out by Charter. He spoke of how he and news director Dan Jacobson were phased out of NY1’s programming discussions before eventually getting purged along with many of the older hands at the network.
“By all indications, they were into a youth movement, both in management and on air,” Jacobson said. Paulus added that “There was a bloodbath at the station. They fired everybody who had any experience.”
Paulus’ name also came up in connection to a lawsuit former anchor Adele Sammarco filed against NY1, which included her claim that someone posted a picture of her with enlarged breasts in the newsroom. While it’s hard to determine Paulus’ level of culpability here, Moscatello quoted a source who said Paulus ran the newsroom “like a college club”:
The station had outgrown Paulus’s loose management style. He had run the newsroom “like a college club,” says a current employee — an approach put on public display in 2010, when former anchor Adele Sammarco took NY1 to court after she claimed she had been wrongfully fired a decade earlier. During the trial (she had rejected a $200,000 settlement to pursue her claim), it was revealed that a male colleague had hung an altered photo of her with enlarged breasts in the newsroom. (The mostly male jury sided with NY1 and its defense that the behavior wasn’t sexual harassment because Sammarco had laughed about it at the time.) Shaughnessy and Torre testified for NY1, speaking against their female colleague.
4. Melissa Rabinovich
As the article detailed NY1’s shifting hierarchy throughout Time Warner Cable’s merger with Charter, it notes that Melissa Rabinovich was promoted to assistant news director after overseeing the network’s coverage in Queens and Staten Island. Rabinovich was described as “the ultimate Regina George”, and there were a series of anecdotes of her chewing out staff.
Alanna Finn, a former news assistant, says Rabinovich prevented her from getting a promotion by writing her up for accumulating unpaid parking tickets with the company car — even though tickets were common because journalists were often rushing to fires or crime scenes and had to park quickly. (A Charter spokesperson says Finn did not submit her tickets as required, resulting in fees.) A former reporter says Rabinovich once called her from an event to tear apart one of her scripts, reiterating her criticisms to her husband — who did not work at NY1 — while on the call so that he too could critique her work. CeFaan Kim, also a former NY1 reporter, says he complained to HR after colleagues informed him that if he didn’t chip in to buy Rabinovich a holiday gift, she would retaliate. Yet another reporter says he threatened legal action against Charter after Rabinovich put a GPS tracker in his company car and recorded his whereabouts. (A Charter spokesperson says using GPS trackers is a common practice for safety reasons.) “So many people complained to HR about Melissa, and they just kind of brushed it under the rug,” he says.
5. Roma Torre
As NY1’s first on-air hire with a live show at noon and an anchor chair, one might think that Torre had it good at the network. Outside of her show, however, Torre saw her air-time decrease. Shaughnessy, Ramirez, and Lee, meanwhile, were allegedly passed over for full-time anchoring gigs.
“Torre also got to use a new studio, though it was smaller, shared, and poorly lit,” the article says, citing her colleagues. Judging by the set-up, Torre’s fewer resources compared to her colleagues, and NY1’s apparent disinterest in promoting her, some network sources got the impression they were setting up Torre to fail:
Torre was also allegedly told that hair and makeup were “not for her.” Ahbi Nishman, a freelance makeup artist, says she was instructed not to stay late for Torre. “They would be like, ‘If she can’t get here on time, she’s out of luck,’ ” says Nishman, who notes that Torre was coming in from New Jersey. “It definitely had the feeling of, We are putting you in a position where it is difficult for you so we have more ammo to say, ‘It’s not working.’ ”
Eventually, after complaints, hair and makeup were provided, but only at 9 a.m. — three hours before Torre went on the air. (A Charter spokesperson says Torre’s shift began at 9 a.m. and that if she arrived punctually, she had “ample time for her makeup.”) Torre complained to Rabinovich and [Anthony] Proia and eventually took the matter to the then–senior vice-president of news, Dan Ronayne, telling him that Proia told her, “I don’t want to hear any more. That’s just the way it is. Too bad. Boo-hoo.”
That was only the tip of the iceberg, apparently:
Torre was also a theater critic for NY1’s On Stage program. Karin Garfin, a former producer of On Stage who later filed a legal complaint of her own, says that from her first days at NY1, there was “a campaign against Roma.” In an early meeting, Garfin says executive producer Kevin Dugan and his boss, Audrey Gruber, made derogatory remarks about Torre’s looks after she had undergone chemo for colon cancer. “I know that she’s been here since we went on air, but does she need to look like it?” Gruber asked, per Garfin’s complaint. Garfin says that Dugan — who she says sexually harassed her — repeatedly instructed her to cut down Torre’s segments and told her that Torre’s look didn’t go with the new, “younger aesthetic” of the show.
