Bloomberg Attacked, BOOED When Questioned Over NDAs With Female Employees

Mike Bloomberg is having a rough night. The billionaire former mayor faced an onslaught from his fellow Democratic candidates from start of the Las Vegas debate, and one particularly brutal exchange prompted loud boos from the audience.

The clash was kicked off by a particularly pointed question from NBC’s Hallie Jackson, who noted that Bloomberg’s company has been described as a “hostile workplace for women” where he made sexually suggestive remarks, like telling one female employee “I would do you in a second.”

“Should Democrats expect better from their nominee?” she asked.

“I have no tolerance for the kind of behavior the Me Too movement has exposed,” Bloomberg replied, before touting the women in positions of power at his company.

The moderators turned to Elizabeth Warren, who told the audience: “I hope you heard what his defense was. I’ve been nice to some women. That just doesn’t cut it. The mayor has to stand on his record. What we need to know is exactly what’s lurking out there. He has gotten some number of women — dozens, who knows — to sign nondisclosure agreements both for sexual harassment and for gender discrimination in the workplace. So Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements so we can hear their side of the story?”

That challenge drew loud applause from the debate audience and an awkward reply from Bloomberg: “We have a very few nondisclosure agreements —”

“How many is that?” Warren interrupted.

“Let me finish,” Bloomberg said. “None of them accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told.”

That comment prompted a gasp and boos from the audience.

“And let me just — there’s agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet. And that’s up to them. They signed those agreements and we’ll live with it.”

Warren continued to press Bloomberg on whether he would release women from the NDAs, earning more applause.

“You could release them from that immediately,” she said. “Because understand, this is not just a question of the mayor’s character. This is also a question about electability. We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against. That’s not what we do as Democrats.”

“All the mayor has to do is say, you are released from the nondisclosure agreement,” Joe Biden added. “Period.”

The crowd again applauded.

“I said we’re not going to end these agreements because they were made consensually and they have every right to expect that they will stay private,” Bloomberg said, earning loud boos from the audience.

Watch above, via MSNBC.