The working environment at New York 1 is about as mature as a fraternity during pledge week, according to testimony from a former reporter who's suing the channel's parent company, Time Warner. Adele Sammarco told her side of the sexual harassment story in her own words yesterday, testifying that executives repeatedly ignored her complaints about the inappropriate conduct. One incident that particularly offended Sammarco involved her zipper and a pair of pliers.
When her pants zipper broke during taping, a technician tried to fix the problem with pliers at the anchor desk. Sammarco's co-workers allegedly edited together a puerile video with the footage, and she claimed, "The video was edited in a sexually provocative way. They had porn-type music underlayed." She also testified that during the time she covered the Amadou Diallo trial, members of the news crew repeatedly asked her, "Would you ever bring a black man home to your father?" and "Who would you sleep with? When did you first have sex?" She also claimed she was given the risque cassette box for the British movie, Fever Pitch.
"I was the first criminal justice reporter at New York 1," Sammarco, 43, told the jury. "I was a salty dog. But I thought any reasonable person would have said, 'Enough.'" The final straw came when higher-ups blew off her allegation that former reporter Gary Anthony Ramsay had groped her. (She was terminated three weeks later.) Though lawyers for Time Warner insists it was just a "peck on the cheek," Sammarco told it differently yesterday, after first asking her parents to leave the courtroom.
According to the Post, Sammarco testified that "Ramsay pinned her wrists down in her lap with one hand and with the other pressed her up against the passenger seat." "I'm going to do to you what I always wanted to do to you since I met you," Sammarco said Ramsay promised. Then, as Sammarco put it, "He proceeded to ram his tongue down my throat so hard it felt like it was almost at my Adam's apple."
