The Shady Side Of Don Lemon

This feature discusses allegations of misogyny, racism, and sexual assault. 

A long, long time ago in a cable universe not that far away, CNN's Larry King ruled prime-time news with an innocuous, eponymous live show until his retirement in 2010. Anxious to keep the momentum going, CNN tried a three-season stint with British journalist Piers Morgan and a series of unscripted programs. That is, until they decided to take a chance on a brash, opinionated journalist named Don Lemon who had been a reporter with the news channel since 2006. "There's certainly a lot of interest in Don Lemon, and that's a good thing for Don and for CNN," said Jeff Zucker, the network's president at the time, to GQ. "You know, Don is a little bit of a lightning rod. Frankly, we needed a little bit of lightning."

Besides being younger than his predecessors, Lemon is also Black and openly gay, making him a potential draw for audiences outside of CNN's aging boomer demographics. He proved his mettle in 2016, tackling issues like race and popular culture during the tail end of Donald Trump's presidential campaign when the garrulous candidate dismissed the host as an also-ran. "With people like Don Lemon, who could expect any more?" said Trump (per Variety). CNN responded by providing more airtime to Lemon, who became the countervailing voice of dissent against Trump once he became president. It was a career-high for Lemon, who couldn't sustain that public altitude for long once several salacious details about the controversial anchor slowly started to trickle into the mainstream.

After spending time in a television newsroom in Chicago, Don Lemon moved to Atlanta in 2006 to start a job as a reporter with CNN. Two years later, he co-hosted a network show called "Live From," with Kyra Phillips. Almost from the first day, it quickly became apparent that the two weren't getting along. According to an explosive 2023 expose on Lemon by Variety, the greatest schism between the two took place when Phillips landed a plum gig as a correspondent in Iraq — an assignment Lemon aggressively pursued. Unidentified sources claim that Lemon didn't take the news surrounding Phillips's good fortune well, reportedly shredding documents on his co-anchor's desk in anger. 

When Phillips received a disturbing text that read, "Now you've crossed the line, and you're going to pay for it," a CNN internal investigation traced the message to Lemon, who used a burner phone to transmit the threat. The network demoted him to a weekend reporting stint.

Lemon was hardly diplomatic in his response to the piece. "The story, which is riddled with patently false anecdotes and no concrete evidence, is entirely based on unsourced, unsubstantiated, 15-year-old anonymous gossip," said Lemon in a prepared statement, per The Wrap. "It's amazing and disappointing that Variety would be so reckless." Other such allegedly anonymous gossip published by Variety included one occasion when he purportedly called a female producer fat and another in which a producer was said to have reprimanded Lemon for making provocative comments on air.

Don Lemon might have garnered a sizeable fan base once he landed a prime time slot on CNN, but before that, he was hardly making any friends at work. Besides a tempestuous relationship with Lyra Phillips, he also publicly mocked Nancy Grace, at one time the biggest star on CNN's sister channel Headline News. While Grace has never responded publicly to Lemon's volleys, one source close to the celebrity told Variety, "She thinks he's an a**." The outlet also published claims that Lemon was so livid that colleague Soledad O'Brien scored a hosting spot on the series "Black in America," that he even questioned the anchor's own racial lineage. 

Additionally, Lemon was said to be jealous of the airtime that Anderson Cooper received, especially during coverage of Michael Jackson's memorial in 2009. A senior executive from that time claimed to Variety that Lemon's allegedly egotistical complaints led to him being told, "Look, you've got to address your behavior. Your performance as a reporter is great. It's your behavior that's gotta improve. It's what's going to derail you if you're not careful." 

Whether that advice sunk in or not, the news anchor made it clear that he was his own man. "I no longer needed approval from anyone, including the people who I had once thought could control my career and what I wanted to accomplish," Lemon wrote in a CNN think piece in 2016. "I realized that I was the only person who was in charge of that. It was liberating."

In 2014, CNN rolled the dice on Don Lemon and gave him his own prime time slot as host of "CNN Tonight." But it didn't take him long to rock the boat. His first controversy was musing that a missing Malaysian Airlines jet might have been sucked into a black hole. Later that year, he chastised a woman accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault by saying, "You know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn't want to do it." 

On CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast in 2015, a visibly drunk Lemon commented on host Kathy Griffin's breasts. At a White House Correspondents dinner in 2016, Lemon flashed a middle finger at comedian Larry Wilmore when he said, "I should say some of America's finest black journalists are here tonight. Don Lemon's here, too." He also faced harsh scrutiny when he backed disgraced actor Jussie Smollett over an attack that turned out to be bogus. Court testimony revealed that Lemon had warned Smollett about authorities bent on picking his story apart, per Newsweek. 

He then earned the wrath of Joe Rogan who accused CNN of lying about ivermectin, which he had obtained as a COVID-19 treatment from a doctor – Lemon suggested it was specifically a deworming drug for animals. The medication is FDA approved for the treatment of parasitic diseases in humans, with a different form of the drug also used as a parasitic for animals. However, as of June 2023, no reliable trials have proven that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

In 2019, shortly after getting engaged to longtime boyfriend Tim Malone, Don Lemon found himself in the middle of a lawsuit claiming he had assaulted a bartender at a Hamptons watering hole. The lawsuit stems from an incident that had taken place the previous year, when the plaintiff, Dustin Hice, said he recognized Lemon from his CNN show and offered to buy him a drink, which Lemon declined. Later, the news anchor was accused of having sexually assaulted the man in the bar in front of his friends. Hice quickly left and said the incident had humiliated him in front of his party.

CNN quickly issued a statement published by Mediaite, saying, "The plaintiff in this lawsuit has previously displayed a pattern of contempt for CNN on his social media accounts. This claim follows his unsuccessful threats and demands for an exorbitant amount of money from Don Lemon. Don categorically denies these claims and this matter does not merit any further comment at this time." The plaintiff did not attach a dollar figure to compensate for emotional damages suffered during the alleged encounter. 

In May 2022, Hice dropped his lawsuit. In response, Lemon's attorney Caroline Polisi said the incident was nothing new to her client. "Unfortunately, being a gay Black man in the media, he has had to deal with these sorts of attacks for quite some time," she said, per The Hill.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

In 2021, Don Lemon's star was so high in the cable news stratosphere, the network changed the name of the show from "CNN Tonight" to "Don Lemon Tonight." But the following year, his cherished prime-time show disappeared. How and why that happened could be summed up in a series of circumstances beyond Lemon's control, although his on-air behavior could have been a factor as well. 

CNN's numbers during the Trump years were impressive, getting as high as 2.2 million in January 2022, during the former President's final month in office. But by the time Joe Biden was sworn in as the next Commander-in-Chief, those figures plummeted to roughly one million viewers. In February, Lemon lost his most powerful CNN ally, company CEO Jeff Zucker, who resigned after confessing to a frowned-upon romance with a colleague. Zucker's successor Chris Licht subsequently gutted staff and unplugged HLN and streaming service CNN+. 

Lemon's shenanigans didn't help, such as the time he was labeled a misogynist when he took CNN correspondent S.E. Cupp to task for a momentary lapse. "Is it mommy brain?" he scolded. "No, I just forgot what I was going to say," she tersely replied. After CNN axed his show, Lemon was shuffled to co-host a new morning show with Kaitlan Collins and Poppy Harlow. "Set your alarms, folks, because we're going to have a lot of fun," Lemon said in a statement. Those alarms would be ringing, all right — but for entirely different reasons.

After losing his prime time slot, Don Lemon found himself sharing a desk with co-anchors Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins on a new weekday program called "CNN This Morning," which debuted November 1, 2022. During his first month at the new gig, Lemon was on his best behavior. That is until he triggered a hornet's nest of fury after the U.S. Soccer Federation reached a pay equity agreement between their national men's and women's teams. The agreement received the endorsement of President Joe Biden, who tweeted, "Let's keep up the fight until we close the gender pay gap in every industry." 

But Lemon, for his part, made it known he wasn't on board with the deal. He argued that men's professional teams deserve a larger share of the loot because they draw larger audiences. "The men's team makes more money," Lemon argued. "If they make more money, then they should get more money. The men's team makes more money because people are more interested." 

At that point, Harlow jumped in, taking issue with Lemon's comment before claiming that women's leagues like the WNBA don't do as well because they lack corporate support and necessary focus. "Until big media companies, big tech companies, advertisers invest and put them on their airwaves more, and allow people to see it more and gain more fans, then you will push toward more equality," she said. It marked the first major public tiff between Lemon and his cohorts.

One of the ugliest altercations between Don Lemon and his "CNN This Morning" co-hosts apparently took place in December 2022, a few days after their heated discussion regarding pay parity for the U.S. Women's Soccer team. Two anonymous sources approached the New York Post the following February to relate an incident that saw Lemon freaking out at Kaitlan Collins after the show concluded its run that day. 

Scuttlebutt has it that Lemon, more accustomed to running a solo show than as part of a live team, was frustrated over Collins repeatedly cutting him off throughout the show and took it out on his colleague, causing her to tearfully rush off the set. "Don has an intractable ego," said one source. "My understanding is he wants the show to be about him. I don't know how you fix that. It's a very difficult situation."

A compilation video shared by Newsbusters appeared to show Lemon and Collins repeatedly interrupting each other during the morning show prior to the alleged incident, several of them when WNBA star Brittney Griner was released from a Russian prison. One source told Radar that much of the friction was due to Lemon wanting to be the star attraction on the program with his colleagues relegated to secondary roles. "Don went into this thinking of himself as Beyoncé and his co-hosts as his backup dancers," said the source. "That attitude did not fly — especially with Kaitlan. She won't play second fiddle to Don."

The on-air tiffs on "CNN This Morning" between Don Lemon and co-hosts Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins were tremors compared to the seismic shock delivered by the controversial anchor later in February when news surfaced that Republican Nikki Haley had thrown her hat into the presidential ring. Commenting on Haley's remarks that certain politicians had exceeded their due dates, Lemon took a swipe at the 51-year-old contender. "Nikki Haley isn't in her prime, sorry," he said on the morning show. "A woman is considered being a prime in her 20s, and 30s, and maybe 40s." Incensed, Harlow shot back, "Prime for what?" causing Lemon to stammer and suggest to his colleagues that they should Google that particular information for themselves.

The faux pas caused pundits from all sides of the political spectrum to lock and load before firing on the combative morning host. Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro said, "How dumb do you have to be to say something like that?" Meanwhile "Breaking Points" co-host Saager Enjeti said, "He is obviously one of the most narcissistic individuals on all of television." Haley even shot back and questioned Lemon's intelligence, saying on Fox News, "I wasn't sitting there saying sexist middle-aged CNN anchors need to take mental competency tests, although he may have just proven that point."

Lemon later apologized for his comments, telling CNN staffers during an editorial meeting, ""I'm sorry that I said it. And I certainly see why people found it completely misguided," per CNN Business.

One of the bolder attributes of Don Lemon as a CNN anchor is that he's never been one to shy away from a fight. He's taken on the likes of Terry Crews for the actor's criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement, CNN analyst Alice Stewart for her support of troubled Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker, and Donald Trump, who called Lemon, "The dumbest man on television." 

But it was a "CNN This Morning" interview with Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in April that put the charismatic co-host in the doghouse. From the start, Lemon hogged the interview, leaving cohort Poppy Harlow in the cold. He verbally charged Ramaswamy for his assertion that the outcome of the Civil War benefited African-Americans in that they were eventually able to own firearms, saying, "That war was not fought for Black people to have guns." Ramaswamy replied, "That war was fought for black people to have freedoms in this country." The argument got uglier until Lemon declared, "It's insulting to me as an African-American."

The interview would prove to be his undoing. Regardless, long afterward, Lemon stuck to his guns. Discussing his general journalistic values with ABC24, he said, "I don't believe in platforming liars and bigots, and insurrectionists and election deniers and putting them on the same footing as people who are telling the truth — people who are fighting for what's right, people who are abiding by the Constitution." 

For those keeping scores, in less than four months as a co-anchor on "CNN This Morning," Don Lemon had insulted a female sports team, allegedly screamed at a colleague, and derided two presidential candidates. It was after a verbal jousting match on-air with Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that the powers that be decided Lemon had injected a sour taste into the mouth of the network which had to be flushed out. On April 24, CNN fired Lemon, announcing the news in a tweet without giving any explanation as to why.  "Don will forever be a part of the CNN family, and we thank him for his contributions over the past 17 years," the statement read. "We wish him well and will be cheering him on in his future endeavors."

The news was apparently relayed to him by his agent — and by all accounts, Lemon appeared to be blindsided by the pink slip. On Twitter, the anchor let his feelings about the sudden company decision be publicly known, writing, "After 17 years at CNN, I would have thought someone in management would have the decency to tell me directly." Additionally, he claimed that he was given no prior warning as to his eventual dismissal. 

Two months later, Lemon revealed he wasn't putting any pressure on himself to find another gig, and was instead planning to take some time off. "I'm not worried about it at all," he said to ABC24.