REUTERS/Mike Blake
- Back in 2005, Chris Cuomo sent an email to his former boss after she said he sexually harassed her.
- Shelley Ross said he lowered his hand to "firmly grab and squeeze the cheek of my buttock."
- In his email shortly afterward, Cuomo first apologized to her "very good and noble husband."
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Shelley Ross, a former executive producer at ABC and CBS who accused Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her at a colleague's going-away party in 2005, says the CNN host apologized to her husband before he apologized to her after the incident.
Ross, who was the executive producer of an ABC entertainment special and previously was Cuomo's executive producer at "Primetime Live," said in Friday's New York Times op-ed article about the incident that Cuomo grabbed her buttocks during the party.
As part of the article, Ross shared an email dated June 1, 2005, in which a sender identified as Cuomo said he was "ashamed" of what he'd done and apologized to her "very good and noble husband" before apologizing to her, "for even putting you in such a position."
The sender added that he would "remember the lesson, no matter how happy I am to see you…" according to a screenshot of the email shared by Ross.
"Was he ashamed of what he did, or was he embarrassed because my husband saw it?" Ross wrote in the Times op-ed article. "Mr. Cuomo may say this is a sincere apology. I've always seen it as an attempt to provide himself with legal and moral coverage to evade accountability."