Former MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews gave his first interview over the weekend since shockingly resigning on-air from “Hardball” nearly two months ago. In the appearance on Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive” podcast, the 74-year-old Matthews admitted that he had behaved inappropriately at his old workplace.
“I didn’t argue about it, I didn’t deny it,” he said of the harassment complaint against him. “I accepted the credibility of the complaint in the article. I didn’t want to challenge the person that made the complaint and wrote the article. I thought it was very credible and certainly within the person’s rights to write that article, of course. That was highly justified.”
In late February, Matthews was accused of inappropriately flirting with journalist Laura Bassett when she appeared on “Hardball” in 2016. Bassett wrote the following about the encounter in GQ:
“Right before I had to go on his show and talk about sexual-assault allegations against Donald Trump, Matthews looked over at me in the makeup chair next to him and said, ‘Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?’ When I laughed nervously and said nothing, he followed up to the makeup artist. ‘Keep putting makeup on her, I’ll fall in love with her.'”
After Matthews’s Vanity Fair interview was made public, Bassett responded on Twitter.
“I appreciate him owning up this and respect how he handled it,” she wrote. “And to everyone who reflexively said I was lying: Please read this.”
___
(c)2020 New York Daily News
Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
—-
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
Recent Comments