The overnight shows were chronically understaffed, and she says her boss would often yell at her when she asked questions. Before their affair began, she would cry before the start of her workweek.
Seeing the couple’s story go viral made Sascha question her own relationship with Holmes and the workplace culture that made sex between co-workers seem so normal at ABC News. “It was very frustrating because there were a lot of people that were doing good work.” ABC News “rewarded the people that were either divas or adulterers,” a former GMA staffer says. Two months later, they signed exit agreements, a fact the pair seemed to celebrate by straddling and hugging each other on the street in Los Angeles. ABC News then launched an internal investigation into whether Holmes’s affair with Robach, or any other staffers, violated the network’s “morality rules.” The anchors each filed for divorce, lawyered up, and began drawn-out negotiations with their employer. She told staffers that though the relationship was “not a violation of company policy,” it had become a liability for GMA’s brand. When Holmes and Robach signed off the Friday after they’d become international news, Holmes sarcastically joked that it had been a “great week,” one he wished would keep “going and going and going.” (“Speak for yourself,” Robach said.) But the publicity didn’t let up.Ī few days later, Kim Godwin, the network’s president, pulled them off the show. They weren’t so different from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the MSNBC anchors whose off-screen romance was lauded as a Great American Love Story despite rumors that it began as an affair. Holmes and Robach, as far as we know, were two colleagues of equal stature having a consensual affair.
CULT ANIMOSITY SHOWS NO UP HOW TO
Ruth, who left GMA in 2019 but is still an ABC News producer, says that show in particular seemed like it was staffed by “a bunch of horned-up high-school students,” who “learned how to do news in the ’80s when people were still doing blow in the bathroom.”Īn ABC News spokesperson didn’t dispute any specific anecdotes but said in a statement that, “We do not condone or allow harassment or intimidation of any kind and take these matters very seriously and with immediacy.” “Creating a safe, respectful, and professional work environment for everyone has been, and continues to be, a top priority at ABC News,” they said. “It felt like everybody was sleeping around.” Staffers worked long, irregular shifts, which made it easier for senior-level men to have relationships with younger women who had no time to date outside work. “It was very commonplace,” says one former GMA staffer. (Their names have been changed because they fear professional consequences.) These sources, women who were all in their 20s when they were first hired, say constant rumors about office hookups, including among the company’s top brass, made them feel it was normal to sleep with or date a senior colleague. Such office relationships between women and men with more seniority were common at the network in the 2010s, according to current and former employees. (Holmes declined to comment for this story.) The Daily Mail outed the couple in November with photos that showed Holmes giving “his lover a playful squeeze from behind” during a trip upstate and Robach leaving an Uber in what social media dubbed her “cheating Uggs.” But juicy gossip about two anchors cheating on their respective spouses was soon followed by tabloid reports about Holmes’s alleged dalliances with co-workers on less equal footing: a junior staffer in her mid-20s, a GMA producer in her 30s, and Sascha. Stories about Holmes’s affairs with colleagues like Sascha have been trickling out since his relationship with Amy Robach, his former Good Morning America co-anchor, became a tabloid obsession.
When she walked into the room, he was sitting on the bed. She rarely felt validated as a low-level staffer, and Holmes often seemed like “the only person in the building who took me seriously.” It wasn’t long, she says, before he booked a hotel near the network’s Upper West Side headquarters and sent her the details.
She knew he was married but found his charisma intoxicating.
They texted for hours one weekend, and Holmes expressed what Sascha calls a “crazy amount of interest” in her personal life. I might actually like you,” he wrote in an email. But a few months later, after Holmes asked her for help setting up his Instagram account, he quickly became flirtatious. They were both pulling graveyard shifts, and the then-27-year-old digital news associate spent most of her time focused on her job and trying to stay awake. Holmes when he began working as an anchor for ABC News in 2014.
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