'SHE PINCHED MY NIPPLES:' Former CNN anchor Don Lemon decries harassment after facing similar accusations

If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was dismissed from the network last year amid allegations of misogynistic behavior, now claims he was sexually harassed by both men and women throughout his career — including during his nearly 10-year primetime run at CNN.

They flipped his nips and even went for the junk in the trunk, he said.

“I never told this story. Someone who I worked with also harassed me at CNN, and I never went to management,” he claimed.

Lemon, who is openly gay, made the revelation during a two-hour conversation on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, where he described uncomfortable workplace encounters but admitted he never reported them, fearing a “double standard” for men. Especially gay ones.

Lemon recounted two separate incidents involving female CNN colleagues. One unidentified woman, he claimed, pinched his nipples in the company cafeteria, joking, “Oh, it’s cold in here!” 

Lemon said he responded, “OK—you realize if I did that, they’d be walking me out the door right now?” Despite his discomfort, he said he chose not to report the incident.

Another female colleague, who Lemon also did not name, allegedly pursued him despite knowing he was gay. He described her behavior as “bizarre” and attributed it to her going through a divorce. He also suggested he feared that reporting the incident would backfire on him.

Lemon’s revelations, however, come with a sense of irony given his own past behavior at CNN, where he was accused of making inappropriate and sexist remarks toward female colleagues.

Lemon’s tenure at CNN was marked by a series of scandals, many involving his treatment of women. In 2023, he sparked outrage when he claimed that then-presidential candidate Nikki Haley, at 51, was “not in her prime,” suggesting that a woman’s prime is in her “20s, 30s, and 40s.” 

The remark led to public backlash and an internal reprimand.

In April of the same year, Variety reported that Lemon had a history of misogynistic behavior at CNN, including allegedly questioning Soledad O’Brien’s racial identity, threatening co-anchor Kyra Phillips, and mocking Nancy Grace. 

His alleged hostility toward female colleagues was a key factor in his firing. While Lemon has denied the allegations, his new claims of being a victim of workplace misconduct add a layer of irony to his own troubled history at the network.

Lemon’s departure was just one piece of a larger shakeup at CNN, which has been struggling in the ratings battle against other major North American news networks. The network has undergone multiple lineup changes and leadership shifts in an attempt to regain viewers, but it continues to lag behind rivals like Fox News and MSNBC.

Now, as Lemon attempts to reinvent himself through podcasting, his latest revelations raise uncomfortable questions about power dynamics in media — both for those who claim to be victims and for those who have been accused. 

“It’s ridiculous,” he told Maher. “There are some things that are really egregious, but not everything is Harvey Weinstein-level,” he added, referring to the disgraced film producer who was found guilty of rapes in courts in both New York and Los Angeles.