The woman accused of leaking footage of ABC News anchor Amy Robach alleging the network quashed her reporting on Jeffrey Epstein spoke publicly for the first time on Friday. Her tearful message: I didn’t do it and I just want my job back.
CBS This Morning producer Ashley Bianco, 25, was fired this week by the broadcast network after ABC determined she’d accessed the Robach clip, which was released Tuesday by right-wing group Project Veritas.
In an exclusive interview with former Fox News and NBC anchor Megyn Kelly, Bianco denied any involvement with the leak.
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“I’m not the whistleblower. I’m sorry to ABC, but the leaker’s still inside,” she said. “I never leaked it, I never showed it to anyone. I never showed it to anyone outside the company.”
Bianco did, however, admit to having saved the footage to ABC’s “internal system” after the August on-camera incident occurred. “I did it just for office gossip, you know,” she said.
As part of her job as a crash producer, Bianco explained to Kelly, “I put together funny anchor reels, I do it all the time.” As such, she said, “I was watching the comments while I was at my desk, and I had seen what she was saying, and I went to my manager, and I said, ‘Do you see what she’s saying?’” She added that “everyone” was aware of the moment and that it was a topic of much conversation inside the network.
In the hot-mic footage, Robach alleged that she “had everything” on the late pedophile billionaire Epstein but that, after threats from the British palace—Prince Andrew has come under scrutiny for his ties to Epstein—her reporting was nixed by ABC out of fear that the network would lose potential interviews with Prince William and Kate Middleton.
Following the leak, Robach backtracked, saying she was simply venting in a “a private moment of frustration” and that “no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, and we have continued to aggressively pursue this important story.”
Clenching a tissue in her left hand, Bianco tearfully pleaded to her former employers that she “would never” seek to embarrass the company. “The three years I spent at ABC, I loved my time there. I’m a good employee. I worked seven days a week. I loved my job.”
She added, “I hadn’t even heard of Project Veritas until this.”
Bianco described how, only four days into her new employment at CBS, she was fired following the leaked footage’s release. “I begged, I pleaded, I didn't know what I had done wrong," she said. "And I wasn’t even given the professional courtesy to defend myself. I didn’t know what I’d been accused of. It was humiliating, it was devastating.”
“I just want my career back. I want people to know I didn’t do it. That’s all I want,” she added.
Bianco further fretted, “I’ll never get a job anywhere else,” prompting Kelly to softly reply, with a car horn audibly blaring outside the room: “You’ll get a job. You’ll definitely get a job.”
