Jeffrey Toobin, the former CNN legal analyst who quit after he was caught masturbating on camera during a work-related Zoom call, has described the incident as a “disaster” in his first cable interview since leaving the network last year.
Toobin, who was also a legal contributor to The New Yorker from 1993 until 2020, initially returned to CNN in June 2021 after an 8-month period of leave, but left the network in Aug. 2022.
Speaking to NewsNation on Dan Abrams Live on Wednesday night to promote his new book, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, Toobin described the incident as “self-inflicted, self-destructive, and something I will regret for the rest of my life,” adding “I have no excuses, only apologies, which I have tried to offer to everyone involved.”
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Toobin said he would rather not “go into the grisly details” but stressed the incident was “not an intentional act on my part” and that “I didn’t know other people on the Zoom call were watching.”
Toobin said that he was not fired by CNN and that his departure was a “mutual decision” with the company instead of a forced act. He did note, however that “new management that was less fond of me so I can’t say they were brokenhearted to see me go.”
“I was very fortunate that CNN brought me back,” he added. “And I worked at CNN for over a year after being brought back.”
Responding to a joke by Roy Wood Jr. at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, Toobin said “it’s lousy. The whole thing is lousy. If I could rewrite history or go back in time of course I would not have wanted to brought this upon myself–or more importantly–my family, but as we used to say in school, this is on my permanent record, I know that, but I hope it’s not the entirety of my permanent record.”
He claimed he wished the response from The New Yorker after the incident “had been dealt with elsewhere, but I’m not doing anger, I’m doing gratitude. Nobody likes to be fired, I wish I hadn’t been fired, but that’s in history now.”
Life after the incident and CNN, Toobin says, “a lot has happened—almost all good since then. And I feel like my life is in a very good place, actually.” He added he doesn’t believe a future in television as a full-time job is on the cards.
