ABC bosses are battling to deal with the fallout from comments made by “Good Morning America” reporter Amy Robach, who was caught on a hot mic claiming network brass scrapped her interview with a Jeffrey Epstein accuser to appease the royal family, reports The NY Post.
The reporter could be heard complaining that she spent three years trying to get the interview with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who alleges she was forced to sleep with Prince Andrew while she was kept as Epstein’s sex slave, on air.
ABC news chiefs swiftly moved on Tuesday to have Robach issue a statement, in which she backtracked on her initial claims.
The anchor said she was “caught in a moment of private frustration” on the video, which was released by the conservative website Project Veritas and believed to have been taped this July.
In her statement, Robach said she was “disappointed” that her interview with Giuffre, taped in 2015, did not run as it failed to meet ABC’s reporting standards, while insisting that she had never been told to stop reporting on the Epstein scandal.
ABC sources told Page Six Tuesday there was “zero truth” that the interview was held to court favor with the royals, and particularly, as Robach said on camera, to get an interview with Prince William and wife Kate Middleton.
An ABC source said: “A lot of broadcasters can probably empathize. We do have to run everything past standards and practices and there are times when interviews can’t air.
“We needed time to corroborate details, and we were unable to verify a lot of Virginia’s claims.”
This does not, however, answer why ABC did not run the interview at any time after 2015. Giuffre has now made her claims to a variety of media outlets.
David Folkenflik at NPR reports the first 64 seconds of Project Veritas' video appear to be unedited, just a straight span of Robach speaking. ABC News and Robach confirmed that the video and her remarks are real. Yet in separate statements released by a spokeswoman for ABC News, they argue that Robach's frustrations do not reflect any breakdown in journalistic acumen.
Instead, Robach and ABC say they were unable to corroborate elements of some of the key charges from Giuffre.
"At the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we have never stopped investigating the story," the ABC News statement says. "Ever since we've had a team on this investigation and substantial resources dedicated to it." The network said it intended to run a two-hour documentary and launch a six-part podcast on Epstein in January 2020.
Project Veritas is led by James O'Keefe, who tells NPR that the tape was sent to him by an employee at ABC News.
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