The former ABC producer who was fired this week in connection with the leaking of the Amy Robach video denied leaking the clip during an interview with Megyn Kelly that was released on YouTube on Friday.
Ashley Bianco was a producer at ABC when Robach disparaged the network’s executives for killing her reporting on Jeffrey Epstein three years earlier. Bianco recently moved to CBS, but once ABC investigators found she accessed the video recording of Robach, the investigators passed the information to CBS, which fired Bianco after four days on the job.
“I’m not the whistleblower,” Bianco told Kelly while holding back tears. “I’m sorry to ABC but the leaker is still inside, I never did any of that.”
Bianco also said she had never heard of Project Veritas, the right wing activist group that leaked the clip, until the footage was released.
An author calling him or herself “Ignotus” posted on Project Veritas’s website on November 8 claiming to be the source of the video leak.
“I came forward with this information bearing no motives other than to have this information public,” Ignotus wrote, calling on ABC executives to “look inwards and remember why this company engages in journalism.”
Bianco said that she made the clip of Robach and saved it in ABC’s internal system for “office gossip,” and promptly forgot about the incident. Part of her job involved selecting video clips of various anchors to play in montage segments on air.
“I clipped [the footage] off, I essentially marked it in the system,” Bianco said. “We do it all the time…Everyone in the office was freaked out by what [Robach] was saying.”
When CBS fired her, Bianco said she didn’t know what she had done wrong, and that she “wasn’t given the professional courtesy to defend herself.”
After Project Veritas released the footage, ABC and Robach both released statements saying Robach’s story on Epstein was not aired because her reporting did not meet company standards for corroborating evidence. However, in the leaked video clip, Robach asserts she had multiple accounts of abuse by Epstein as well as photographic and video evidence to back up the claims.
Robach also said ABC spiked the story because Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts, whom Robach had interviewed, alleged she was forced to perform sex acts on British royal Prince Andrew. According to Robach, the network feared airing the allegations would endanger its opportunity to interview Prince Harry and spouse Kate Middleton.
“The [British royal] Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways,” Robach said.