Ex-CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin reveals dad beat her with belt until she was black and blue on my backside

Brooke Baldwin says her father once beat her with a belt so many times that she woke up “black and blue on my backside” — a childhood episode the former CNN anchor says she has never publicly disclosed before.Baldwin, 47, revisited the painful memory in her Substack newsletter “Unraveling” on Sunday after more than two weeks on the road interviewing women for her independent journalism project, “America, Tell Me Everything.”“I have one very specific memory.Elementary school.

My father… The belt,” Baldwin wrote.“I’ve never shared this story before.”The memory was stirred by an interview with another Southern woman who had been spanked as a child, Baldwin said.She recalled the dread she felt awaiting punishment from her father, though she no longer remembers exactly what she had done.“The full-body panic.The anxiety of knowing the pain was coming.

And also the semi-defiance: do itttttt.”Baldwin suspects she may have fought with her younger brother and taken the blame because she was the older and larger sibling who should have “known better.”Whatever prompted it, she said one beating went far beyond a routine spanking.“One time, I got belted so many times I woke up black and blue on my backside,” Baldwin wrote.“Let the record reflect… this ended up being my last spanking.”Baldwin was preparing to leave for sleepaway camp that week, leaving her “mortified” by the prospect that other children could see the bruising in showers, bathing suits or while changing.She remembered showing the marks to her mother — an act she now interprets as her childhood attempt to protest what had happened.“This was my little-girl-way of speaking up.Do you see me? This hurt.

This is not okay.”“I remember being furious.I remember trying to make her feel terrible.”With decades of hindsight, Baldwin said she wonders whether her mother was already carrying her own shame — both over the punishment and a marriage in which Baldwin beli...