Ex-CNN Anchor Claims Her Dad 'Beat Her With a Belt Until Her Backside Was Black and Blue'
Brooke Baldwin shared a personal admission from her childhood.
Sept. 14 2026, Published 6:20 p.m. ET
Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin has claimed in a personal essay that her father used to "beat her with a belt" in anger, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The journalist shared the haunting memory from her childhood while claiming her dad once struck her so many times that she woke up "black and blue" on her backside.
Brooke Baldwin Relives Personal Trauma
Brooke Baldwin opened up about her life in her personal Substack.
Baldwin was an anchor and correspondent for CNN from 2008 to 2021, hosting the weekday afternoon program CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin for the final seven years.
Since leaving the network, she has forged her own reporting, sharing her experiences in her Substack, Unraveling. The 47-year-old has also dropped her personal guard and shared some emotional memories.
Her latest post chronicled the more than two weeks she spent traveling and interviewing women for her independent journalism project, America, Tell Me Everything. Among her conversations was one with a Southern woman about being spanked as a child. That brought Baldwin back to her own experience with spanking.
"I have one very specific memory. Elementary school. My father... The belt," Baldwin wrote. "I've never shared this story before."
Brooke Baldwin's Father Would Allegedly Beat Her for 'Not Knowing Better'
Baldwin claimed her father used to beat her with a belt.
Though she confesses she no longer remembers what she did to spurn her father, she has vivid memories of "the full-body panic. The anxiety of knowing the pain was coming. And also the semi-defiance: do itttttt."
Baldwin wrote that she may have been fighting with her younger brother and ended up taking the blame because she was the older, larger sibling who was expected to "know better."
But one particular punishment stood out from the others. It came as she was preparing to leave for sleepaway camp
"One time, I got belted so many times I woke up black and blue on my backside," Baldwin wrote, before quickly clarifying, "Let the record reflect… this ended up being my last spanking."
Brooke Baldwin Showed Her Mother the Bruises
The journalist said one beating was so severe it left her visibly bruised.
Baldwin said she was "mortified" by the thought of other children seeing the bruises while they were showering, wearing swimsuits, or changing clothes. She eventually showed the marks to her mom, which she considered her "littlle-girl-way of speaking up. 'Do you see me? This hurt. This is not okay,'" she recalled.
"I remember being furious. I remember trying to make [my mom] feel terrible," Baldwin admitted.
Baldwin, however, said she has also thought about her mother's position at the time, wondering whether her mom was dealing with her own shame surrounding the punishment along with a marriage where Baldwin felt her father held more authority.
"I watched my mother defer, over and over, to choices my father made about me – decisions some part of me knew weren't really his to make alone," she wrote.
Brooke Baldwin Holds On to the Memories
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Baldwin said the incident has shaped her own family viewpoints.
However, Baldwin stopped short of placing all the blame on her mother.
While the ex-CNN anchor does not have any children of her own and announced her divorce from British producer James Fletcher in 2023 after five years of marriage, she said the experience with her father has shaped the way she thinks about her own family patterns.
"I also know that sometimes, someone has to be the one to break the cycle," Baldwin wrote. "And it’s rarely the generation that started it."
