Blind Item #8 - The Alcoholic And The Children Live On Television

I remember every fall sitting around and watching a program. It only came on once a year and back when there were limited channels available for your viewing pleasure, one of them was stuck with this particular event. Everyone knows who the host of the event was, but there were co-hosts. One was a former A lister. He had a huge network hit back in the day for which he was nominated/won a couple of times with an award. The events you are about to read happened a good decade beyond his peak. He was a huge drinker back when this happened. There was rarely a night he didn't end up passed out drunk. He also had a thing for women. Lots and lots of women. He was married for a long time but rarely went a week without cheating on his wife. He didn't particularly care how old the women were or if the women were actually teens. Apparently he did have some kind of sick code of ethics where he wanted them to be at least a teen although at least one twelve year old would beg to differ.

She was one of many tweens and teens who were on the show. Not in the spotlight or featured but tagged along with a sibling who was being featured. Often times the parents would be focused exclusively on one sibling and not the other. Plus, the parents in these pre internet days would be talking to other parents who faced similar struggles and the siblings were left unattended for long periods. With hundreds of things going on at any point and a lot of drinking, there was a lot of room for trouble.

The twelve year old said that when she was twelve and thirteen she attended this event and both times she was cornered by the aforementioned co-host and was molested. When she was twelve she says she wore a dress and after what the host did to her she wore jeans the next year. He tired to touch her beneath her jeans but was too drunk to figure out the button. She ran from the dressing room and never went back to the show despite her sibling continuing to go for the next couple years.

At a meeting when she was in college she found a support group of siblings who had siblings with this disease. All of the women in this support group had all been molested and in one case raped by this co-host. What were the odds that the five women in this group who had all gone to the show had been molested and they were the only ones? Pretty small. So, she reached out to others, but did so in a couple of ads she placed in newspapers around the country. Well, that brought the full force of the organization down on her and she didn't have the money to fight them and their lawyers. They told her to stand down or would sue her and make sure her sibling never got any help ever again.