MAUREEN CALLAHAN: ‘Predator’ T.J. Holmes exposes what a farce the #MeToo industry really is

How is T.J. Holmes getting away with this?

Yet another young woman has now come forward, claiming that Holmes, then her senior at ABC News, used her sexually and tossed her aside.

This seems a pattern for Holmes, who nonetheless is getting soft-focus treatment from a mainstream news media and a #MeToo industrial complex that otherwise pounces on sexual predators in the workplace.

Since his affair with co-host Amy Robach was revealed in the MailOnline last fall, there’s been a drip-drip-drip of women coming forward to say he took advantage of them. As is usually the case, where there is one abuse of power there is another, and another, and another.

How many other young women did Holmes sexually exploit in the workplace? My guess is more than we know.

As the MailOnline exclusively reported last month, a different female staffer, identified as Jasmin Pettaway, was 24 — 13 years younger than Holmes — when she worked at ABC News. She had hoped Holmes would be a mentor.

Instead, it was sex in his office until Holmes got bored and discarded her.

An anonymous source, who knew Pettaway well at the time, claimed that Holmes ‘was a predator who took full advantage of his position.’

Speaking to The Cut, this latest woman, identified only as Sascha, says she was 27 years old and working the overnight shift in 2014 when Holmes began coming on to her. He was married, but his status as a rising star, coupled with his considerable charm, was hard to resist.

Holmes, Sascha said, appeared to be ‘the only person in the building who took me seriously.’ He took a ‘crazy amount of interest’ in her, flirting over email.

‘I’m learning a lot about you,’ Holmes wrote. ‘I might actually like you.’

Heady stuff for a junior staffer left exhausted by a 9 p.m.-5 a.m. schedule that left no room for dating or any kind of social life. Her job was grit but his was glamour, and his attention and affection were a boon to Sascha. Their sexual relationship began in an Upper West Side hotel and went downhill from there, hook-ups mainly relegated to — where else? — his office.

Think about that: A network star who has young female staffers coming into his office — door closed and locked — then emerging flushed and disheveled.

The New York Post spoke to a source who reported seeing a ‘junior staffer’ emerge from Holmes’ office in 2015 looking like a ‘deer in the headlights.’

Sascha said she was shocked to read that report and recognize that that young woman was her — that she had been observed and seen by a co-worker as something of a victim.

The message Holmes was sending, to my mind, is very clear: This newsroom is mine, I’ll take who I want when I want, and make minimal effort to hide it.

The notion that Holmes’s bosses had no idea what he was up to is laughable. This went on for years.

Multiple sources also told the MailOnline that another young female, an intern, was left ‘stressed’ and ‘freaked out’ by his repeated advances. And no one is lower in the ranks or has less power than an intern.

How was Holmes allowed to predate for so long? Have network news executives learned nothing from Matt Lauer, who was fired in 2017 amid sexual misconduct and abuse allegations that included rape?

To be clear, Holmes is not accused of anything so vile — but make no mistake: predatory acts by a superior in the workplace harm and scar. They affect career trajectories. How many young women bow out rather than navigate this stuff? Or get blackballed? Or are unable to do their best under such undue, unspoken, tolerated-by-the-brass stress?

Pettaway, now an award-winning casting producer and lifestyle brand founder, left ABC after two years to return to Cleveland, where she worked for a local affiliate. The ‘toxic work environment’ at ABC News in New York City, she said, ‘really damaged my self-esteem.’

Jasmin Pettaway (left) , was 24 — 13 years younger than Holmes — when she worked at ABC News. Holmes, 45, had a three-year affair with Good Morning America producer Natasha Singh (right), 37, that began in 2016

T.J. Holmes walks around, head held high, clearly regretting nothing. His arrogance with junior female staffers extended to his peers.

Women at ABC News, according to this report, worried that sleeping with their male superiors was the best and often only way to rise through the ranks. How thoroughly demoralizing and depressing.

Whether ABC likes it or not, T.J. Holmes, he of insufferable smirk and swagger, is the face of their problem. Taking him off air was the right call, to be sure. But as he spends all his new free time buying jewelry for Robach at David Yurman (a promise ring, of all things!) and flaunting this latest affair in front of paparazzi, former spouses and wounded children be damned, the question remains: Why hasn’t Holmes been fired outright, instead of ABC gently saying he was ‘moving on’?

Why hasn’t ABC News forcefully denounced his behavior in a statement, distanced themselves from him, and pledged to make sure that going forward, anyone in his position who abuses female underlings will be fired with zero severance or financial settlement? The head of ABC News is a woman. Where is she? Why isn’t Holmes’s behavior generating the kind of outrage that followed other workplace sex scandals?

Bill O’Reilly now broadcasts from his basement on Long Island. Charlie Rose lives in permanent media exile, as does Lauer.

Chris Cuomo was outed as sexually harassing his female boss — by said female boss — in a New York Times op-ed and was finally fired for abusing his position at CNN to potentially smear his brother’s accusers. He is now back on the air at the NewsNation — for whatever that’s worth. As Cuomo recently lamented on a New York Times podcast, ‘I’ll never be what I was. I was number one on the most powerful media platform in the world.’

These guys are always so shocked to find that the elite media axis keeps on spinning even as they’re spun off from it, floating into space like so much flotsam. For them and their grossly distorted egos, this really seems a fate worse than criminal charges or civil suits.

Still: Why hasn’t the #MeToo movement agitated against T.J. Holmes? Has corporate media decided that, in the absence of outside pressure and scorn, it’s just cheaper and easier to let some bad guys skate?

If so, that’s bad news for women.

T.J. Holmes walks around, head held high, clearly regretting nothing. His arrogance with junior female staffers extended to his peers.

‘No one likes working with him,’ an ABC source told Page Six. ‘He yells and has the biggest ego.’

In a statement to The Cut, an ABC News spokesperson said, ‘We do not condone or allow harassment or intimidation of any kind and take these matters very seriously and with immediacy. Creating a safe, respectful, and professional work environment for everyone has been, and continues to be, a top priority at ABC News.’

Since his affair with co-host Amy Robach was revealed in the MailOnline last fall, there’s been a drip-drip-drip of women coming forward to say he took advantage of them. As is usually the case, where there is one abuse of power there is another, and another, and another.

Again, that’s hard to believe. When young women were getting tossed around like sexual playthings, it’s inconceivable that higher-ups didn’t know. It’s hard to believe that something so ingrained in corporate culture changes with a high-profile firing or two. As anyone who has ever worked in media knows, newsrooms are the most gossipy workplaces around: Reporters reporting on other reporters, underlings at a distinct disadvantage.

To wit: When Holmes got promoted to ‘Good Morning America,’ Sascha says, she found out like anyone else. He never told her he was leaving, which left her feeling like a ‘throwaway object.’ She was too young and inexperienced, she says, to realize that if he was doing this with her, he was doing it with others.

‘I was just part of a pattern,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even think about power dynamics. I thought I was special.’

If anyone thought they were special, it was T.J. Holmes. But the women he took advantage of are having their own reckoning. Here’s to more coming forward.