WATCH: Black ABC Producer Emotionally Recalls Encounter With White Supremacist

Jasmine Brown, a producer for ABC's "Nightline," shares how it felt to receive insulting messages from self-described white supremacist Craig Cobb while trying to report a story on him.
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Self-described white supremacist Craig Cobb has repeatedly claimed that he doesn’t intend to bother anyone in his attempts to establish all-white enclaves in various remote Midwestern towns.

That’s hard to believe now that a black producer for ABC’s “Nightline” has opened up about the way Cobb treated her and another correspondent, who is also black, while they worked on a recent segment about him.

Towards the end of the “Nightline” segment, which aired late last month, producer Jasmine Brown informed co-anchor Byron Pitts that Cobb told her the network better not send a “negro presenter” to interview him. Pitts, who had just arrived in North Dakota, tried to convince Cobb over the phone to sit down with him in person. In response, Cobb repeatedly called Pitts the N-word.

Brown shared even more details of their interactions with Cobb in a video posted online last week. She recalled that Cobb seemed “gracious” and excited to talk about his affinity for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump when she first reached out to him about an interview.

Then Cobb looked her up on Google and sent her a text message that read “I’d been hoping yr given name was from a standard wigress mom” and added “ABC will have to provide a human iterviewer (sic).”

“This was definitely the first time that I’d ever experienced anything like this,” Brown said in the video. “Like just direct hatred towards me because of the color of my skin.”

Despite refusing to work with the black members of the “Nightline” crew, Cobb has interacted with black TV personalities in the past. He appeared on “The Trisha Goddard Show” two years ago and found out that a DNA test allegedly showed he had “14 percent sub-Saharan African” heritage.

Yet Cobb accused ABC of “intentionally” sending two black reporters to cover him. He responded by posting both Brown’s and Pitts’ personal information on a white supremacist website, Brown said in the video.

The brush with Cobb clearly had an impact on the young producer.

“It sucks that as a 20-something-year-old woman, who’s like a millennial who’s always been told their entire life ‘just be you,’ that that’s not the case for some people,” Brown said in the video while tearing up. “You think that it’s all in the past. You learn about civil rights and all that stuff, how far we’ve come. But we haven’t.”

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Notable Replies

  1. Racists are assholes. Racism hurts people.

    Aside from John Roberts, nobody is shocked.

  2. Avatar for chammy chammy says:

    A bullet in Craig Cobb’s head would be too kind.

  3. “It sucks that as a 20-something-year-old woman, who’s like a millennial who’s always been told their entire life ‘just be you,’ that that’s not the case for some people,” Brown said in the video while tearing up.

    You have to prepare your children for the way the world is, not the way it’s supposed to be. I’ve seen a lot of millennials with so much hope and promise, go into the real world and 6 months later they feel dejected. What she will learn is that life is just a competition for resources. Unfortunately that competition has been divided along racial and gender lines.

  4. Somehow, the conversation has been turned around that we have to be tolerant of these d-baggers. But what liberals are asking for with tolerance is minorities and other people previously shut out of the system should be allowed in. It is not a tactic to allow people who would shut the rest of us out back in again.

  5. Is Cobb a typical tRump supporter? Yeah, pretty much.

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

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