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 believes her father wielded greater 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.
Baldwin was careful not to condemn her mother, saying she loves her and believes she did the best she could given her circumstances.
“But 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.”
The childhood account emerged as Baldwin chronicled the early production of “America, Tell Me Everything,” the independent reporting venture she first detailed to The Post last month.
The intensely personal account follows a series of revelations Baldwin has made this year.
In July, she devoted an installment of her newsletter to sex and dating, saying four men had recently presented opportunities for her to sleep with them.
One “used to run a country,” she wrote, while another “literally flew in just to take me to dinner.”
She passed on all four encounters while making clear that celibacy did not reflect a lack of enthusiasm for sex.
“And y’all know… I love sex. If I may be so bold, I’m pretty damn good at it,” Baldwin wrote.
Baldwin said at the time that casual sex remained “very much on the table,” but she was deliberately preserving her energy for other parts of her life.
She also disclosed earlier this year that she believes she may have been sexually assaulted at age 21 during a spring break visit to Los Angeles.
In that account, Baldwin said she was by herself at a Beverly Hills bar when two significantly older men approached and offered her a drink.
What came afterward survives in her memory “only in flashes,” she wrote. Baldwin recalled a black SUV and eventually awakening half-dressed on the bathroom floor of the Chateau Marmont with an unfamiliar man nearby.
“For years, I did not have language for what I believed may have been done to me,” she wrote.
The Post has sought comment from Baldwin.
