‘Joined at the Hip’: Jeff Zucker’s Relationship With a Top CNN Executive

It was a pattern that dated back to earlier chapters of Mr. Zucker’s career at NBCUniversal, where Ms. Gollust first emerged as his most trusted aide-de-camp.

“They were joined at the hip,” the former “Today” anchor Katie Couric wrote about Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust in her 2021 memoir, “Going There.”

When both were still married to their respective spouses, Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust lived for several years in the same luxury co-op apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; Ms. Gollust and her family lived one floor above the Zuckers.

Office relationships are not uncommon in the high-pressure world of TV news, and rumors of a potential romance between the two proliferated, especially after their divorces. Mr. Zucker and his wife, Caryn, divorced in 2017; The New York Post reported that Ms. Gollust and her husband filed for divorce in 2015.

But the rumors stayed only rumors, until Wednesday.

Jason Kilar, the chief executive of WarnerMedia who informed Mr. Zucker that he would have to resign, told CNN journalists at a meeting in its Washington bureau on Wednesday that he was “not aware of the relationship” before the recent events. Mr. Kilar would not specify when he first learned of it, but he acknowledged that the relationship emerged as part of CNN’s investigation into the tenure of Chris Cuomo, the star anchor who was fired last year for advising his brother, then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, on how to deal with sexual harassment accusations.

In his memo on Wednesday announcing his resignation, Mr. Zucker put it this way: “The relationship evolved in recent years.” Ms. Gollust, in her own statement, wrote: “Recently, our relationship changed during Covid.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/business/media/jeff-zucker-allison-gollust-cnn.html