“I want to punch you in the face.”

Yes, those words actually came out of my mouth. Like, out loud. A couple months ago. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I was talking to my loving partner, Peter. He had just flown across the country and was set to wake up with me at four-something in the morning so that he could accompany me to my appearance on Good Morning America. I was going back on national TV for the first time since I’d signed off from my CNN show. I would be talking about the debut of my new Netflix show, The Trust. This was a big deal. In many ways, it felt like a rebirth. But that night before, I hadn’t been in a celebratory mood.

I was pissed off. I felt violent. I felt like I was going to explode. I am now in the process of understanding why, and this deep knowing has enabled me to change everything in my life.

I am not an angry person. Or maybe I am. There I go, silencing myself again.

When I signed off from CNN Newsroom on April 16, 2021, I couldn’t tell the whole truth. I wasn’t allowed to—and probably still am not. But I’m now on the other side of a profound life moment, of my unraveling.

This story really begins during my senior year of college, when my mother and I drove up to a strange house about a half hour from where I grew up in Atlanta. I was 21. Outside the house was my father’s silver Porsche. Inside the house was my father, with a woman who was not my mother. I reached for the car door to run into the house, to do or say I don’t know what. With my leg dragging out the passenger door, I screamed at my mother to stop the car and let me out. Instead she sped away, the passenger door slamming shut. Just recently, a friend told me my mom saved me that day: Had I gotten out of that car, I would have spent the rest of my life trying to unsee what I’d seen.

For years I watched my mother keep her mouth shut. I held on to that secret and said nothing about, or to, my father. This would be just the beginning of carrying bigger secrets and allowing myself to be muzzled —or rather, as I’m now learning, muzzling myself.

Ironic (or not) that I chose a career in TV journalism, which saw me wear a microphone to amplify the voiceless for a living. Problem was, I didn’t use my own. I see it all so clearly now: I rarely spoke up for myself.

CNN was always the dream. For 10 years it put me in millions of living rooms, allowing me to cover everything from the White House to school shootings to the pandemic. I became known for giving you the news, straight up, with dignity and compassion. And—after the 10 years I spent climbing the ranks of local news to get to the big leagues—I was good at it.

I was living my dream and saying yes to everything. YES to oil spills. YES to elections. Coal mine disasters. Hurricanes. Escaped inmates. Gun legislation. Yes to everything, yes to everyone.

I never said no. There would have always been someone hungrier and more telegenic if I had.

Behind the scenes, my yes-girl behavior was starting to snowball. CNN moved me from Atlanta to New York, but my producing team stayed behind; we would work long-distance. I could feel my tether to my executive producer begin to fray.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, those first few years working together were pretty great. We bounced ideas off each other. We got excited about similar news stories. I adored his wife and kids—and he always knew whom I was dating. Our relationship was almost as sibling-like as it was collegial.

But after my move, our working relationship started to take a drastic turn. My producer made me feel as though I couldn’t do heavy-hitting interviews without him. Or, maybe, I allowed him to make it feel like I couldn’t do heavy-hitting interviews without him. The word gaslighting has become so cliché, but that’s what it felt like. Manipulation. Bullying.

Anyone who’s ever tried long-distance in any kind of relationship, romantic or professional, knows it wears on you. My producer was read-in on the news at all times—it was his job. When you work at any cable news network, email comes in fast and furiously. Sometimes that meant I would accidentally miss his emails. And I started to notice that if I didn’t respond to those emails right away, he would go dark.

Even worse, sometimes he would go dark during my live broadcasts. In front of hundreds of thousands of people. There would be days when I’d get on set, clip on my microphone, and slip my earpiece into my right ear. No “hello.” No check-in. Instead, I’d be greeted by someone less seasoned.

With live TV, there should always be a palpable sense of “I’ve got you” —which goes both ways between anchor and executive producer. I had to learn how to rely on myself and others to move through the show without him.

Sometimes he needed to communicate urgently with me—for instance, if he had gotten word there’d be a press conference and wanted me to know I’d need to ad-lib coming out of it. But depending on his mood, he might refuse to actually speak into my ear, instead writing me notes on the teleprompter during commercial breaks.

I got into a bad habit. I never picked up the phone and said something—like really said something. Not to him. And I didn’t report up the chain of command. I was the good girl. Good girls smile, are grateful for our jobs, and keep our mouths shut. We definitely don’t speak up.

Everything changed for me the day in 2015 when Donald Trump came down that escalator. In the years that followed, I was not only pushed out of alignment with what news had become and how I was being told to cover it; I was also changed. I got curious about the legions of women who, as a direct result of that election, finally decided to speak up.

In 2018, I started researching my book, Huddle, about the collective power of women. I spent weekends during one of the most insane news cycles of our lifetime interviewing Black women judges in Texas; a queer chef from San Francisco; military badasses turned congresswomen—athletes, teachers, activists, mothers. Women who knew real marginalization and discrimination. I’m a privileged white woman, and yet that’s when I started to find my voice.

“No, I don’t want to cover that today.”

“No, I’d like to interview her instead of him.”

“No, I will not be spoken to like that.”

Despite my own narrative that I “needed” my producer, I knew I needed to figure it out without him. And I knew that I could.

In November 2019, I finally walked into my boss’s office. I told Jeff Zucker, the former president of CNN, that I wanted my producer off my team. I didn’t want him to be punished—just moved to another anchor to start anew. A male colleague had made a similar request with success. My request? Denied.

Little did I know, this was the beginning of the end for me.

A few weeks later, I got called back into the boss’s office with my then agent, who’d prepared me with something like, “Brooke, your boss is furious at you. What have you done?!” I’d had a lovely relationship with Jeff up until this point. I’d even danced with him at my wedding. Now I found myself standing in his office dumbfounded, but prepared to defend myself and my integrity.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Why was I even sitting there? Why did I suddenly feel like the third wheel with my executive producer and my boss? Had I inadvertently kicked a hornet’s nest? All because I had gone over my producer’s head to the big boss? It didn’t make sense. I wasn’t accusing this guy of any kind of misconduct. Just as I’d told Jeff, our working relationship had run out of track.

Instead of addressing me right away, my boss engaged in the longest five-minute conversation of my life—not with me, but with my agent. The topic: whether Anderson Cooper, another of her clients, was happy with the view out of his new office.

I stood there waiting to hear my fate.

What the fucking fuck.

Textbook power move. I just stood there. Paralyzed. In fear? In shame?

Then Jeff turned to me and threatened, “I could give your show to someone in Washington tomorrow.” [Long pause] “But I won’t…because I believe you’re the best broadcaster on this network.” He told me that I needed my executive producer and that he would not remove him.

Whiplash. Instability. Another classic play. I’d lost. Some months later, the pandemic hit. I got a severe case of COVID early, and my sickness became national news. I was getting alerts about myself. Thousands of viewers reached out to me and showed me so much love. But what they didn’t know was that, in addition to my health, I was fighting for my own self-respect.

To summarize the next year: With very little explanation (read: some excuse about “not enough available control rooms” to produce my show), my boss yanked me off the air for the two months leading up to and including Election Day 2020. When people understandably started asking why I was “taking vacation” during such a crucial time, I responded to a random, buried comment on Instagram: “Not my choice.”

My three little words made news around the globe. So I got slapped again. When I got my show back, Jeff cut it in half. This time I kept my mouth shut. “Be grateful,” Jeff had once told me over lunch a year or two before, while we were in contract negotiations. “Don’t be like Megyn Kelly. Don’t you dare get bored.”

Why didn’t I leave earlier? For one thing, that little girl deep inside of me would have been disappointed. She and I, we lived in small-town West Virginia. We dated the wrong guys. We put off having kids. The hustling. We can’t quit now. We worked too hard for this. This was our dream.

CNN beat me to it. In January 2021, the morning Trump was impeached for a second time, my cell phone rang. It wasn’t my boss —rather, it was my agent.

Jeff wanted me out. No explanation. Just out. From that moment on, after I’d spent 13 years at CNN, Jeff never spoke to me again. Neither did my former executive producer, who ended up getting moved to another show for COVID-protocol reasons and then eventually promoted. (When I emailed them to let them know I’d be publishing this piece, offering each of them a chance to comment on or dispute my recollections, Jeff’s publicist responded by saying that “he wishes you all the best.” My old producer never responded.)

After 10 years: crickets. And the worst part? I had to lie to my team, my friends and family, and my viewers.

My lawyer and publicist worked hard to negotiate my exit, fighting to allow me to announce my own news on my own show. In February, I got to do exactly that. My end date was mutually agreed upon—coincidentally coming less than two weeks after I would be publishing my first book. Eventually, I did an interview with the Ms. magazine podcast during which I called out gender inequality at CNN. Another phone call from my agent. Another “Jeff is going nuclear.” This time he was apparently threatening to yank me off the air. My response: “But he’s already yanking me off the air!” My then agent: “He is threatening to yank you even sooner.” He didn’t.

Through my final days at CNN, I was so allergic to the idea of that man that instead of risking running into him on the way to the bathroom, I contemplated peeing in a Gatorade bottle in my office.

Everything was upside down.

On my last day at the network, after I said my goodbyes, I slipped out the literal side door of the building, and of my dream.

On my way out, the only CNN face I saw was a security guard’s. Masked, hands trembling, Anthony stood there clutching a shoebox. He’d bought me a pair of Air Jordans as a goodbye. I hugged him and wept.

No cheesy plaque. No Champagne. No send-off party.

Just quiet.

Life is unfair. People are shitty. Bosses are bullies. This is not news. In the hierarchy of giving a shit, I didn’t think my story, my thousand little cuts, amounted to much.

It’s taken me nearly three years to remove the blinders, feel the anger, welcome the fear, and recognize that in all my yesses, in all my silence, in all my enabling, the person who betrayed me the most was me.

I wanted to obey. I wanted to please. I wanted to be the good girl. I was afraid they’d let me go—joke’s on me.

It starts in childhood. We want approval—from our parents, then our lovers, then our bosses. I wanted the people who had certain control over me to want me so that I could get what I wanted.

It’s a transaction and it’s a gamble, and the house always wins.

A former colleague of mine in her 20s knew what I was going through at work. She confessed to me years later that she was aghast and afraid: If it could happen to me, how would it not happen to her?

Which brings me back to wanting to punch my man in the face. Why was I so angry?

Because all of the truths were flooding into my mind the night before GMA. The muzzling. The charade. My childhood. My accountability.

I didn’t hit Peter, of course. Instead, he threw his arms around me, showing me how to feel seen and safe—and I wept. I wept for my mother. I wept for the versions of a woman I’d been throughout my life. I wept for the woman I was finally becoming.

So this is my confession. I’m calling myself out. And it feels powerful.

As for my family? My mother eventually left my father. She has found love with a man, a kind of love she had never known. And I don’t speak to my father, who is remarried. I wish him well.

Part of my own unraveling meant I became a believer in divorce. Including my divorce, so to speak, from CNN. Like my marriage ending, it was painful. I miss being a vessel for information and clarity and news—the good and the bad. I miss my audience. But I’m experiencing a rebirth. As with a forest fire, you can burn out the debris and foster new growth.

And it turns out that once you find your voice, you can’t unfind it. You can still say yes, as long as it’s using that voice.

Yes to hosting a social-experiment show on Netflix.

Yes to becoming a filmmaker, my own storyteller.

Yes to getting divorced.

Yes to starting the fuck over.

Yes to finding new love.

Yes to chopping your hair.

Remove your armor.

Burn the boats.

Unraveling. A funny word. I always took it to mean “coming apart,” but it also can mean “getting to the truth.”

Now I realize it’s both.