Brooke Baldwin says her father used to beat her “black and blue.”
The ex-CNN anchor publicly disclosed this painful childhood episode in her Substack newsletter “Unraveling.”
This story, which had not been made public until Sunday, came to light in an interview for Baldwin’s new independent series, in which she travels across the country speaking to women about anything and everything.
The woman with whom Baldwin was speaking when the childhood memory resurfaced was the eleventh in the series. She, too, had also been spanked as a child.
“I have one very specific memory. Elementary school. My father… The belt,” Baldwin wrote, recalling the fear she felt awaiting punishment.
Baldwin didn’t recall exactly what she had done to get the beating, but she assumed that it had something to do with her little brother. Because she was older and bigger and supposedly more responsible, she got the blame — and the punishment.
This particular beating, however, was different. Baldwin said that she was beaten so much that she woke up with a black-and-blue backside.
This was particularly upsetting for a young Baldwin, who was scheduled to leave for sleepaway camp that week. Imagining how the other girls would respond to her bruised skin made everything that much worse.
Noting that this ended up being her last spanking, Baldwin described showing the bruising to her mother: “This was my little-girl-way of speaking up. Do you see me? This hurt. This is not okay.“
Looking back, she realized that her mother already felt terrible, yet considered that there might also have been feelings of shame about her husband’s actions.
While she remembered with pain the way her mother constantly deferred to her father, Baldwin remained careful to show her mother love, not condemnation, acknowledging that her mother had been doing the best she could. Rather, Baldwin specifically called out her father on making decisions by himself that he shouldn’t have made alone.
She clearly explained the need to “break the cycle” and how she did it — by burning her life down.
Baldwin suggested that this fit into her idea that at around 8 years old, the human being is “basically fully baked.”
For her, she wrote, each 8-year-old already knows what they love, what they don’t, what makes them laugh, what makes them cry. They have opinions, beliefs, and dreams.
And then, as Baldwin suggested, “life happens.” The beautiful image of life and joy begins to be covered with the “muck and mud” of life.
The only way to get back to the original 8-year-old self is to “become dust… and then … we rise from it.”
Baldwin’s post follows her progress as she begins to produce her new independent reporting venture: “America, Tell Me Everything.”
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