Ex-reporter describes NY1's sexually loaded workplace

Adele Sammarco, the former New York 1 reporter suing the Time Warner Cable news station for sex discrimination, testified Wednesday that she was "humiliated" and "embarrassed" by a series of sexually loaded episodes at the station, but managers did nothing to help her.

Sammarco, in a turbulent appearance that occasionally brought her to tears, said she was taunted with questions about whether she would sleep with a black man while covering the Amadou Diallo trial in 1999, and described the appearance later that year of copies of a doctored picture showing her with enlarged breasts plastered around the newsroom.

"Nothing!" she shouted when her lawyer asked what news managers Steven Paulus and Peter Landis and former human resources officer Elizabeth Fanfant, all defendants, did in response to her complaints.

"I was trying to do my job," Sammarco, 43, told the Brooklyn federal court jury. "You don't need to deal with that."

Sammarco worked at New York 1 from 1992 until 2001, when she was let go. She claims she lost her job in retaliation for pressing complaints about her treatment. The station says she was let go because she wasn't a good reporter. The trial began Monday.

At the Diallo trial, held in Albany, Sammarco said NY1 co-workers referred to her as "BBB" - an acronym describing the size of a part of her anatomy - and would pepper her with questions about interracial sexual encounters and her own sexual experiences.

"It was a constant barrage," Sammarco said.

She also described a series of other episodes that management dealt with cavalierly, including a video of her getting help with a stuck zipper and culminating in an alleged tongue-thrusting forcible kiss by a co-worker.

But the day's testimony also included some setbacks for Sammarco. During three hours of testimony in which she tried to impress the jury with war stories about her reporting skills, she appeared to make several mistakes.

Among them: She called assassinated Gambino family crime boss Paul Castellano the head of the Genovese family, and told the jury that Lemrick Nelson, who was convicted of stabbing a Jewish man in a racial incident, had been involved in a shooting.

She was also upbraided several times by U.S. District Judge Roslynn Mauskopf for unresponsive emotive narratives on the witness stand, and for - without the judge's permission - ordering her parents to leave the courtroom when she was asked about the kissing incident.