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HANNAH STORM:

I’m a pretty busy person. I have my three kids, my work at ESPN, a production company, and I also run a foundation where I raise money to help children with debilitating and disfiguring birthmarks. I grew up with a birthmark on my face—I look like I have a black eye when I don’t have makeup on—and so appearance is something that I can put in a pretty healthy perspective. I definitely have very solid philosophical and personal feelings about appearance and how important it is, but not in terms of some shallow, crazy ratings game. I dress the way I do because that’s how I like to dress and that’s my personality. I’m not doing it to court attention. My whole thing is just being myself and being confident in that. That’s something I was forced to grow into because of the way I looked growing up. I couldn’t be self-conscious about my looks and I couldn’t be afraid.

Nobody was aware of what had happened until it became a really big firestorm. It started off small—I started getting some phone calls, “Hey, how are things doing?” and, “How are you holding up?” and, “Is there anything we can do for you, are you okay?” And then it just blew up.

The episode also unleashed a lot of voices out there on the Internet. I received really nasty e-mails, really hateful stuff about my clothes. Even voice mails. Once, I had a tabloid reporter and photographer come to my home. It was horrendous to open up the New York Post and see yourself there in a cartoon and be dragged down into this hateful realm. That was really sad.

I don’t think there’s anything anyone can say that can really disparage anything about my work, my work ethic, my knowledge, or anything that I say or do professionally. So to have a discussion away from how good I am at what I do, to what I’m actually wearing and how old I am, was painful. But it passed.

You’re looking at a company that was trying to do the right thing, trying not to have the situation happen again. I’m a woman in a completely nontraditional female field, and I’m old enough to have been one of the trailblazers in this field. It’s funny because I thought by now we would have moved beyond sexism and ageism. I thought, “Aren’t we past all this?” And I guess maybe with some people we’re never going to be. I’ve never let that kind of thing discourage me before, and it certainly won’t now.

JOSH ELLIOTT, Anchor:

If you ask Hannah, she’ll tell you that there might be a handful of people who’ve ever discussed her wardrobe choices with her consistently, and I am number one on that list. The wardrobe choice in question—she’d worn something similar to it about a month or two prior, and when I’d seen it, I said, “Hannah, never wear that again.”

From day one, her wardrobe felt like the only thing anybody wanted to talk about. I would get messages during the shows, “What was she wearing?” And I would get calls after the shows, “What was she thinking?” Hannah is a grown woman and can make her own choices. That said, I don’t think Tony was trying to be hurtful, but the issue I always had with it wasn’t so much what he said with regard to her wardrobe as it was the references to her age. I think especially for a woman in our business, when you start referring to their age in a snarky way, you are in the process of writing a professional obituary. That was poor form. That to me is far more hands-off than comments about her wardrobe. That was unfair. I feel like that really hurt her.

CINDY BRUNSON:

I have these shorts that are really fantastic. When I first saw them on Fashion Week several years ago, I just fell in love. What a great option: it’s not a skirt, it’s not a dress, it’s not pants, but it’s still sporty yet dressy enough to work in sports television. So I have like six or seven pairs now and loved wearing them. Then about a month ago, there was a chain of phone calls and e-mails from people here, then somebody from the talent office pulled me in and said, “You can no longer wear them.” To