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KARIE ROSS:

There were no women around in upper management for us to talk to. No one was going to talk to an upper-management male because then they’d be the female that was causing trouble. Finally I decided the only way to get my point across was to stand up in front of the whole place. I wasn’t thinking, “Okay, I’m going to shake this earth and bring this company to its knees.” My only point was to tell these guys to quit harassing these poor girls.

There was a company meeting in what we called the cafeteria, and I don’t know exactly how many people were there that day, but maybe it was 200 or 250. It was a lot. It was practically the whole building. I was so nervous. I remember shaking. I’d never done a live shot or TV show where I was shaking that badly. I stood up and said, “Look, this behavior has got to stop. This is crazy. You guys can’t be doing this. Guys, you must stop sexually harassing these women. Don’t be trading edit time for a date. Quit making all the lewd comments. Just let us work in peace.” And then I said, “I know it’s illegal.” My voice was shaking as I spoke. After I finished, you could hear a pin drop.

Immediately afterward, I got called in to the office; it was John Walsh and I can’t remember who else. He was very concerned and said, “Okay, Karie, what’s going on?” I told him I wasn’t going to name names, but that he had to do something at this point. And he said, “Okay, we’ll handle it.” Later, they brought us all in to a meeting and we were supposed to tell our stories. But a lot of the women were uncomfortable telling their stories in front of these management people—I think there was one man and a woman from marketing. I actually told the man that I’d feel a lot more comfortable if he left the room, which he then did, and some of the women started talking a bit.

Once the cafeteria speech was made, I received a lot of letters from the girls saying, “Thank you so much for standing up. We could have never ever done that on our own.”

JULIE ANDERSON:

I worked with Karie a lot. She was beautiful and slightly high-maintenance. Some of the guys were intimidated by her or respected her because she was the beautiful girl “who I’ll never get” kind of thing. But she also got trashed and harassed. When she stood up in the cafeteria, the guys were stunned. Stunned. I knew it was going to happen and sat next to her. She was mad. John Walsh and Steve Anderson were in the front of the room and they knew there had to be an acknowledgment. There was just too much going on. Too many girls were talking about it. A lot of people were really upset.

So sometime after Karie’s speech, they finally said, “You should feel free to go to HR.” Actually, we were invited to go to HR as a group or on our own, so we could say whatever we wanted about guys in the company, and they would put stuff in their records. Of course, nothing ever came of it. Nothing happened. We were all mad because nothing happened.

JOHN WALSH:

Until Karie Ross made her speech in the cafeteria (really a vending-machine hall back then), we were really not aware of what was going on. And then, when we found out, we dug in and started really acting on it, doing the best we could. All this stuff cropped up and you had to deal with it. It’s something I had never experienced in my life, so I didn’t know how to handle it. The human resources department for all intents and purposes didn’t exist back then. The guy running it had left the company. Steve Anderson and I wound up doing these interviews and later Jim Allegro got really involved. The interviews were no fun. It was people with different versions of a story and it was hard to find out what actually happened.

FRED GAUDELLI:

Karie was the first woman to bring it all to a head. We lived together for five years, and we had some discussions about what was going on. I remember she told me she would be at her terminal typing up the SportsCenter show she was about to do, and her desk was in front of a big wall of monitors. Guys would come