ABC anchor Amy Robach is walking back a leaked rant against the network for not airing her Jeffrey Epstein story, saying she was "caught in a private moment of frustration."
In a video posted by James O'Keefe's right-wing group Project Veritas Tuesday, Robach appears to complain that an interview she conducted in 2015 with Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre didn't make it to air. Giuffre claims she was forced to perform sex acts with Prince Andrew when she was 17, and Robach seems to suggest in the video that ABC "quashed the story" partially because it feared "we wouldn't be able to interview" Kate Middleton and Prince William for other stories if it ran. Prince Andrew has denied Giuffre's allegation.
"We had everything," Robach says. "I tried for three years to get it on to no avail ... I'm so pissed right now. Every day I get more and more pissed."
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Project Veritas' leaked videos have been known to be misleadingly edited, but Robach and ABC News didn't accuse the organization of taking her comments out of context in their response, per The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, Robach describes this as a "private moment of frustration," saying she was "upset" that she didn't have "sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC's editorial standards" after having said in the video that she had "everything." She also says that "no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein." ABC News in its statement adds that "at the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we have never stopped investigating the story."
NPR previously reported on ABC not running the interview, with Giuffre saying, "I could not believe that a formidable network like ABC had backed down and given in."
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