Investigative Reporter Lisa Guerrero Reflects on Her Career

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Turning to the truth behind the glamour of a once prominent sports broadcaster. Lisa Guerrero hosted a sports show for several years before becoming an NFL sideline reporter in the early 2000s. She was fired after one season. She is now an award-winning journalist and chief investigative correspondent for the news magazine, “Inside Edition”. Her new memoir details the sexism, misogyny, harassment, and suicidal thoughts that she experienced throughout her career as a sports broadcaster. Here’s her conversation with Michel Martin.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Lisa Guerrero, thanks so much for talking with us.

LISA GUERRERO, AUTHOR, “WARRIOR: MY PATH TO BEING BRAVE” AND CHIEF INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT, “INSIDE EDITION”: Thank you for having me, Michel. I’m really excited to have this discussion.

MARTIN: Likewise. You know, you’ve had this incredible career. And it’s interesting because I’m guessing that a lot of people who know you from one of your lives doesn’t necessarily know you from your other lives. I mean, you’ve been a professional football cheerleader, you’ve been an actress on a popular drama, you’ve been a sportscaster on what has been the highest profile, you know, sports show, especially in football. You’re a long time award-winning investigative reporter, and now, you’re writing a memoir. Why now? What made this time?

GUERRERO: That’s — first and foremost, that is such an important question and the answer is because this is a message, I think, people need to hear today. I talk about my many career transitions in the book. But I also talk really honestly about the challenges I faced and a lot of the criticism I endured as a woman in sports, specifically. And how I, kind of, rebuilt my career after a disastrous season with “Monday Night Football” into what people see now as this brave, investigative correspondent who chases bad guys on “Inside Edition”. But what I want people to know is that the brave person they see on camera wasn’t born that way. My pain, the trauma endured, a lot of the challenges and obstacles I faced are what made me the brave person I am today.

MARTIN: Uh-huh.

GUERRERO: And I believe that bravery is like a muscle, it’s something you can practice and get better at with time. And I really wanted people to learn how to take their pain and turn it into power.

MARTIN: Was there a, kind of, eureka moment for you that said to you, this is the time to tell this story. Was there something in particular or something that someone said or someone who reached out to you that made you feel that you needed to share this story? Which is extremely, I have to say, very personal. At times — I mean, you talked about a lot of mistakes that you made. And — do you know what I mean? What was it exactly?

GUERRERO: So, because “Inside Edition” is popular with young people because of YouTube, a lot of kids watched my investigations. They binged them on their devices. I started to read the comments below my stories written by a teenager is and kids in high school and junior high school, and they would say, wow, she looks like Wonder Woman. She’s out there, you know, chasing these bad people and demanding justice. She’s brave. I want to be brave like her but I’m being bullied in school. I want to be able to stand up to my mom who is being abused by my dad. And I started reading these comments from young people and I just wept. I thought they look at me as being brave. But when I was their age, I was shy, I was awkward, I had lost my mother at eight years old. I was glasses and braces and, you know, an introvert. I was far from brave. But they see me as being brave. So, I wanted to write something that would be both a love letter and a, you know, guide to how to navigate through obstacles from the time you’re a kid, from the time you’re 58, like I am. I wanted people to know that you can always reach down into the inner warrior that I believe we all have. The reason I called the book “Warrior” is my last name Guerrero or guerrero means warrior in Spanish. And when I was little, I was eight years old when my mom was diagnosed with lymphoma. She died at 29. But before she passed away, she pulled me aside and said, Lisita (ph), never forget that your last name is Guerrero, and Guerrero means warrior. You were born to fight. So, that’s the legacy I wanted to leave in this book. I wanted everybody to know that we all have an inner warrior, we need to unleash it.

MARTIN: I have to say just losing your mom at eight and hearing you talk about what it was like to grow up without a mom, even though you obviously had, you know, a wonderful dad. And you have a beautiful dedication to him at the beginning of your book, which is lovely. But just losing your mom at eight, I mean, that’s just a very tough thing for any kid. How do you think that kind of shaped you as you were growing up?

GUERRERO: Well, I absolutely didn’t have a female identity to bond with. I did not have anybody to show me how to wear makeup or how to shave my legs or what to do when you get your period. In fact, when I got my period, I didn’t know what was going on. I was screaming to my dad that I was in pain. He took me to the emergency room and they said sir, your daughter is fine. She’s just having her first period.

MARTIN: Oh.

GUERRERO: So, I had nobody to teach me these things. So, that was the biggest difficulty for me, was that I didn’t have female role models around me or anybody to help me through that which is why I’ve developed such a sisterhood now as an adult. Female relationships are incredibly important to me now. I don’t have children. I don’t have a mom, so I don’t have a daughter. So, to me my female friends are everything to me.

MARTIN: You know, I found — like, honestly, the book — it’s just — there’s just, like — you’re too — dropping knowledge throughout. That duality of the things that people want women to do versus the way they even punish them for doing it seems to be a theme throughout the book. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that and throughout your career?

GUERRERO: So, I was an actress, I was a reporter, a sportscaster, and then, you know, investigative reporter. So, when you’re on TV, there is this, you know, there is this pressure to look your best. This is a visual medium. And for me, growing up in Southern California, being on television in Los Angeles. there was an expectation that you should look great while you’re covering sports. But if you look too great, they’re going to think you are a bimbo. So, there was, you know, I believe there was a lot of this slut shaming involved in sportscasting in the ’90s before they had that term for it. But when I started interviewing these hard-to-get players, I would get Shaq and Kobe, Aaron, Barry Bonds. These massive sit-down interviews. The first question people would ask was, well, how did you get that interview, honey? You know, there was this almost insinuation that I was, you know, dating people or sleeping with people to get to where I got. from local to regional to national prominence as a sportscaster. So, what you look like is important on television. But in my case, especially going back to the ’90s, I think it hurts me as well.

MARTIN: You talked about that it was just, you know, contradiction after contradiction. Because on the one hand, people would say, oh, no, no. You should cut your hair you. You should wear blazers. And then on the other hand, and people wanted you to wear leotard’s and do all this other — in these tight and revealing clothes and to put highlights in your hair. What do you think that’s about?

GUERRERO: So —

MARTIN: And do you think that’s changed?

GUERRERO: No, I don’t think it’s changed, sadly. I think we still see it. What I — one of the reasons I wrote “Warrior” is that I wanted people to see that struggle that I had. And I know a lot of people write memoirs and they say, look at my fabulous life. I have no regrets. I’m not that person. I have a lot of regrets. And one of my regrets, Michel, is exactly what you were talking about right now. Is that allowed myself early in my career to negotiate how I was going to look. What my image was. How I would be — even — how I would be presented on a set. At one point during one of the shows I was on, “The Best DanceSport” period, on FOX Sports Net, I was the sportscaster, the update anchor. They put me in the center of a panel of men, but they realized after the first week that this coffee table was blocking my legs. So, they put me over to camera far right so people could see my legs. And then they asked me to wear short skirts. So, It was one constant compromise after the other in order to keep my job — — and to have this opportunity to have the platform of being a woman in sports that knew sports that could argue with athletes on the set but I had to look this way. So, you know, one of the things I want to tell young women in my book is to not negotiate. Start at the very beginning when somebody says smile more, argue less, show more legs. Then that’s your time to walk.

MARTIN: So, you got these jobs because of your sports knowledge but the way you kept your job was because if you’re looks. And I just — do you blame yourself for that?

GUERRERO: I struggle with that, Michel, because I grieve for the young woman that I was.

MARTIN: Uh-huh.

GUERRERO: And that I wasn’t able to see that there — you know, through these compromises, this is going to hurt how people view you. I want to reach out to that young girl and say, you are a part of this culture that, you know, was in place before you got here. You’re just doing your best every day, you get up every day, you try to avoid the executives in the hallway that are hitting on you. You try to avoid the rest of the media in the locker rooms that are trying to grab your butt. You’re trying to avoid that, you know, misogynistic player that wants to demean you in front of others. And then you want to file your report at the end of the night and put a smile on your face and report on sports. And I really struggled a lot to maintain my sense of place and to know that I had every right to be there as a woman in sports. And I didn’t need to put up with a lot of that. And some of it I did, I negotiated with myself. I put up with it instead of going to H.R., instead of screaming out, don’t touch me.

MARTIN: Uh-huh.

GUERRERO: I grieved for that young woman. And I don’t want another young woman to go through what I went through, which is why wrote the book.

MARTIN: Lisa, one of the tough parts of the book is that you talk about the abuse that you say you experienced by your former boss at ABC when you were at “Monday Night Football”, Fred Gaudelli. I think people who watched you during that period may be shocked to know of what a terrible experience it was from your perspective. I mean, for a lot of people, that is the pinnacle, like, that is the height. If you’re interested in sports, if you’re interested in football, being a sideline reporter for “Monday Night Football”, for just being any part of that broadcast. You say that your former boss was so abusive to you, verbally abusive to you, and emotionally abusive. I would have to say that you actually considered harming yourself.

GUERRERO: So, my depression, my anxiety that year was a culmination of a lot of things. Not just, you know, a horrible boss, but it was also, you know, the criticism I was hearing about in the media. That I was just a pretty face. That I was a cheerleader. You know, kind of, people ignoring the dozen years that I spent as a reporter and as a sportscaster before I got “Monday Night Football”. They reduced me to a model, you know, a cheerleader, a bimbo, an actress. And so, before I even had my first game, I was already enduring a lot of criticism in the media. I had the audacity to misspeak at the end of my first regular season game. I was interviewing somebody, I misspoke, I immediately corrected it. But the damage was done because my critics said, see, she’s just a bimbo. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t know sports. And that started this downward spiral along with a boss that yelled at me, that screamed at me in my IFB, while I’m reporting live to 40 million people. I could hear him demeaning me. And I think the light went out. The spark, the energy, the person that I was before that job was completely gone. She disappeared. I was afraid of him, I was afraid of the criticism, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I was throwing up before and after every game or every interaction with this producer. And finally, towards the end of the season, I discovered I was pregnant, I had just gotten engaged. And in one of the later games, I started to feel a cramp in the first quarter, by the second quarter, I felt a lot of pain and dizziness and nausea. And sure enough at halftime, I went into the officials’ locker room in the bathroom and I discovered I had had started a miscarriage. And instead of calling 9-1-1 or telling my producer I need to get the hospital right now. I didn’t. I covered it up. I shoved a bunch of paper towels in my pants. I buttoned up my long jacket so they couldn’t see the blood. And I went out there in the second half, slapped a smile on my face, and continue to do these live reports. And I look back up at myself then and I can’t believe I did that. It was so dangerous. I was so sick emotionally and physically, but I was scared to lose my job. And I was scared that if I left, that people would say, there, see. She’s a failure.

MARTIN: Can I just — just in the spirit of fairness, we need to share with the person you wrote about says about his perception of events. Some of the excerpts from the book have previously been made public in advance of its publication. And this terrible episode where you, you know, had a miscarriage in the middle of a broadcast, is something that had been previously made public. And the producer in question, he — you know, you talk about verbal abuse, you talk about emotional abuse, you talk about undermining you, not allowing you to kind of do the job in a way that would allow you to actually do it to your best effort. And he vehemently denies all of this. And I just want to read a statement that he or his representatives gave to “The New York Post”. He says the following — he says, I always tried to be Lisa’s biggest advocate, starting for the moment that I hired her. Her memory of that season and mine are quite different. He says, this is the first time I’m learning of her pregnancy, and I’m sorry that she struggled through that difficult time without the full support of the team surrounding her. And he says, I unequivocal disagree with Lisa’s account of the nature of my interactions with her. That’s not how I recall our time together during her tenure at MNF, “Monday Night Football”, and it makes me very sad. Do you want to respond to that?

GUERRERO: Yes, in my book I also — we also shared his perspective as well because, you know, he had told me that I misremembered it. That he doesn’t remember doing that. And that in fact, you know, he never yelled at me. So, we do put that in the book as well because, like you, I wanted to give both sides, you know, I wanted to give him an opportunity to share his perspective of it. I know what I endured and other people saw it and heard it. And the point of the book isn’t to, you know, say, this one person did this one thing to me. It was a culture going back to FOX Sports Net that treats women a certain way when they cover sports or on camera at all. And the other thing I wanted to talk about, which I did really, you know, in great detail was the miscarriage. One in every four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. So, millions of women endure this, and many of them endure it at work. So, I wanted to be open about this and I wanted to start a discussion that you don’t need to be ashamed of this. This is a very common situation. And let’s talk about it openly and honestly. You don’t have to be ashamed or embarrassed of something like that. But at the time, I was. Now I’m not.

MARTIN: Well, Lisa, you’ve had just such a remarkable career. Lots of ups and lots of downs. Lots of downs that then become ups. Where are you now? Like now that you’ve told it, now that you’ve lived it, you know, how do you feel about all that? Do you think it was worth it?

GUERRERO: It was worth it. Every second, every tear, every challenge, all of this was worth it. To tell these stories, to let people know that you can come back after these horrible traumatic challenges, and still be successful and still have your voice and find your voice. That you can be brave. You need to practice bravery every day and you can become more courageous. So, it was worth that. It was worth it to tell these stories as painful as they are. And writing it is painful. And now talking about the book, is also brings back this trauma. But at the end of the day, I know my mother who died when I was eight, and she was 29, Lucy Guerrero. I know she sees it. I know she senses it. I know that I’m honoring her and my legacy through telling these stories. And the bottom line is, I feel like I’ve grown into the warrior that she always wanted me to be.

MARTIN: Lisa Guerrero, thank you so much for talking with us today.

GUERRERO: Thank you, Michel.