For the first time since his arrest a week ago on charges he tried to extort $2 million from David Letterman, CBS News producer Joe Halderman is talking, though he’s not saying much.
FOX 5 WNYW caught up Halderman at his Norwalk, CT home earlier today. “I can’t make any comment and I understand you’re just trying to do your job,” said Halderman, who knows that job well. “There’s nothing I can say. I hope you have a very nice day. I’m not trying to hide or run, but there’s nothing I can say,” Halderman told reporter Christine Persichetti,
Meanwhile, the NYTimes’ Bill Carter reveals it was Halderman’s co-workers who bailed him out of jail last Friday.
In another sign of how much support Mr. Halderman still commands inside CBS, two of his current co-workers, Andy Soto and Marc Goldbaum, posted the bond for Mr. Halderman’s bail. Neither man would comment Wednesday, but Mr. Halderman’s lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, confirmed that the men had posted the bond.
CBS News continues to decline comment on other questions about Halderman, who remains suspended with pay, but Carter writes the network is denying a report that it is conducting an internal investigation of Halderman.
The network said it had initiated no such investigation on its own and was only cooperating with the authorities who were pursuing the case.
Marcy McGinnis, who spent 35 years at CBS News, departing in 2005, was Halderman’s boss in the CBS News London bureau. “Joe went to every nasty place there was,” McGinnis tells Carter. After hearing the news of the killing of 16 children at a school in Scotland in 1996, he told her: “Just let me grab a bag and I’m there.” As for his way with women co-workers, McGinnis says Halderman was “a flirty guy,” adding, “I was his boss, of course, but he never put the moves on me.”