Some New York 1 reporters may have fixated on fired reporter Adele Sammarco’s breasts — but they had their eyes on someone else’s butt, a jury was told yesterday.
As the Brooklyn Federal Court trial of sex-harassment charges brought by Sammarco descended even further into farce, former cameraman Marvin Hoffman testified that staffers had fondly named a male news assistant’s rear — not Sammarco’s — “Big Butt Booty.”
Sammarco — who had insisted that the nickname had been applied behind her back to her own behind — shook her head and rolled her eyes, finally breaking down and running from the courtroom in tears.
Hoffman identified the owner of the big backside as Baron Gullette.
“They called him Big Booty Baron,” said Hoffman, who is now a freelance cameraman.
He said that even Sammarco joined in the talk about the news crewman’s rear end.
“Adele would say, ‘Baron, you got a big butt.’ I thought they were cool enough that they could joke about it,” Hoffman testified.
Sammarco — who is suing the station and her former bosses there — has also complained that colleagues taunted her about her breast size.
But she had some evidence of that — a doctored photo created by another colleague that made her breasts seem enormous.
In her lawsuit, Sammarco said that Hoffman and Gullette — both of whom are black — had harassed her with questions like, “Would you ever sleep with a black man?” or “Would you bring a black man home to meet your father?”
But Hoffman insisted that she was racially insensitive, once likening him to Morgan Freeman in the movie “Driving Miss Daisy.”
She was absent during much of the direct testimony of former New York 1 weekend anchor Gary Anthony Ramsay, who was asked about her accusation that he had attacked her and forced his tongue down her throat one night.
Ramsay said that on the night of July 21, 2001, he offered to give Sammarco a ride to her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen from a party because she was drunk.
He said his 1996 Nissan Pathfinder had two gear shifters and an armrest, making it impossible to pin her down as she described in her testimony.
“This lie has done a lot of damage to me and done a lot of damage to my family,” he said.
“She told this story because she thought that someone would believe it. She’s not the first to blame her problems on a bogeyman and she won’t be the last.”