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Alisyn Camerota’s decade at CNN seems to have been a thankless job.
The veteran broadcaster departed the struggling network last month and, “honestly, nobody was celebrating her,” according to her former colleague Don Lemon, who dished on her exit on his eponymous YouTube show.
But her old CNN boss Jeff Zucker and his former comms exec and girlfriend Allison Gollust instead hosted a dinner for Camerota at Il Buco in New York on Thursday.
The event brought out current and past CNN staffers, including Sara Sidner, Jon Berman, David Axelrod, Erin Burnett and Lemon, who told the crowd, “I was her first work husband,” at CNN.
Lemon shared stories from the evening during the “Hot Topics” segment on his show, where he recently had a chatfest about the network with another ex-employee, Oliver Darcy.
And even though the now indie journo spent 17 years at the cable channel, Camerota’s dinner was “the only time I missed working at CNN,” he said.
“I got to have dinner with the best of the best… We all got together to celebrate Alisyn because she got let go from CNN, and honestly, nobody was celebrating her,” he said.
Sources echoed Lemon, telling Page Six, “[it’s] awful CNN didn’t do anything for her when she left.”
“She got nothing,” they said, not even a champagne send-off in the newsroom.
Meanwhile, there were plenty of cheers at Zucker and Gollust’s dinner.
A source described the scene by saying, “There was toasting and reminiscing about the glory days [at CNN]. People seemed happy to be together, and the people who left are all happy and doing well.”
Our first source said it felt like the “Jeff and Allison era,” when Zucker would often take teams out for dinners.
“It was like a family,” the source said. (Zucker and Camerota are so close they were photographed holding hands at a previous CNN reunion, we reported.)
The Zucker-Gollust dinner coincided with another round of massive layoffs at the company, so the mood was initially somber, we’re told.
By the end of the night, the group was even more nostalgic for CNN’s golden era.
Camerota was in control of the list, and her former morning co-anchor Chris Cuomo, wasn’t on it, we hear.
A rep for CNN did not comment.
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