Two women say former Anniston Star publisher assaulted them

Two women who worked for The Anniston Star in the 1970s said former publisher H. Brandt Ayers spanked them in two separate incidents in 1975.

One woman, Veronica Pike Kennedy, said Ayers — long a prominent figure in Alabama journalism — assaulted her with a long thin metal ruler in the middle of the Star’s newsroom. A second woman, who asked to be kept anonymous because of the nature of the work she currently does, said Ayers summoned her to his office later that year and spanked her after she missed covering a local meeting. 

Both women said the assaults shook their professional confidence and left them with emotional scars.

“I think there’s an imprint on my heart, really,” the woman said. “I was a victim of an assault — I can’t ever change that. And it’s something I hid like most women of that time did.”

Kennedy said that the assault — witnessed by a reporter in the newsroom at the time — damaged her psyche and led her to seek counseling years later. 

“It was hard to trust anybody in authority for a long time after that,” she said. “I had anger I didn’t realize I had.” 

The story was first reported by Alabama Political Reporter Monday. In response to requests for comment, current Anniston Star Publisher and Executive Editor Bob Davis pointed to a statement Ayers gave to the Star for a story the newspaper published Monday. 

“As a very young man with more authority than judgment, I did some things I regret,” the statement said. “At my advanced age I wish I could relive those days again, knowing the seriousness of my position with the accumulated judgment that goes with age.” Ayers was in his late 30s or early 40s when the alleged incidents took place. 

In a story The Star published on its website Tuesday, Ayers acknowledged spanking a third reporter, Wendy Sigal, in a visit to her home in 1973 or 1974. Ayers told The Star that he did so after consulting with a doctor. Former employees interviewed by the newspaper said they had not heard of managers contacting employees' doctors at the time.

The accusations surfaced amid a growing national conversation about sexual assault and harassment in the workplace, prompted by accusations against producer Harvey Weinstein that have since spread to prominent men in politics, media and entertainment. Accusations of sexual abuse, harassmentand misconduct against Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore played a role in his defeat last month by Democratic nominee Doug Jones. 

The Montgomery Advertiser conducted two separate interviews with the accusers in early December. Besides an interview with the witness to Kennedy's assault, a man who dated Kennedy in the 1970s said in an email he remembered her telling him about it after it occurred. The other woman’s husband, her boyfriend at the time the assault took place, told the Advertiser in an interview that she called him immediately after the assault and related what happened.

Interviews with former Anniston Star employees and a review of depositions in a lawsuit brought by a former Star advertising executive in 2006 — in which Ayers was asked about rumors of sexual harassment at the newspaper — suggested people in the newsroom had heard stories of attacks by Ayers, but often lacked firsthand knowledge. Kennedy and Trisha O’Connor, who worked at the paper from 1972 to 1979, said women in the newsroom at one point confronted management about the assaults but did not see any visible changes. Some female employees began warning new hires about being alone with Ayers. 

“It would be, ‘Here’s some important information you need to have,’” said O’Connor, now a journalism professor at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. “Take this seriously. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you are alone. Always insist on taking an editor with you. If he says, ‘You’ve been bad,’ understand this is a trigger.”

A young newsroom

Ayers, known generally as Brandy, inherited the paper from his father, Col. Harry M. Ayers, in the 1960s and served as publisher of the Star until November of 2016. The Star said in its Monday story that his active role in the newsroom ended about a decade before. Ayers serves as chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co., which owns The Anniston Star, and still writes a column syndicated around the state.

Col. Ayers gave the Star what was — for the South at the time — a progressive cast, and the younger Ayers took it further with strong and sometimes lonely support for school integration, along with a generally liberal editorial page that stood in contrast to other contemporary Alabama newspapers. Former Gov. George Wallace dubbed the newspaper “The Red Star,” which the staff adopted with an ironic pride. 

The newspaper has attracted and continues to attract young journalists from around the country, and often wins praise as one of the best local newspapers in the nation. 

“The Star has a reputation of being a great place to start a career,” O’Connor said. “Different backgrounds and educational institutions, many of us on our first or second jobs, and totally passionate about journalism.”

Mike Stamler, who worked at the newspaper from 1975 to 1978, said he had “a lot of fun” working at the Star. 

“Most of the reporters were young,” he said. “They were on their first or second jobs. We had a lot of freedom to write.” 

Kennedy

Kennedy worked as a part-time newsroom clerk at the Star while studying journalism at Jacksonville State University in the early 1970s. Like other Star veterans interviewed, Kennedy had positive memories of her colleagues — “it was a fun newsroom,” she said — and saw it as a place to learn journalism. 

Most of those who worked at the Star at the time remembered Ayers generally being absent from the newsroom, usually passing through to attend to other business. Kennedy said her interactions with Ayers were generally limited to the word “hello.”

One Saturday, Kennedy was working a split shift when Ayers came in. 

“He said, ‘I have a piece of fine writing I want you to read,’” she said. “’And I’m going to leave it with you, and I’ll be back later.’”

Kennedy read the piece, which she said was the lead editorial for the following Sunday. When Ayers returned, Kennedy said she told Ayers, “You were right about this. It really is a good piece of writing.” Then, intending it as a joke, Kennedy said, “Can you tell me who wrote it?”

“And he said, ‘Oh, you are being a bad girl,’” Kennedy said. “’You know what I do to bad girls? I spank them.'”

As Kennedy recalled, Ayers came around her desk. At first she did not think he was serious. But realizing his intentions, she grabbed her chair. Ayers, she said, “picked me and the chair up” and then “bent me across the desk behind me.”

Ayers, Kennedy said, then picked up a pica pole — a long thin metal ruler used for newspaper layouts — and started hitting her across her rear end. 

In disbelief, Kennedy said she began fighting him, kicking and elbowing him and calling him names. “And he just laughed about it,” she said. “He thought it was funny.” 

“He asked me how old I was, because he was counting the licks,” she said. “And I think he was up at 15 or 16, and I said, ‘I’m 18,’ even though I was older than that. I just wanted him to quit hitting me.”

When Ayers finished, Kennedy said, he told her, “I hope you won’t be a bad girl anymore. I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” and left the newsroom. 

Mike Stamler was in the newsroom that day, working on another story. He said he remembered seeing Ayers and Kennedy speaking when they “disagreed about something,” then saw the assault take place. 

“I was staring with my mouth hanging open,” he said. “I was stunned.” 

Kennedy spoke with other employees after the incident, some of whom indicated that they had either heard rumors of the behavior or experienced it themselves. But Kennedy said she told very few people at the time. She struggles with that — “maybe if I had spoken up, I could have prevented other women from going through what I did” — but at the same time, Kennedy says options for a young woman in a small Southern town in the 1970s against a powerful local publisher were limited. Kennedy never told her parents, saying she feared her father "would have walked down to The Anniston Star and shot Brandy in the head."

“We didn’t have any money to hire a lawyer, even if I had told him,” she said. “It was truly just a dilemma.”

A missed meeting

In the fall of 1975, a 22-year-old reporter at the Star missed a scheduled meeting of a local community improvement organization. It had been an early morning gathering, and someone called the newspaper to say no one from the Star had attended. The new reporter called someone who had been at the meeting to get the story. 

Then, at lunchtime, she was told to see Ayers. As she recalled she walked from the newsroom — in the back of the building where the Star was located — down a hallway to Ayers’ office, not certain what to expect. 

“We were talking, and he started chastising me, saying, ‘You’ve been a bad girl, and now you’re going to have to be punished for this,’” the woman recalled. 

Before she knew it, Ayers came over and spanked her — an incident that left her in tears. Ayers, she said, directed her to his private bathroom. 

“He said, ‘Go into the bathroom and clean yourself up,’” she said. “What it really meant was, ‘You can’t be crying as you walk out,’ because I was crying a lot.”

The woman left the office, and then the building. She called her boyfriend from her home, “just hysterical,” and stayed home for at least an hour. 

“I remember her being very upset, and I remember her crying,” said the boyfriend, now the reporter’s husband. “I guess I was puzzled. Those were some pretty unusual allegations, strange conduct. I really just didn’t know what to think.”

When she went back to the office, she told a supervisor about what had happened. The next day, she was called back to Ayers’ office. 

“He said I misunderstood what had happened,” she said. “That was the word he used.”

The reporter said the attack affected how she did her job. “It shook my confidence quite a bit,” she said, adding “my life had been changed, and Brandy was going on as if everything was hunky-dory, being exalted all over the place as a great journalist and leader.” 

There was some talk at the time about going to the police, she said, but she thought no one would believe her. She only told her parents about the attack two years later, and recalled them being “very angry” about it.  

On her first evaluation, she said, her supervisors told her she wasn’t performing as they had expected. “And I said, ‘Well, considering what happened to me, I’m doing the best I can,’” she said.

Like Kennedy, the reporter said she had fond memories of the Star and her newsroom colleagues, but not of Ayers.

“It sickens me that it continued for so long because nobody spoke up,” she said.

‘Common knowledge’

Reporters who worked at the Star in the 1970s and 1980s said there was talk of the attacks among the staff, but that it was often secondhand. Tom Gordon, who worked at the Star from 1974 to 1981, said it was “common knowledge” at the time. 

“I can’t explain why we as a newsroom didn’t rise up about it,” he said. “I guess I just don’t know. You’re young and this is kind of surreal.”

Beyond the three assaults described, it is unclear whether other assaults took place, or when. 

In 2006, a Star advertising executive named Sharon Rutherford sued Consolidated Publishing Co., claiming it had retaliated against her after she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging the company had created a “sexually hostile work environment” owing to a relationship between two other executives. The suit was later settled out of court.

In a deposition the following year, Rutherford — who started working for the company in 1981 — said “there’s always been rumors of Brandi (sic) spanking young girls” though she indicated in her testimony that she had only heard the stories secondhand. 

Ayers was also deposed in the lawsuit. Answering questions on April 27, 2007, Ayers said the Star had not faced a lawsuit over sexual harassment, or internal complaints. Later, an attorney asked Ayers if “any employee complained or told you that they felt like you made an inappropriate sexual comment to them or inappropriately touched them.”

“Not formally, no,” he said, but added “possibly” when he was asked if anyone had complained “informally.” In answer to a question, Ayers dated any such informal complaints, if they existed, to before 2003.

“Back in the dim ages,” he said. “I’ve been there for 40 years.”

Updated at 6:58 p.m.Tuesday with a Star report about Ayers saying he spanked former reporter Wendy Sigal.