CNN should dump Jeffrey Toobin and his bad behavior

Jeffrey Toobin can now commiserate with Joey Buttafucco and Anthony Weiner about how crummy it is to have your family name forever associated with bad behavior.

The disgraced CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer was in a virtual work meeting when the group broke out into smaller groups to discuss election coverage by play acting certain roles.

Toobin was supposed to play the role of the court, but he turned the camera on his computer down to face his lap, which gave everyone a front row seat to activities that weren’t very court-like (with the exception of Oklahoma Judge Donald Thompson).

One person who was there said Toobin seemed to be participating in two virtual events at the same time, so maybe he wasn’t planning to share his man-parts with his colleagues. But he was intentionally engaging in extra-curricular pleasure, and as a lawyer Toobin knows that’s a fireable offense and potentially a civil rights violation and workplace discrimination.

The guy has a right to do what he wants on his own time, but engaging in racist or sexist conduct at work — even if consensual — is unacceptable.

Thus far, CNN has not terminated Toobin and people want to know why. If it had been racially inappropriate rather than sexually inappropriate, even if consensual, he would have been fired with great fanfare, and CNN would be putting out a statement about how it has zero tolerance for racially insensitive conduct, blah blah, but some employers don’t care very much about things that offend women.

I once got in trouble just for asking for a 15 minute break from a jury trial to nurse my newborn. The judge screamed at me: “We don’t take breaks for that, Attorney Murphy — if you want to breastfeed your child, you have to find another lawyer to continue asking questions in your absence.”

The judge was an idiot, and I could have sued him for sex discrimination. He had an old-fashioned notion that some things ought not be done during judicial proceedings — even in private, during a break.

I guess male lawyers can feed their sexual desires, but female lawyers can’t feed their babies.

Spare me the whining about how masturbation is a normal healthy sexual activity and we should cut the guy some slack because he meant to flash a willing person on a different platform.

Even if nobody saw him do it, it’s a fireable (if unprovable) offense, not because he masturbated but because he masturbated during a work meeting. He claims it was a mistake, but that’s nonsense. There’s no such thing as accidental “Toobin” and it’s never appropriate to take care of yourself when you’re supposed to be taking care of business.

Wendy Murphy is a lawyer and legal scholar who writes an occasional column for the Herald.

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