ABC Producer Opens Up About Bigotry She Faced Doing Her Job

Jasmine Brown, a producer for ABC's "Nightline," recently worked on a story that put her on the receiving end of racial hatred from self-proclaimed white supremacist Craig Cobb.

A new video, "Racism & Me|The Producer’s Cut," by timesXtwo, follows Brown, who is black, as she struggles with her assignment to cover Cobb. Brown says in the video, a joint venture between ABC's "Nightline" and The BBC's "Current Affairs," that meeting someone like Cobb was a new experience for her.

“This was definitely the first time that I’d ever experienced anything like this,” she says in the film. “Like just direct hatred towards me because of the color of my skin.”

Brown says Cobb was incredibly "gracious" when she first spoke to him. That changed after he searched her name on LinkedIn and discovered she is African-American. She says Cobb sent her an insulting message and refused to be interviewed by "Nightline" reporter Byron Pitts, who is African-American.

“He pretty much ended the conversation there and used the N-word and said, ‘I’m not going to talk to an N-word,'” Brown says. “So I think what we want to do is have you call him,” she tells Pitts.

The video shows Pitts on the phone with Cobb.

“When we first spoke on the phone you were polite, you agreed to speak with me, then suddenly you Google me and you see that I am a person of color,” Pitts tells Cobb. “Then suddenly your tone changes, your attitude changes.”

Cobb responds by calling Pitts the N-word multiple times.

Brown becomes emotional talking about the conversation

“It just sucks as a twenty-something-year-old women who’s like a millennial … who’s always been told her entire life that like, ‘Just be you,’ that that’s not the case for some people,” she says. “You sort of think that it’s all in the past, like you learn about civil rights … and how far we’ve come. But we haven’t.”

Watch the timesXtwo piece "Racism & Me|The Producer’s Cut" below.