The footage, surreptitiously filmed, shows a man approach Cuomo and call him the alleged slur.
The man says he thought Cuomo was “Fredo,” leading the anchor to tell him: “Punk [expletives] from the right call me ‘Fredo.’ My name is Chris Cuomo. I’m an anchor on CNN.”
“Fredo is from the Godfather. He was that weak brother, and they use it as an Italian aspersion,” Cuomo, the brother of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, continues. “Are any of you Italian? It’s a [expletive] insult to your people. It’s like the N-word for us.”
The man says he thought Cuomo’s name was Fredo, leading Cuomo to threaten him.
“You’re going to have a [expletive] problem,” Cuomo responds.
“What are you gonna do about it?” the man says.
“I‘ll [expletive] ruin your [expletive],” Cuomo tells him. “I’ll [expletive] throw you down these stairs like a [expletive] punk.”
Cuomo calls for him to “take a [expletive] swing” and gets in the man’s face, leading for people to call for security.
Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s son, weighed in, writing on Twitter late Aug. 12: “I assume @cnn not available for comment. Imagine their coverage of this if they were a real news organization?”
CNN spokesperson Matt Dornic responded, claiming “Fredo” was an “ethnic slur.”
“Chris Cuomo defended himself when he was verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur in an orchestrated setup. We completely support him,” Dornic wrote.
CNN employees have used the word “Fredo” to refer to Trump Jr. and others in years past, as has The New York Times and other news organizations.
In 2018, CNN analyst Ana Navarro was criticizing Trump Jr., calling him an “entitled, rich, spoiled little brat whose only call to fame is being his daddy’s son.”
“[D]addy kept Fredo back home...Who cares what [he] says. I don’t want to talk about that entitled little brat,” she said in a clip posted by “Cuomo Prime Time,” Cuomo’s show.
“Does CNN’s head of PR still think ‘Fredo’ is an ethnic slur after watching this? Because if it’s the N word for Italians like @ChrisCuomo says, I don’t understand why Chris seems so at ease with someone saying it here. An excuse just as fake as his news,” Trump Jr. wrote.
CNN’s Jake Tapper also used “Fredo” in the past on Twitter.
Dornic has not addressed CNN employees using the word as of yet.
Conservatives and some others said that the claim of Fredo being a slur on par with the N-word wasn’t true.
“So @ChrisCuomo says that ‘Fredo’—a character on The Godfather—is the same as the n-word?” wrote Steven Cheung, a former special assistant to President Trump.
“Equating the two is the very definition of white privilege and diminishes the generations of hate African Americans have had to endure.”
