A television weather anchor for the New York City affiliate of ABC who also worked as a fill-in forecaster on “Good Morning America” has been pulled off the air by the network for allegedly making up a story about being attacked while running in Central Park.
Heidi Jones, 37, faces a misdemeanor count of falsely reporting an incident, a charge that carries a penalty of up to a year in jail if proven. Jones’ legal woes, however, pale in comparison to what the arrest and suspension could mean for her personal life and once-promising broadcasting career, a defense lawyer and a psychiatrist said Thursday on TODAY.
“The question is: Was the stress such, or is the personality structure such, that a reaction to anxiety or depression would cause them to break their own moral code?” said Dr. Gail Saltz, TODAY contributing psychiatrist.
“Sometimes it is real mental illness,” Saltz said. “Looking at someone who is beautiful and successful does not mean they aren’t suffering inside, that they don’t potentially have a mental illness or that something really bizarre isn’t going on in their life.”
According to police, Jones filed a report on Nov. 24 claiming that a Hispanic man who had approached her outside an apartment three days earlier was the same man who she said tried to rape her while she was jogging in Central Park on Sept. 24.
Jones, a marathon runner, later retracted her story after officers canvassed her neighborhood, police said. She was given a summons to appear in court.
After WABC-TV announced on-air Wednesday that Jones was suspended pending the outcome of an internal investigation, her lawyer told The Associated Press that she will plead not guilty when she appears in court on Jan. 5.
“Ms. Jones has had a distinguished career as a broadcast journalist and urges all concerned to refrain from jumping to conclusions about the unproven charges against her being discussed in the press,” said the attorney, Paul Callan.
Discuss: Should she get a second chance?
Appearing on TODAY, defense attorney and former Court TV anchor Rikki Klieman said it is unlikely that Jones will see any time behind bars. But because police wasted resources investigating the claim, Jones should not expect to go unpunished if the charge is proven, Klieman said.
“This is a woman who does not need to go to jail; however, this is a case that is not going to go away. She needs supervision. [She is] a perfect candidate for probation,” Klieman said.
“It will cry out for someone to help her,” Klieman added. “And it will cry out for an example to be made so we don’t have others making false accusations.”
Cry for help?
Dr. Saltz, the psychiatrist, speculated that Jones may have concocted the story about being attacked in order to gain sympathy from people in her life because she feels she cannot control a situation. People sometimes falsely claim to be sick in order to get family and friends to rally around them, Saltz said.
But if the media reports are true, Jones isn’t getting much sympathy now from her colleagues at WABC-TV. The New York Post reported Thursday that co-workers at Channel 7’s Eyewitness News feel angry and betrayed because she had them believing for two months that she really had been attacked.
“She was deeply unhappy, personally and professionally,” a newsroom source told the New York Post.
“She’s really a nice girl,” said another. “There must be something deeper that we don’t yet know about.”
Coincidentally, Jones’ Nov. 24 report of the alleged attack came 34 years to the day that legendary WABC-TV meteorologist Tex Antoine followed up a report about the violent sexual assault of a young girl with a poorly timed joke. “With rape so predominant in the news lately, it is well to remember the words of Confucius: If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it,” Antoine said, earning him a pink slip.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.