Michael Bloomberg Told Female Employee To Hire ‘Some Black’ To Nanny Her Baby, Report Claims

Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg once berated a female employee who had recently had a baby, telling the woman to hire “some black” to serve as a nanny, a newly-released report claims.

The former New York City mayor has been rocked by a series of stories claiming that he promoted a negative and abusive workplace culture, with poor treatment of women and controversial statements toward and about people of color. A new report from The Washington Post uncovered a 1998 lawsuit that claimed Bloomberg berated a female salesperson at a financial data company he founded.

The lawsuit claimed that in July 1993, Bloomberg laid into the woman after hearing that she was having difficulty finding a nanny for her infant.

“It’s a f*cking baby! All it does is eat and s*it! It doesn’t know the difference between you and anyone else!” Bloomberg allegedly yelled at the employee. “All you need is some Black, who doesn’t even have to speak English, to rescue it from a burning building!” he allegedly said.

The lawsuit claimed that the yelling brought the woman to tears. A spokesperson for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said that he never made those remarks.

The report is the latest to rock the Bloomberg campaign after the Manhattan billionaire’s late entry into the presidential race. That included a number of racially-charged statements, like his claim that the housing crisis of 2008 was caused in part by the end of the practice known as “redlining,” a discriminatory practice that stopped banks from providing mortgages in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods. The practice made it difficult for people of color to own their own homes and to move out of the tightly restricted neighborhoods.

As CNN noted, Bloomberg claimed at the height of the housing crisis that the end of the practice played a role in the collapse of the real estate market.

“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg said at the time, via the Associated Press.

“Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’ “

The remark drew fire from many of Bloomberg’s Democratic competitors, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren who said that anyone who holds views that banks should have been allowed to discriminate more against black people is not fit to lead the Democratic Party in November.