KUSI is a TV station in San Diego, but it should really be a soap opera on TV….

FTVLive has been mentioned in the case, but first, let’s tell you what is happening.

The station is owned by the very conservative McKinnon family and is not run like most stations In the country. TV agents often tell its clients heading there for a job interview to make sure that they said that their favorite football team is the Dallas Cowboys. Apparently, if gives you a better chance of landing the job.

Right now in a SoCal courtroom, there is a case going on that involves a couple of former Anchors.

Back in 2019, FTVLive told you that former KUSI Anchor Sandra Maas was suing the station for $10 million dollars as part of a lawsuit focusing on equal pay.

That lawsuit is finally playing out in court and another former Anchor is accusing the station of hacking into her personal email.

Ken Stone of the Times of San Diego writes that KUSI is calling former news anchor Anna Laurel a “secret agent” who sought damaging and confidential information for her attorneys.

Laurel and her lawyers say KUSI illegally hacked her personal email account and printed out private information, including chats with her husband.

Laurel is pursuing criminal charges against KUSI Chief Financial Officer Stephen Sadler, who in a deposition admitted reading 50-100 of Laurel’s private emails over several days on a news desk laptop. In court papers, Sadler says Laurel’s Gmail account was “left open” on a shared laptop, and he was reviewing them “to protect the company.”

The Times says that the San Diego Police Department is investigating the matter, Laurel says, and the City Attorney’s Office is “definitely interested in this case.”

Laurel has retained the same law firm that is representing Maas in her case against the station.

Laurel believes the station is trying to intimidate her because they believe she is going to testify on behalf of Maas in her case against KUSI.

As for KUSI’s CFO, in a deposition, Stephan Sadler said he anonymously shared printed emails from Laurel’s account — putting them in two separate envelopes and addressing them to Luck by “spelling her first name with cut-out letters from a magazine” to make it look like a ransom note,

“I was kind of being silly,” Sadler said, agreeing under oath that “yes, I was” having fun with it.

In a court brief, the station’s attorney, Marisa Janine-Page writes, “Notably, Plaintiff does not deny that she and her counsel used Anna Laurel, a then current MBC employee, as a secret agent to gather information from her employer and share it with Plaintiff and her attorney, Gruenberg Law, to use it against MBC, a represented party in this litigation.”

And, wouldn’t you know it, FTVLive also was mentioned on this court case according to the Times of San Diego.

The paper writes, Laurel also stands accused of leaking confidential MBC information in April 2020 to FTVLive, which KUSI calls “a website that provides disparaging blogging about TV news.”

On Tuesday, Laurel denied being a leaker, saying “a lot of people don’t like KUSI. In fact, I would cringe because I would wake up in the morning and have texts from my friends all over the country in the business — ‘Is this your station again?’ It was terribly embarrassing.”

As the guy behind FTVLive, I feel a need to respond to a couple of things here. First off, Laurel is correct in saying, “a lot of people don’t like KUSI.” FTVLive hears from a number of current and former employees at the station and we have nor would we ever reveal who those people are.

Lastly, as KUSI says about FTVLive, “a website that provides disparaging blogging about TV news.”

Wrong! FTVLive provides news about TV news both good, bad, and indifferent. If KUSI feels that the FTVLive stories about their station and how it’s run are “disparaging” maybe they need to look at how they run their station.

FTVLive’s goal is just to call it as we see it and report it.

I’m not saying your station is bad and doesn’t treat many of the employees fairly, nor covers the news fairly.

But hey, if the shoe fits, lace that bitch up and wear it all over Souther California.