A woman who worked for Mario Batali accused the disgraced celebrity chef of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 2005 after she woke up on the third floor of West Village hotspot the Spotted Pig surrounded by broken bottles with scratches on her legs and semen on her skirt.
The woman, who worked at Batali’s ritzy red-sauce joint Babbo on Waverly Place, told CBS‘ “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired Sunday that he invited her to a party at the Spotted Pig, a trendy West Village restaurant in which he had a financial stake.
The woman said she remembers sitting alone with the Crocs-wearing chef at a second-floor table drinking wine.
“It gets completely foggy for me. And this is — part of the messy, scary part for me, there is a part where it — it all disappears,” said the woman, who asked CBS to remain anonymous because she was looking for work in the restaurant industry. “I remember a moment where I was on his lap, kissing him. Like, he was kissing me. And then I remember throwing up — in a toilet. And that is all.”
The next thing she said she recalled was waking up at dawn on the restaurant’s third floor, which Batali and owner Ken Friedman nicknamed the “rape room,” where anything-goes sexual antics and drug use were commonplace.
“I woke up by myself on the floor, I don’t know where I am, of an empty room, wooden floor. I see broken bottles. The first thing I think is, ‘I’ve been drugged.’ That was the first thing I thought is, ‘I’ve been — I’ve been assaulted.'”
She told host Anderson Cooper she found evidence of the encounter on her skirt.
“There were two areas. It looked like DNA,” she said.
“Semen?” Cooper asked.
“Semen,” she responded.
Batali stepped down from his restaurant empire last December after being accused of sexual assault by a number of women, and issued an apology for his years of inappropriate behavior. Friedman also apologized in December after being accused by 10 women of groping them sexually or making sexual demands.
Batali “vehemently” denied the woman’s allegations in a statement to CBS.
Hours later, she saw Batali when she returned to work at Babbo and confronted him about it.
“I asked him. ‘What happened last night?’ And he just was silent, wouldn’t talk to me,” she said.
Following her shift, she called a crisis hotline, got examined at a hospital and spoke to an NYPD detective.
But she said she couldn’t go through with it.
“They tried getting me to file a report. They tried, they tried. But I — you know, a young actress, no resources, no money. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it,” she said.