Former ABC News field producer Samira Said has quietly removed CBS News correspondent Matt Gutman from her wrongful termination and harassment lawsuit, and no one involved is saying why.
Said's lawyers filed a request with Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday to drop Gutman from the complaint she had brought just weeks earlier against him, ABC News, and parent company The Walt Disney Co. The move came without public explanation, leaving the core question, what changed, unanswered. The New York Post reported that "it's unclear why the decision was made." CBS News declined to comment Saturday, and Gutman did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit itself remains active against ABC News and Disney. Said, who worked as a field producer in ABC's Los Angeles bureau for four years, claims the network wrongfully fired her in 2025 after she sought accommodations for mental health issues. But the harassment allegations she leveled against Gutman personally, now withdrawn from the case, had drawn the most public attention, in part because of who hired him and where he landed.
Gutman spent 17 years at ABC News before joining CBS in January, shortly after Bari Weiss took over as the network's editor-in-chief in October 2025. Fox News reported that Gutman was Weiss's first major on-air hire, a move she promoted with public praise.
Weiss called Gutman a journalist who "goes there" and "brings the audience along with him," adding that he approached his work with "fearlessness, energy and relentlessness." That endorsement landed differently once Said's lawsuit surfaced last month, putting Weiss's flagship recruitment under an uncomfortable spotlight before Gutman had spent a full year at the network.
Said's complaint alleged two separate incidents involving Gutman, both described as occurring "several years ago" during their overlapping time at ABC.
In the first, Said claimed Gutman began rating the physical appearance of a female correspondent while the two were on assignment. Court filings described Gutman initiating "a discussion rating a female correspondent's appearance and reducing her professional standing to a numerical score based on her physical attributes." Other male crew members allegedly joined the conversation and pressed Said to weigh in. She refused and told them the discussion was inappropriate.
The second incident allegedly took place while Said and Gutman covered a press event for a movie release. The two disagreed about whether to leave the work site. Breitbart reported that Gutman allegedly made a "sexualized insinuation", suggesting Said "must have an after-hours date in the city", in front of several coworkers. Said's lawsuit alleged the remark "demeaned Said and reduced her professional judgment to a sexualized stereotype."
Those are allegations, not proven facts. Gutman has not publicly responded to them. And Said's own legal team has now pulled him from the case without stating a reason.
Even with Gutman removed, the broader lawsuit presses forward. Said claims ABC sent her to cover the Uvalde school shooting while she had COVID-19 symptoms, and that she developed severe psychological symptoms afterward. She alleges the network refused to provide medical accommodations and ultimately fired her in March 2025.
Neither ABC News nor The Walt Disney Co. has publicly commented on the ongoing litigation, at least not in any statement captured in current reporting. The case remains pending in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The decision to drop Gutman raises more questions than it answers. Plaintiffs remove individual defendants from lawsuits for many reasons, a settlement, a strategic shift, insufficient evidence, or a calculation that the corporate defendants carry more liability. None of those explanations has been confirmed here.
For CBS News, the episode is an early test of the Weiss era. She staked credibility on Gutman as a marquee hire. Within months, he was named in a harassment lawsuit. Now he has been dropped from that suit just as quickly, but the allegations were aired publicly, and neither Gutman nor CBS has offered any on-the-record response.
Silence is a legal strategy. It is not an accountability strategy. Readers and viewers are left to wonder whether the claims had merit, whether they were resolved privately, or whether they simply could not be sustained. The parties involved owe the public more than a quiet filing on a Friday afternoon.
When institutions refuse to explain, the public fills in the blanks, and the institutions rarely like what gets written in.
