Who is Don Lemon, the ex-CNN anchor arrested over a Minnesota church protest?

The arrest of the independent journalist Don Lemon has pulled the former CNN anchor, who has been a regular media presence in American life for nearly 20 years, back into the spotlight.

The 59-year-old news anchor once stood at the apex of news media as a primetime host of a CNN show. But in February 2023, Lemon was rebuked by CNN’s then CEO, Chris Licht, and briefly taken off the air over televised remarks about the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s age, who at the time was running for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime,” Lemon said to his two co-hosts – both women – on CNN This Morning in 2023. “Sorry, when a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s, and 30s and maybe 40s …” Haley was then 51.

After a Variety investigation alleged longstanding instances of problematic behavior toward female colleagues, CNN abruptly terminated Lemon’s contract later that year, ultimately paying the remainder of his salary in a settlement.

Lemon launched an internet show on X which collapsed almost instantly in ignominious conflict with Elon Musk, his first interview subject. The public dispute preceded a lawsuit from Lemon, and Lemon’s eventual departure from the platform in late 2024. Lemon subsequently moved his reporting to a YouTube channel.

Lemon grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was a young Republican who voted for Ronald Reagan in college. He became a television journalist working in local news in Birmingham, Alabama, Philadelphia, St Louis and Chicago, winning an Edward R Murrow award for coverage of the October 2002 capture of the Washington DC snipers.

He joined CNN in 2006 as a correspondent and eventually entered CNN’s rotation as an anchor, drawing early attention for off-script criticism of out-of-wedlock births by Black parents, AfricanAmerican commitment to education, and cable news itself.

“In general, when I watch cable news during the day, it’s frustrating because it reminds me of a gameshow. If I want to watch The Price is Right, I’ll watch The Price is Right,” Lemon said in an interview with Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s former alternative weekly newspaper. “I’m not consciously thinking that when I’m on the air, but that’s just my personality. To be like, ‘Are we really doing this?’”

Lemon was also one of the first gay, Black news hosts in national cable television.

“I would have to say that I’ve personally been discriminated against more for being African American than for being gay,” Lemon said to Laurence Watts at PinkNews in 2011, on a press tour for his biography Transparent.

Lemon’s ratings waxed and waned with the show and the time slot, doing little to halt the long-term erosion of CNN’s audience. His CNN primetime show, Don Lemon Tonight, drew an average of about 628,000 viewers near its end, while his later morning show, CNN This Morning, drew half that figure.