Radio shock jock Anthony Cumia entered rehab not long ago, following a December arrest for allegedly strangling his then-girlfriend in his home. The night of the incident, Dani Golightly broadcast about two minutes of footage from Cumia’s home on Periscope. A longer and much more disturbing video of the same incident was just put on YouTube by an embittered Cumia fan.
In the video, Cumia screams about a handgun he’s lost, tearing the house apart looking for it. The footage also shows him and Golightly answering the door for a pair of police officers responding to a 911 call, then quickly persuading them to leave.
The new video begins with the same two minutes of footage we saw before: Golightly shows the camera bruises on her body and one of her hands, grotesquely swollen, seemingly already bruising, and with what looks like a cut or a puncture wound on the back.
“I got my hand broken, I’m waiting for police to come,” she says.
But where the old Periscope video cut out at 1:47, the new one continues for another nine minutes.
“Where the fuck is my gun?” Cumia screams, at the 2:45 mark. Golightly paces the house with him, dryly offering some advice here and there (“Do you think you dropped it outside?”), while also occasionally reminding him that she’s badly injured (“You broke my fucking hand”).
Golightly also occasionally addresses the camera, in a soft voice: “He said he’d call the cops and lie to them and I’d look like an asshole and no one would believe me,” she says around the four-minute mark. “I’m gonna be in a lot of trouble if I don’t go. I gotta go now. But... everything’s fine. I don’t know if you can see that my phone is shattered.”
At the five-minute mark, two police officers appear at the door. We can’t see them, but we can hear them, along with Golightly’s panicked response: “We’re in trouble,” she whispers.
“Who called 911?” one of the officers inquires.
“I guess she did,” Cumia says, off-camera.
“It was an accident, or...?” one of the cops replies.
“It was an accident, yeah,” Golightly says. “I’m so sorry. Sorry to make you come out here.”
The cops leave almost immediately and the pair resume their hunt for Cumia’s missing handgun.
“What terrible police officers,” Golightly says, with a bitter-sounding laugh. “My hand is the size of a fucking golf ball.”
“No, it’s not,” Cumia says.
“Yes, it is,” she responds. “Come on. Please.”
At one point, Golightly also jokingly returns to the door, motioning that she’ll beckon the police back: “Do you need help finding your gun? They’ll help you.”
“Baby, don’t say anything like that,” Cumia pleads.
“It’s literally a gun that we lost,” Golightly shouts out the door. It’s unclear whether the cops were still nearby to hear her. “You’re terrible police officers! I don’t live in this town.” And then, to Cumia: “You literally lost a firearm.”
“You stop this right the fuck now,” Cumia says, his voice low.
He spends a few minutes alternately threatening and cajoling her. Golightly indicates that she’ll leave if he pays her: “The first thing you better figure out is your goddamn checkbook or I’ll call the police so fucking quickly.”
“You broke both my fucking hands in one year,” she tells him, a minute later.
“That’s a crazy thing to lose,” Cumia murmurs, clearly distracted by his lost gun. He wonders if maybe he left it in a restaurant, or if it fell out of its holster “during one of our ruckuses.”
The footage was put online by a podcaster and rabid fan of Cumia’s old show, Opie and Anthony (Cumia was fired in 2014 after going on a racist Twitter rant). A subreddit devoted to all things Opie and Anthony has taken an interesting turn recently. While they were once Cumia’s biggest fans and defenders, mobbing on Golightly to call her a liar and a cunt after his arrest, they’ve since decided he’s an asshole and dedicated themselves to taking him down. (They also have a complicated relationship with Jezebel: I’m a cunt too, obviously, though they seem curiously delighted when we write about them.)
Cumia was eventually arrested later the same night. He’s charged with two felonies, strangulation in the second degree and criminal mischief in the third degree, as well as two misdemeanors, preventing an emergency call and unlawful imprisonment. It’s unclear whether he ever found his gun.
The video is below. It’s very disturbing and should be viewed with caution.
Cumia in 2014. Photo via Getty