What … again? Didn’t Don Lemon’s hostility toward women get amply demonstrated on air a couple of months ago, when he declared that Nikki Haley and all women are past their prime at 50? CNN decided to put him back on its morning show despite outrage from women over those comments, claiming that “training” would suffice.

Lots of conservative pundits and media critics had a laugh over that, as well as any number of “imagine if” hypotheses. CNN shrugged it off as a political attack and a version of Republicans pounce®! This time, though, it’s Variety that reports that Lemon’s misogyny runs far deeper than the February kerfuffle revealed. And it goes back much farther, too:

Back in 2008, Don Lemon was co-anchoring CNN’s “Live From” weekday show with Kyra Phillips, a gig that he landed after he arrived at the network two years prior from local news in Chicago. For months, tensions between the pair kept mounting. On more than one occasion, a “Live From” producer and a newsroom supervisor had to pull Lemon off the air during a commercial break because of the anchor’s provocative antics, not unlike his recent declaration that the 51-year-old Nikki Haley isn’t a viable presidential candidate because she “isn’t in her prime.” Amid the charged atmosphere, sources say Lemon disrespected colleague Nancy Grace on the air and Soledad O’Brien during an editorial meeting attended by roughly 30 staffers.

It got even weirder after that, according to Variety:

But his antipathy toward Phillips was particularly concerning and had many members of the close-knit Atlanta news team on edge. While Phillips was on assignment in Iraq — a high-profile gig that Lemon coveted — he vented his disappointment at being passed over by tearing up pictures and notes on top of and inside Phillips’ desk in the news pod they shared, according to two sources who worked there at the time. When she returned from Iraq, things only got weirder. One night while dining with members of the news team, she received the first of two threatening text messages from an unknown number on her flip phone that warned, “Now you’ve crossed the line, and you’re going to pay for it.” Phillips was visibly rattled and quickly enlisted CNN’s higher ups to identify the sender.

Remarkably, the texts were traced back to Lemon, according to those same sources. A human resources investigation was launched, and while the findings were never disclosed to the growing pool of staffers who were aware of the situation, Lemon was abruptly pulled from his co-anchor duties with Phillips and moved to the weekends. It was a demotion by any objective measure and understood to be some kind of disciplinary action. It appears to be the last time he was paired with a female anchor until his most recent assignment on “CNN This Morning With Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins.”

In other words, this pattern of behavior goes back fifteen years. CNN apparently knew that well enough to avoid pairing Lemon up with women on air until they moved him to a chatty morning show that needed some balance among co-hosts. And surprise surprise, leaks had come out well before the Haley remarks that Lemon’s behavior to his female co-hosts had been arguably abusive. Remember this?

Tensions on the set of “CNN This Morning” have recently boiled over, with Don Lemon allegedly “screaming” at co-host Kaitlan Collins off-camera during an ugly December incident that has left the cast and crew rattled ever since, The Post has learned.

According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, 56-year-old Lemon approached 30-year-old Collins following the show’s Thursday, Dec. 8, broadcast — and unloaded on her in front of staffers as he accused her of “interrupting” him on air.

“Don screamed at Kaitlan, who was visibly upset and ran out of the studio,” one source with knowledge of the skirmish said.

That story ran on February 8, a week or so before Lemon’s comments on Haley. At the time, CNN tried to play off this eruption as just the normal stress on set for a new show trying to find its footing and audience. Variety’s report, if accurate, shows that they had known for well over a decade that Lemon’s misogyny had played out in abusive behavior in the past.

But Variety’s report covers more than just misogyny. If accurate, it paints Lemon as more or less an equal-opportunity jerk. Variety reports on an episode with Soledad O’Brien in which he questioned her blackness, an incident at which O’Brien herself was not present and so she declined to confirm or deny. However, her on-the-record response about Lemon is still worth noting:

“Don has long had a habit of saying idiotic and inaccurate things, so it sounds pretty on brand for him.”

That seems pretty accurate, based on his on-air remarks, let alone what he does off-air. So why did CNN keep him around? Variety has a theory about that:

Instead of reining in Lemon, his superiors let things slide, perhaps because he had fostered a close friendship with then-Turner Broadcasting System chairman and CEO Phil Kent, sitting in the Turner box alongside Kent at sporting events.

Well, okay, Lemon kissed the right ass then, but what about now? Variety suggests that Lemon’s threats about litigation has management worried. More likely, they’re concerned about Lemon’s “intersectionality,” so to speak, and his ability to claim victimhood of racial and sexual bias if cashiered. At some point, though, Lemon’s continued presence and poisonous internal impact will outweigh the potential costs of bad publicity and litigation in firing him.

And if Variety is publishing this long record, maybe this week is when new CNN/Discovery management begin recalculating Lemon’s value.