Ex-colleague Ashleigh Banfield responds to Katie Couric's remarks about her in new book

“Someone younger and cuter was always around the corner," Katie Couric writes in "Going There."

"For a minute there, Ashleigh Banfield was the next big thing," she continues. "I’d heard through the grapevine her father was telling anyone who would listen that she was going to replace me. In that environment, mentorship sometimes felt like self-sabotage.” 

 Banfield, who worked at MSNBC and NBC News during the years Couric co-hosted "Today," is now on cable channel NewsNation with a nightly news show titled "Banfield." She responded to Couric's remarks about her on the air, saying: “I was pretty stunned to find out what Katie wrote. ... It’s just not true.”

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Banfield says that when she was on assignment in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, a reporter called her father, who “was near 80 and extremely senile and living in a care home.”

"The reporter asked, ‘Are you afraid for your daughter?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘And I think NBC should bring her home and give her a desk job like Katie's.’

 “That’s a far cry from being able to even leave that facility,” Banfield said. “Let alone tell anyone who would listen. That hurt my feelings deeply."

Banfield went on to say: “I looked up to (Couric) for years and years, and I still do! It saddens me we couldn’t collaborate; it saddens me she didn’t want to mentor me. I think mentoring women in this business is one of the best investments ... and not just in TV, in everything!”   

Banfield, it turns out, is doing more than just talking about helping others. 

On Thursday, Britain's Daily Mail reported that she had tapped Savannah Guthrie, Mika Brzezinski and other veteran journalists to help lead a mentorship program she's launching through NewsNation.