Steve Bannon's ties to the alt-right Breitbart website is not the only upsetting news about his background, according to a report in Mother Jones. Bannon, the incoming chief strategist for the White House, in the early 1990s was said to have bullied a woman while head of Biosphere 2, a scientific research facility in Tucson.
Biosphere 2, created to lay the foundation for future space colonization missions, was built in the 1980s and consisted of a 7,200,000-cubic-foot airtight glass and space-frame structure. It was designed as a copy of Earth's environment and, its purpose was to see what problems would arise when a group of eight people lived in the closed building after two years.
Bannon called Abigail Alling, one of the crew members of the project, a "self-centered, deluded young woman" and a "bimbo," after Alling sued Space Biosphere Ventures, the company Bannon headed, for abuse of process. Bannon had, in 1993, proposed to remove top Biosphere management and quit when he was not granted the authority to do so. A year later, he was back when Texas oil magnate Ed Bass, the funder of the project, told him he could do as he pleased.
That is when Alling and another colleague broke in to tell others living inside that new management was not capable of running the project.
Alling, in preparation for a grand jury hearing for the criminal charges, claimed she had put together a five-page statement about the safety problems, and Bannon, in turn, threatened to "ram it down her —— throat," according to a report in the Tucson Citizen.
Bannon was tabbed to take over the project after it was losing millions a year.