NBC executives threatened Journalist Ronan Farrow over his covering of the rape allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
The producer who worked alongside Ronan Farrow at NBC News on his Harvey Weinstein investigation quit in protest earlier this month.
Rich McHugh tendered his resignation on Friday, Aug. 17, a year to the day that the Weinstein story left with Farrow. Since then, Farrow has won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles that revealed allegations of sexual harassment and assault—and questions have lingered about why the network gave up on the story that helped launch the #MeToo movement.
NBC News has long insisted the Weinstein exposé wasn’t ready to run on air or online, contrary to Farrow’s claims that it was. Farrow’s story, which ultimately ran in The New Yorker, was part of a series that ultimately won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, earned him in the prestigious George Polk Award for National Reporting, and garnered near-universal praise from his colleagues.
The Daily Beast has uncovered new details of how the process went awry, including alleged threats from NBC, back-biting inside the network about who was truly responsible, and a previously unreported ultimatum by Weinstein’s attorneys.
According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, NBC News General Counsel Susan Weiner made a series of phone calls to Farrow, threatening to smear him if he continued to report on Weinstein.
A spokesperson for NBC News, speaking on the condition of anonymity, vigorously denied those allegations. “Absolutely false,” the spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “There’s no truth to that all. There is no chance, in no version of the world, that Susan Weiner would tell Ronan Farrow what he could or could not report on.
“The sole point of the Susan Weiner’s conversation with Farrow, roughly a month after he had left NBC, was to make sure he wasn’t still telling sources that he was working on the story for NBC since he had moved on to The New Yorker.”
I encourage everyone to click the Daily Beast link above and read the entire story. One thing is for certain Harvey Weinstein was a powerful figure who used the top brass at NBC to try and crush these allegations against him from coming out.
