by Ronan Farrow
Pretty soon I was in Griffin’s office with him and another member of his team. “What the fuck?” he asked, exasperated.
I looked at the proposed script in front of me.
“Phil, I’m not gonna edit sound bites to change their meaning.”
“Why not?!” he said, like this was the craziest thing he’d ever heard.
“It’s not ethical?” I offered, less as a statement and more as a kind of reminder, hoping Griffin’s question had been rhetorical and he’d finish the thought. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and directed a “Lord give me strength” look at his colleague.
She tried a gentler tone. “We all know you care a lot about the”—she hesitated here, seeming to genuinely struggle to find a nice way to put it—“ journalism with a capital J, but this is not some sensitive political story.”
“It’s a puff piece!” Griffin chimed in. “Come on. What the fuck?”
“There are literally kids dying over this issue. She’s a famous person. Since when do we send transcripts of interviews outside the building anyway?”
“We don’t know how that happened—” his colleague began.
“Who cares?” Griffin interjected, impatient. “You know what happens if we don’t make these edits? Stefani’s threatening to pull out! That’s straight from her manager.”
“That’s who made these edits?”
Griffin blew past the question. “Point is, she pulls out, sponsors start to pull out, the network’s pissed…” The channel’s partnership with the Global Citizen Festival was, Griffin often remarked, bait to entice corporate sponsors. For weeks, we would run branded segments about Unilever or Caterpillar.
“So let’s not air it,” I said.
“You have to air it,” said Griffin.
“Why?”
“It’s part of the deal with the sponsors, with her people—”
“We ran this all the way up,” his colleague said, referring to the executive chain of command in the news group. “Your concerns are not shared.”
Griffin said he’d tell me what he told another anchor trying to air a tough segment about net neutrality—the principle that internet providers shouldn’t charge different rates for different types of data on the internet, which our parent company was lobbying against. “You wanna work for PBS and have complete freedom and make a hundred thousand bucks a year, be my guest,” he recalled telling that anchor. “You wanna fight with me on what’s good for the bottom line, I’ll be happy to put your salary numbers out in the press.”
I considered quitting. I called Tom Brokaw, who said I under no circumstances could air sound bites with deceptive edits, and gave me the same warning about fucking my credibility that he’d later lay on me during the Weinstein reporting. Then I called Savannah Guthrie, who had a knack for cutting through bullshit. “What about just not airing that part of the interview?” she suggested.
“I mean, it was most of the interview,” I said.
“Just find something else to air.”
It was simple and, in hindsight, obvious advice—don’t air the deceptive part, but don’t self-immolate over a singer’s backstage interview. Picking the right fights was a lesson I could be slow to learn. In the end, I sat at the anchor desk and aired a five-minute clip of small talk with No Doubt. I felt neither hella good nor hella bad.
Two years later, as Weinstein continued his calls to the triumvirate of executives, he reached Griffin.
“I thought this was done,” Weinstein said.
“Harvey, it is,” Griffin responded.
“You need to get your boy in line,” he said. He sounded angry.
“Harvey,” Griffin said, defensive, “he’s not running it with us.” Later, Griffin would deny he ever promised the story was killed.
It was, by the estimate of multiple staffers in Weinstein’s office, one of at least fifteen calls between Weinstein and the three NBC executives. And by late summer, Weinstein’s mood after the calls had again become triumphal. Weinstein told one of his legal advisors that he’d spoken to executives at the network, and that “they tell me they’re not doing the story.”
CHAPTER 27:
ALTAR
The news from the executive suites of NBCUniversal at first seemed good. Early that August, Greenberg called to report that legal had signed off on the pared-down version of the script. And from the editorial side, he added, “my view is everything in there is reportable.”
“So we seek comment. We go into edit,” I said.
“Reportable doesn’t mean it airs. Now it goes to Noah and Andy.”
“But surely if legal approved, and you consider it reportable—”
“What they decide’s above my pay grade,” he said. “There may be questions that have nothing to do with what’s reportable. They may have concerns about whether it’s good TV. You know, you have an incredible print piece, an incredible Vanity Fair story here.”
“I—what?” was all I managed.
“You know, it’d make a perfect Vanity Fair story,” he repeated.
Later, McHugh and I sat in a conference room and puzzled over the comment. “Maybe he’s right,” he said heavily. “Maybe you save this by taking it to somewhere else.”
“Rich, you know if that happens, you get screwed.” He had produced the hell out of the story, as a television piece. We’d shot, by this point, eight on-camera interviews. All of that would fall by the wayside in the scenario Greenberg had lightly proposed. And even if I wanted to take it elsewhere, would it be possible? The footage was owned by NBCUniversal and, in turn, the Comcast Corporation.
“We’re running this here,” I said firmly. “Produced by you.”
McHugh said, “Okay,” and sounded less certain.
It rained ceaselessly that day. In my in-box, inquiries unrelated to the Weinstein story piled up. Diana Filip, the investor with the women’s rights project, sent another email, this time through my agents at CAA. The messages related to the story were more anxiety-inducing. One arrived, blunt and short, from Auletta:
Ronanm
Harvey status?
ken
I made my way down through the bowels of 30 Rock, onto a D train. It was sparsely populated, despite the rain. I saw something, or thought I did, and froze. There, in profile, seated on my side at the opposite end of the car, was a bald head that I swore I’d seen in the Nissan. I could make out the same pale face and snub nose. I couldn’t be sure. My most rational self thought, You’re seeing things. But as the train stopped, I felt uncomfortable enough to slip out before my station. I pushed onto the crowded platform, looking over my shoulder.
Outside, New York was a dreamscape, streets and buildings and people suspended in mist and rain. I walked fast, stopping at a CVS, scanning to see if I recognized anyone from the subway car or the platform. When I emerged, the light was failing. I came to the familiar fortress-like church near my apartment, and moved quickly up the steps, and walked through the doors. Where my damp shirt hadn’t adhered to my body, rain rolled down the small of my back, my chest, my arms. The nave was smaller than I’d expected from the outside. Under imposing stained-glass windows, an altar loomed. I stood in front of it, feeling out of place. By the altar was a seal, in inlaid marble, showing a book and a sword over a diagram of the earth: the coat of arms of Saint Paul. “PRAEDICATOR VERITATIS IN VNIVERSO MUNDO.” I had to google the translation later: “A preacher of truth to the whole world.”
“We’ve been watching you,” said a heavily accented voice next to me, and I lurched. It was an older woman with dark hair. Next to her was a younger woman. They looked alarmed at my reaction. “We’ve been watching,” she said again. “From the beginning. Your show. My daughter is a big fan.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.” And then, collecting myself, managed a smile and a stock joke about low ratings: “You and my mom and no one else.”
I had arrived home when Berger, my agent at CAA, called. “Ronan!” he boomed. “How’s it g
oing?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re better than fine, you’re fantastic,” he said. And then, a little quieter, descending into brisk efficiency, “Look, I don’t know the details of this big story—”
“Did Noah mention it?” I asked. Berger was agent to both of us, and closer to Oppenheim.
“Ronan, I don’t know a thing,” he said. He reminded me that my contract was about to be up for renewal. “I’m just saying if this is causing you problems, prioritize the stuff that’s working.”
I chewed my lip for a second, then dialed my sister.
“So how’s the story?” she asked.
“I don’t know how it is, honestly.”
“Don’t you have, like, literally a recording of him admitting to it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So—”
“I’ve been pushing. I don’t know how much more I can push.”
“So you’re going to drop it.”
“It’s not that simple. I might have to prioritize other things while I figure this out.”
“I know what it’s like to have people stop fighting for you,” she said quietly. And there was a long silence before we said our goodbyes.
It was dark by then. I looked at my phone and found Oppenheim had texted: “Let’s talk tomorrow. When’s good?” I went over to my laptop and opened up a Microsoft Word document. “OTHER STORIES,” I typed, and then hit Delete a few times and replaced “OTHER” with “UPCOMING.” I pasted in bullet points for two stories we were in the midst of shooting, on health care consolidation and opioid-dependent infants, and a handful of others Oppenheim had liked before, including a “Vicey travelogue” on Facebook’s server farm deep in the permafrost of Luleå, Sweden. “It looks like a Bond villain’s lair,” I had written of the server farm, and other escapist TV pablum followed. Luleå is one of the busiest ports in Sweden and a major hub of its steel industry, but of this I knew nothing. I was picturing a place big and brisk and empty, where a person could breathe, and you could see the northern lights.
At 30 Rock, McHugh stepped into an elevator, turned to find Weiner standing next to him, and smiled. But as she said hello back, she flinched and looked at her feet.
CHAPTER 28:
PAVONINE
During my years at 30 Rock, the third-floor waiting area outside of the news executives’ offices cycled through several arrangements of furniture. That August, there was a low chair and a little table with a fan of the kind of months-old magazines that tend to ornament waiting rooms. A Time cover, jet-black with blood-red lettering, asked, “Is Truth Dead?” It was an homage to a classic ’60s Time cover that read “Is God Dead?” but not as good. It had been an impossible task: “Truth” just didn’t fit like “God” did, despite valiant efforts at kerning. I looked at it, then went over to Oppenheim’s assistant, Anna, to make small talk. “Guess you guys are working on something big,” she said, and gave me a conspiratorial, mum’s the word smile.
When I walked into Oppenheim’s office, he didn’t rise or move to the couch as usual. He looked nervous. “So where’s your head at?” I asked. I had, folded in one hand, the print-out of the alternative stories list. Maybe Berger was right. Maybe I could turn from the terrible topic at hand, leaven things, refocus. Oppenheim shifted in his seat. “Well,” he said, picking up a copy of the script, “we have some anonymous sourcing in here.”
“We’re leading with a woman we name, we’re showing her face, we’re hearing her voice,” I said, referring to Gutierrez.
He let out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know how credible she is. I mean, his lawyers are gonna say, they’re in a public place, nothing actually happens—”
“But he admits to something having happened before, something serious and specific.”
“We’ve gone over this, he’s trying to get rid of her. And anyway, you say right here”—he flipped to the relevant section of the script—“she’s got credibility problems.”
“No,” I said. “We’ve got sources on the force, sources in the DA’s office, saying she was credible.”
“It says right here in the approved script!” he said.
“Noah, I wrote the script. We’re disclosing the stuff that got thrown at her. But the DA, the cops—”
“The DA didn’t go with it! And he’s gonna say, she’s some hooker—”
“Okay, so we disclose all of that. And we let the public listen and decide.”
He shook his head, looked at the page again.
“And it’s—how serious is this stuff, really?” he asked, as he had in each of our conversations about the story.
As we spoke, a conversation came back to me, from the year before, during the campaign. At the NBC cafeteria, I’d sat with Oppenheim, a green juice in front of me. He’d leaned in, a little more gossipy than usual, and said that women at NBC News had reported harassment by a Trump campaign official on the trail. “That’s a huge story!” I said.
“We can’t tell it,” Oppenheim replied, with a shrug. “They don’t want to, anyway.”
“Well, surely there’s a way to document it without violating confidences—”
“It’s just not gonna happen,” he told me, as if to say, “that’s life,” with the nonchalance and confidence I so admired at the time—so much so that I didn’t give it, or his wider views on sexual harassment, more thought.
During his years as a writer at the Harvard Crimson, Oppenheim had styled himself as a provocateur. He would pose as an earnest attendee at gatherings of feminist groups, then turn out fiery columns in the Crimson about how these groups were full of shit. While columnists don’t always write their own headlines, Oppenheim’s pieces had titles like “Reading ‘Clit Notes’” and “Transgender Absurd,” which accurately reflected their content. “There is no question that my most impassioned adversaries have been the members of organized feminist groups,” he wrote. “The vitriol of their rhetoric has gone unmatched. Of course, so has their hypocrisy. Apparently, it is easy to blame the patriarchy for all of your woes, and to silence your opponents with accusations of misogyny, but it is more difficult to actually deny oneself the pleasures of cavorting with said patriarchy’s handsome sons. I will never forget the fateful evening when I encountered the leader of one prominent women’s organization emerging from the anteroom of the Porcellian,” an all-male social club. “It seems that political dogmatism comes easy, so long as it does not interfere with one’s plans for Saturday night.”
After attending a meeting related to the merger of Radcliffe, Harvard’s former women’s college, with the main undergraduate school, young Noah Oppenheim wrote: “Why are women’s meetings any more deserving of protected space than anyone else’s?” In a column defending the good old days of same-sex clubs at Harvard, he argued, “To the angry feminists: There is nothing wrong with single-sex institutions. Men, just like women, need to themselves. We need a place to let our baser instincts have free reign, to let go of whatever exterior polish we affect to appease female sensibilities.” He added that “women who fell threatened by the clubs’ environments should seek tamer pastures. However apparently women enjoy being confined, pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon. They feel desired, not demeaned.”
Years had passed and Noah Oppenheim had matured. But, that day in 2017, as I watched him shift and gaze down, I had a sense that part of his vulnerability to criticism of the story was a sincere belief: that this just wasn’t a huge deal, some Hollywood bully, famous in SoHo and Cannes, crossing a line.
“Megyn Kelly did that story about women in tech, and we had a couch full of women—” he was telling me.
“If what you’re saying is you sincerely just want more, then tell me,” I said. “There’s more we can get in place quickly.”
He seemed not to hear this. “The temp is in shadow,” he said.
“She’ll go full face. She said she’ll do it if we need it.”
He swallowed hard, laughed a little. “Well, I
don’t know,” he said. “It depends what she has to say.”
“We know what she has to say. She has evidence. She has messages from an executive within the company—”
“Well, I don’t know if we want that, I don’t know—”
“And there’s a third woman, as I’ve mentioned, with a rape allegation. Noah, she’s close to going on camera. If what you’re saying is we need more, I will get us more.”
“Now, just a second, I don’t know if—we’d have to check with legal before we do anything like that.” He seemed frustrated, like he’d expected this to be easier. His face was going pale and slick, as it had when he listened to the audio.
“That’s the problem, Noah,” I said. “Every time we try to get more, you guys push back.”
This seemed to make him angry. “Well, none of this matters,” he said. “We’ve got a much bigger problem.” He smacked onto the desk a printed page, then leaned back.
I picked it up. It was a Los Angeles Times article from the early 1990s, describing Weinstein agreeing to distribute Woody Allen’s movies.
“Harvey says you’ve got a huge conflict of interest,” Oppenheim said.
I looked up from the page. “Harvey says?”
Oppenheim’s gaze shifted off to the side again. “You know,” he said. “Harvey told Rich Greenberg. I never talked to Harvey.”
“But we knew this,” I said, puzzled. “Greenberg and McHugh and I searched and found he’d worked with both my parents—he worked with everyone in Hollywood.”
“He worked with Woody Allen when he was a pariah!” He was raising his voice now.
“A lot of distributors worked with him.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not just about that, it’s—your sister was sexually assaulted. You wrote that Hollywood Reporter piece last year about sexual assault in Hollywood, it caused this splash.”