by Ronan Farrow
“What are you arguing?” I asked. “That no one with a family member who’s been sexually assaulted can report on sexual assault issues?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “This goes directly to the heart of your—your agenda!”
“Do you think I have an agenda, Noah?” I had the same feeling I’d had in the conversation with Greenberg—that I had to ask direct questions, because it was the only way to expose the space between what he was willing to imply and what he was willing to say.
“Of course not!” Oppenheim said. “But I know you. That’s not what this is about, this is about public narrative, and the public narrative is gonna be ‘I let Ronan Farrow, who just came out as this—this—sexual assault crusader, hating his father—’”
“This wasn’t a crusade, it was an assignment. An assignment you gave me!”
“I don’t remember that,” he said. “I don’t think I would have done that.”
“Well, it’s true. I didn’t pitch this of my own initiative, and I didn’t report it alone, either. This is something your whole news organization worked on.” I slid the printout back across the desk to him. “We knew he was gonna try to smear me in some way,” I said. “If this is the best he’s got, honestly, I’m relieved, and you should be, too.”
“I’d be happier,” he said, agitated, “if he’d found video of you fucking in a bathroom or something.” The friendship we’d had, which might have made this gay joke merit an eye roll and a laugh, was giving way to something else, where he was just a boss and a network head, and I was annoyed by it.
“Insane!” Jonathan would later yell at no one in particular. “It’s insane for him to actually present that article seriously. It’s not serious. It’s not a real objection. It’s fully fucking slimy.” Later, every journalist I consulted—Auletta, Brokaw even—would say that there was no conflict, that it was a non-issue. What Oppenheim was describing was a journalist caring about a topic, not having a conflict with a specific person. Even so, I told him I’d be more than happy to put a disclosure on the story.
An almost pleading look crossed Oppenheim’s face. “I’m not saying there isn’t a lot here. This is an incredible”—he searched for the end of the sentence—“an incredible New York magazine piece. And you know, you want to take it to New York magazine, go with God. Go with God.” He put up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
I looked at him like he was crazy for a moment and then asked, “Noah, is this story dead or not?” He looked at the script again. Over his shoulder, I saw the deco architecture of historic Rockefeller Plaza.
I thought of my sister. Five years earlier, she’d first told the family she wanted to revive her allegation of sexual assault against Woody Allen. We’d stood in the TV room at our home in Connecticut, with stacks of fading VHS tapes.
“I don’t see why you can’t just move on,” I told her.
“You had that choice!” she said. “I didn’t!”
“We have all spent decades trying to put this thing behind us. I’m just now trying to launch something serious where people focus on the work. And you want to—want to reset the clock completely.”
“This isn’t about you,” she said. “Don’t you see that?”
“No, it’s about you. You’re smart, you’re talented, you have so many other things you can do,” I said.
“But I can’t. Because it’s always there,” she said, and then she was crying.
“You do not need to do this. And you are ruining your life if you do.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“I support you. But you just—you have to stop.”
Oppenheim was looking up from the page. “I can go back to the group. But right now, we can’t run this.”
Alan Berger’s creaky voice drifted through my mind. “Prioritize the stuff that’s working.” I wondered if I had it in me to say “Okay,” to turn to other things, to focus on the future. In hindsight, it’s clear. But in the moment, you don’t know how important a story is going to be. You don’t know if you’re fighting because you’re right, or because of your ego, and your desire to win, and to avoid confirming what everyone thought—that you were young, and inexperienced, and in over your head.
I looked at the story list on my lap. I’d been gripping it so hard it was twisted and moist with sweat. The words “looks like a Bond villain’s lair” peeked up at me. Just beyond my field of vision, the aurora flashed.
Oppenheim was studying me. He said there couldn’t be any more work under the aegis of NBC News. He said, “I can’t have you going to any more sources.”
I thought of McGowan under the TV lights, saying, “I hope they’re brave, too”; Nestor, falling into shadow, wondering, “Is this the way the world works?”; Gutierrez, listening as Weinstein said, “I’m used to that”; Annabella Sciorra telling me, “I’m sorry.”
I looked at Oppenheim hard. “No,” I said.
He looked annoyed.
“Excuse me?”
“No,” I said again. “I’m not going to—whatever you said. Stop contact with sources.” I balled up the page in my hand. “A lot of women have risked a lot to get this out, are still risking a lot—”
“This is the problem,” he said, picking up volume. “You’re too close to this.”
I considered whether this could be true. Auletta had said he had a “fixation” on the story. I guessed I did too. But I had also grilled these sources. And I was skeptical, ready to follow the facts wherever they led. And I was eager to go to Weinstein for comment, which I had not been allowed to do.
“Okay. So I’m close to it,” I said. “So I care. We have evidence, Noah. And if there’s a chance of exposing this before it happens to anyone again, then I can’t stop.” I wanted this to sound masculine and assertive, but I could hear my voice cracking. “If you’re sending me packing, this is your news organization, and that’s your call,” I continued. “But you need to tell me.”
“I’m not sending you packing,” he said, but he was looking away again. There was a long beat, and then he shot me a wan smile. “This was fun. Wish we could go back to California poison water, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Guess so.” I stood up and thanked him.
I walked out of Noah Oppenheim’s office, into the elevator bank and past its giant chrome rendering of the NBC crest—a peacock that said, “NBC is in color now. You can watch it in color. Isn’t that amazing?” And it was. It truly was. I moved through the cubicles of the Today show newsroom and up the stairs to the fourth floor, with battery acid in my mouth and red parentheses in my palms where I had pressed nails into skin.
CHAPTER 29:
FAKAKTA
“Go with God,” Oppenheim had said. To New York magazine, of all places. (Only in Manhattan media circles did heaven mean a middlebrow biweekly.) But how to go with God when the interviews were locked up on NBC’s servers? I motioned McHugh over to an empty office and told him what had just happened with Oppenheim. “This is why this guy continues to get off,” McHugh said. “So they were coming up with this argument with Weinstein’s lawyers, not telling us, waiting to deliver it like a… like a death nail,” he added, mixing metaphors. “They were trying to get us to wrap up our reporting. That’s why nobody’s particularly interested in this recent victim that we’re talking to.” I looked at him, nodded. So this was the end. “It’s a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “What happened here at this company. It’s a big story.”
“All the reporting,” I said wearily. “They own everything.”
He looked at me hard.
“Come here.”
Back at our cubicles, McHugh glanced around, leaned to open a desk drawer.
“Say,” he said, fumbling through a stack of AV paraphernalia and producing a silver rectangle, “you did have the interviews.” He slid across the desk a USB hard drive, with “Poison Valley” written in black Sharpie on one corner.
“Rich…,” I said.
He shrugged.
“Backup.”
I laughed. “They’re gonna fire you.”
“Let’s be honest, neither of us is going to have a job after this.”
I moved in like maybe I was gonna hug him and he waved me off. “Alright, alright. Just don’t let them bury this.”
A few minutes later, I was headed for the safe-deposit box at the bank, walking quickly. I didn’t want to give Oppenheim the chance to reconsider his suggestion that I take the story somewhere else. But whom to call? Looking at my phone, I saw Auletta’s email from the previous day. If there was an outlet that knew the challenges of going up against Weinstein, it was The New Yorker. I dialed Auletta.
“They’re not running it? With what you have? The recording?” he asked. “That’s ridiculous.” He told me he’d make some calls and get back to me.
I’d been trying to reach Jonathan since after the meeting with Oppenheim. “Call me,” I wrote. Then, pettily: “I’m going through the biggest thing in my life and you have not been there for me. I’m making critical decisions and I’m making them without you, which sucks. I step out of shoots for you, you don’t reciprocate.”
When he finally called, he was annoyed.
“I can’t step out of meetings to these explosions of texts from you, it’s ridiculous,” he said.
“I’m just dealing with a lot,” I said. “And I feel like I’m doing it alone.”
“You’re not alone.”
“So come be with me.”
“You know I can’t do that. We’re starting a company here, which barely registers for you—”
“There are weird things happening around me,” I said. “I feel like I’m going crazy.” We both got off the call in a huff. By then, I was descending into the subterranean vault. I put the hard drive in the deposit box and watched as it slid back into place with a nails-on-chalkboard squeal.
The next day, Auletta introduced me to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. Remnick and I set a time to talk the following week. “It’s an issue,” he wrote, “about which we have some experience.”
At 30 Rock, anxiety pulsed through McHugh’s and my interactions in the newsroom. Greenberg seemed on edge. McHugh cornered him and expressed incredulity about the conflict of interest argument. He reminded Greenberg that we’d looked at industry connections between Weinstein and my family and determined there wasn’t a conflict of interest.
Greenberg said vaguely that they’d find a way forward.
“So this is not dead at NBC?” McHugh asked.
“Look, I’m not going to debate this,” Greenberg replied.
“I’m not debating,” McHugh said. “But I have to say, for the record, I disagree.”
When I saw Greenberg, likewise, I had questions. “This conflict of interest thing,” I said. “Noah said Harvey told you about it.”
He found time in between looking panicked to appear sincerely puzzled.
“I never talked about that with Harvey,” he said.
It was early afternoon when Oppenheim texted, asking to meet. “I spent all day having conversations about this,” he snapped, as I arrived in his office. He looked like he hadn’t slept. “We all think that there’s a potential”—and then, evidently off my look of pirouetting optimism, he repeated—“ potential solution.” Whoever decided that the story couldn’t run had now, it seemed, realized the story couldn’t not run, either—at least not the way Oppenheim had left it the day before. “We’re going to have one of the most veteran senior producers in the company, a Dateline person who’s been here twenty, thirty years—we’re going to assign them to retrace everything you’ve done, scrub everything.”
“Who?” I said.
“Corvo, who’s unimpeachable, is going to oversee it. He’s picking someone.”
I thought of Corvo, the Dateline veteran—a company man, but, as far as I knew, a principled one.
“If this is genuinely an effort born of wanting to run it, then I welcome it. Vet the hell out of it. The reporting holds up.”
“It’s not just the checking,” Oppenheim said. “My view is that the tape and Harvey Weinstein grabbing a lady’s breasts a couple of years ago, that’s not national news.” I started to talk and he held up a hand. “It’s news somewhere. Do it for the Hollywood Reporter, great, it’s news there. For the Today show, a movie producer grabbing a lady is not news.”
He said they wanted more, and I said that was great too. I could take Gutierrez up on her offer to come in, and shoot with Canosa, and reshoot with Nestor.
“No, no, no,” he said. “We’re picking this producer to vet things. Everyone we’re considering is on vacation till Monday. Let’s just hang tight till then,” he said.
“Noah, if you want more, I need to be able to go out and get it.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “I’m just saying hang tight till Monday.”
“This is fakakt,” McHugh was saying.
“Please, Rich, no more Yiddish, and it’s fakakta—”
“It calls into question my credibility, which I fucking—”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said.
“How’s that? We have had a trusted producer vetting every element of this. I’ve been there the whole time—”
“Oh, sorry!” a chirpy young Today show producer said, opening the door. We were in a mailroom near the Today show bullpen. Everything else was full. The producer started sorting through mail and futzing with FedEx forms.
We stood awkwardly for a moment.
“So, life’s good?” I managed.
“Yeah,” she said. “Great. You know. Sad the summer’s over.”
“Sure,” I said.
When the door swung shut behind her, I turned to McHugh. “Rich, I’m not gonna let them force you out.”
“But it is forcing me out,” McHugh continued under his breath. “What the hell is this?”
“Basically it’s a special prosecutor role, and if they wanna shut this thing down, sure, they can, but it was very promising.”
Rich looked at me like I was insane. “They said no, then they realized it’s a PR scandal. And now they’re just gonna rope-a-dope us to death until it’s March and we’re still talking about this. Basically, ‘we need more, we need more’; they’re not gonna say no to us—It’s okay, come in.”
“Sorry!” the producer squeaked, and tiptoed back over to grab some document she’d left behind.
I smiled tightly, then said to McHugh, “Don’t you think that’s a little conspiratorial? Maybe they’ll run it.”
“Bottom line, it’s trouble that the president of NBC News is talking directly with Harvey and lying to us about it.” He was sulking. “What are you gonna do about the meeting with Remnick next week?”
I thought about this. “I keep it, and we keep that option waiting in the wings. Potentially propose doing it for both. I don’t know.”
“You’ve got to be careful now,” McHugh said, “because, say it does come out in another publication, and it does look bad for NBC, they could so easily turn on us—”
“Hello!” said one of three smiling interns who had just opened the door. “Don’t mind us.”
Despite McHugh’s skepticism, I was lifted, as I left Rockefeller Plaza and made my way through the harsh neons of Times Square, by newfound optimism. “NBC’s a bird in the hand. As long as they’re letting you keep reporting, stick with them,” Jonathan said, on the phone from Los Angeles. “Noah’s in over his head, he’s not malicious.”
My feeling that the obstacles of the last month had been a passing fever dream was reinforced when Thomas McFadden, from NBC security, got back in touch to say he had an update. They’d figured out where at least some of the menacing messages came from. It turned out I really did have your run-of-the-mill stalkers with mental health issues. No grand conspiracies, no one lurking outside the apartment, I told myself.
Harvey Weinstein’s mood was shifting too. In conversations with those around him, he’d once again gone from jubilant claims th
at his contacts at NBC had promised the story was killed to concern that it hadn’t happened cleanly and I might still be working. Weinstein knew Boies was friendly with Lack, and asked if the attorney might put in a call to the network head.
“I can call Andy and see if he’ll tell me,” was all Boies would say.
More sources were telling me that they were getting calls from Weinstein or his associates that they found unsettling. Katrina Wolfe, who had gone on camera to say she’d witnessed the London settlement process, nervously told me that she’d gotten a call from a veteran Weinstein producer named Denise Doyle Chambers. Doyle Chambers said that she and another veteran producer, Pam Lubell, were back working for Weinstein, conducting research for a book. A “fun book,” Lubell would later say, “on the old times, the heyday, of Miramax.” Weinstein had asked them to write down all the employees they knew and get in touch with them. Later, how much the two women believed this cover story would be a subject of public speculation. Lubell, anyway, seemed to have convinced herself: she even put together a book proposal. On its cover, Bob and Harvey Weinstein smiled in black and white. The graphic above them read: “MIRAMAX: THOSE WERE THE DAYS MY FRIEND, I THOUGHT THEY’D NEVER END.”
But the cover story, threadbare to begin with, quickly frayed. In early August, Weinstein called the two women back into the office. “You know what, we’re going to put a hold on the book,” he said. He asked Doyle Chambers and Lubell to “call some of your friends from the list and see if they got calls from the press.”
On the phone with Wolfe, Doyle Chambers didn’t make much small talk about the good old days before she came to the point. Weinstein wanted to know if Wolfe had heard from any reporters: if she’d heard, specifically, from me. And he wanted copies of any emails she’d received or sent. Wolfe, rattled, sent my messages to Doyle Chambers and denied she’d ever responded to them.