by Ronan Farrow
“Farrow never had a victim or witness willing to be identified,” the memo said repeatedly. This was not true of any point in the life span of the story at NBC. “Ambra had always been willing to allow Farrow to identify her by name and use the recording of her, and I had filmed an interview in silhouette,” Nestor wrote in a furious statement she released to the press shortly after the Lack memo went out. “After Rose McGowan pulled out of the story, realizing that the story was in peril of not being made public at all, Farrow and I discussed and I had tentatively offered either to attach my name to the interview in silhouette or potentially even reshoot the interview with my face visible. However, they were not interested in this interview.” Gutierrez added: “I was as available to Ronan before he left nbc as I was after he left. Nothing about me has ever waivered.” Rose McGowan gave a statement to Megyn Kelly’s program, reiterating that she’d been on the record for months.
The memo contained a long tract in which Lack and the communications team attempted to undercut and dismantle the credibility of the sources. They dismissed Abby Ex’s recollections of Weinstein’s meetings designed for sexual entrapment by saying that “her account was based on suspicion alone.” Ex, too, released a statement saying this wasn’t true. “That is factually incorrect,” she wrote. “Harvey asked ME, many times, to join these meetings, to which I refused. But I was a witness to them, and in fact, was a first-hand witness to physical and verbal abuse at his hands as well, all of which Ronan has on camera from my interview.” The memo suggested that Dennis Rice, the marketing executive, hadn’t been referring to Weinstein and that my use of his quotes had been misleading. In fact, Rice’s statements had been designed to give him plausible deniability in the event that he faced retaliation, and he’d approved of how his quotes were used. Rice told a reporter that McHugh and I “didn’t take anything out of context. I always knew what I was saying on camera would end up in a story about Harvey.” The New Yorker had later used these accounts without incident.
Lack’s memo was a “misleading and incorrect account,” Ex wrote, expressing bewilderment at the network’s effort to attack and expose sources without consulting them. “To see this memo leaked to the press with the sources listed, even without our names, and without the full and honest picture of the reporting, feels like the opposite of honest and direct.”
The memo copped—for the first time, contradicting earlier communiqués to the press—to Weinstein’s “numerous” calls and emails to Lack, Griffin, and Oppenheim. It painted a portrait of those conversations at odds with the records I’d later uncover, and the accounts of those who had stayed on the line while they played out. It made no mention of Griffin’s assurances to Weinstein, or of the warm rapport implied by a bottle of Grey Goose.
Several investigative reporters at the network said they found the memo’s focus on picking apart the work-in-progress reporting baffling. A number of television journalists I consulted agreed that the audio, in and of itself, was worthy of air. But McHugh and I hadn’t argued that the story was finalized at NBC, or that it didn’t have room to grow and come to fuller fruition, as it did in just a few weeks at The New Yorker. The problem, rather, was that we received a hard order to stop that development. Lack’s memo made no mention of Greenberg ordering me to cancel an interview, blaming Oppenheim. It omitted McHugh being told to stand down, and Oppenheim being the first to suggest sending the reporting out the door to a print outlet. “It’s immaterial,” one veteran correspondent recalled telling Oppenheim and Greenberg, in response to their protestations about how much we’d had. “I know what it looks like when we’re trying to bring a story to air and I know what it looks like when we’re not.” The correspondent said that “privately, the internal narrative is, we blew it.”
The memo was greeted with similar skepticism in the press. On the network’s own air, Megyn Kelly questioned NBC’s self-reporting, joining the calls for independent oversight. Soon she’d be gone, too—fired after another conflagration over a racially insensitive remark. For the network, the firing had the added benefit of cutting off what several sources around Lack said were mounting tensions over Kelly’s focus on Weinstein and Lauer.
The memo was only one in a series of steps designed to rewrite the history of the story at the network. NBC also hired Ed Sussman, a “Wikipedia whitewasher,” to unbraid references to Oppenheim, Weinstein, and Lauer on the crowdsourced encyclopedia. The Lauer matter, Sussman wrote, justifying one edit, “should be handled seperately.” He spun the material in NBC’s favor, sometimes weaving in errors. In one edit, he proposed that the month between the Weinstein story being greenlit and running at The New Yorker be revised to “several months.” Other times, he simply removed all mention of the controversies.
“This is one of the most blatant and naked exercises of hard corporate spin that I have encountered in WP and I have encountered a lot,” one veteran Wikipedia editor complained. But Sussman often prevailed: he reasserted his changes again and again, with a doggedness that unpaid editors could not match. And he deployed a network of friendly accounts to launder his changes and make sure they stuck. Several Wikipedia pages, including Oppenheim’s, were stripped of evidence of the killing of the Weinstein story. It was almost as if it had never happened.
CHAPTER 59:
BLACKLIST
After the first New Yorker story, I faced a dilemma similar to McHugh’s. For a time, I did as I’d uneasily promised during the argument with Oppenheim and Kornblau, and dodged questions about the story’s history at NBC. On CBS, Stephen Colbert looked at me narrowly as I said I didn’t want the story to be about me and changed the subject. “Part of this story is the story not being told for so long,” he said. “And you experienced the story not being told.”
My sister called at the height of the evasive interviews. “You’re covering for them,” she said.
“I’m not lying,” I replied.
“No. You’re omitting. It’s dishonest.”
The low points between us flickered back to me. I remembered the hard years, after I’d told her to shut up about her own allegation: walking into her room after she came back from the hospital; seeing her pull a long sleeve over the ladder of blood-red em-dashes on her forearm; saying I was sorry, and that I wished I could have done more.
Throughout that fall, the network followed up on Oppenheim’s text dangling a new deal. “You should counter however aggressively you need,” he added. Griffin called my agents and said, “I’m his guy. What do we have to do?” Before the claims about him surfaced, Brokaw emailed after my media appearances to tell me, “You’ve handled this perfectly. Now the future….” He called, saying the network had asked him to convince me to come back. “I realize the offer might have to be over the top, but you should consider it. It’s still a great place to do journalism.” He said he felt confident the network would agree to a statement acknowledging what had gone wrong and a new set of guidelines to prevent editorial interference. I still just wanted my job back. And I believed in the values NBC News represented at its best. I convinced myself that maybe the killing of the Weinstein story was a one-off, not a sign of deeper ills. I said I’d hear the network out, and told my agents the same.
But with McHugh’s refusals to compromise, and with each source who called to allege a pattern of harassment and settlements at the network, it got harder to go along to get along. From the early days after the Weinstein story broke, I’d been talking to a group of sources who described serial misconduct at CBS: an executive who was said to sleep with underlings and harass and assault others; a pattern of payouts to silence women; dozens of employees describing how the cover-up was distorting a news outlet’s priorities. In the end, I didn’t think I could report out the allegations against Leslie Moonves and the other CBS executives while shutting up about the pervasive claims streaming out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
I told my agents to drop negotiations.
The reprisal was decisive. With each of the AMI
stories over the following months, I was invited to appear on MSNBC and NBC shows at all hours—and then, suddenly, uninvited. On-air personalities called upset, one near tears, to say I’d been unbooked over their objections, on direct orders from Griffin. A senior executive at the network later said Lack had issued an edict too. “These people are insidious,” one anchor wrote. “I’m so angry.” Then the executives were reaching out, saying they knew I had a book coming out—I’d managed to finish the foreign policy book I’d ignored for so long—and they’d be happy to consider having me back on air to promote it, if I’d come in and reach a formal agreement about not rehashing the past. I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program. Later, as I finished work on this book, NBC’s litigation department began contacting the publisher, Hachette.
The last conversation I had with Noah Oppenheim in the aftermath of the story was a call he made. I spoke to him while pacing the strange safe house in Chelsea, Jonathan listening in the background. “I’ve become the poster boy for this,” Oppenheim told me. The backfire from his and Kornblau’s dissembling statements to media reporters had flared into the political zeitgeist. On Fox News a few days earlier, Tucker Carlson had sat in front of a picture of Oppenheim and called for his resignation. “Let’s be clear. NBC is lying,” Carlson said. “Many powerful people knew what Harvey Weinstein was doing and not only ignored his crimes but actively took his side against his many victims. It’s a long list but at the very top of that list is NBC News.” He appeared to relish the chance to attack a mainstream outlet, Hollywood liberals, and a sexual predator all at once. “News executives are not allowed to tell lies,” he said, as if he’d never met one.
As I paced, Oppenheim said, “You know, I just got a call this morning from NBC Global Security saying they need to send a police car to my house because of all the online death threats.” He sounded angry, not afraid. “I’ve got three young kids who are wondering why there are cops out front.” I said I was sorry to hear it. I meant it.
“Even if you think that NBC was either cowardly or acted inappropriately or whatever, which you’re entitled to feel, I hope that you would realize the way this has become personalized and hung on me is not fair or accurate,” he added. “Even if you believe that there is a villain in this, that the villain is not me.”
He was agitated, talking over me. Everyone, it seemed, had some culpability for his predicament except him. When I told him media reporters were telling me their criticism was a result of Kornblau’s blanketing the press with false claims, he wailed: “Kornblau works for Andy! He works for the news group! He doesn’t work for me! He doesn’t work for me!” And then: “I can’t tell him what to do. I can try and I have tried.” When he said he’d never threatened me, I reminded him that Susan Weiner had explicitly done so, on his orders. He shouted: “Susan Weiner is Andy’s lawyer! These are not people who work for me!” Later, others involved disputed that characterization of Oppenheim’s authority as president of NBC News.
“You keep saying you’re the one who takes the hit and it wasn’t you. So where does it come from?” I asked finally.
“My boss! Okay? I have a boss. I don’t run NBC News exclusively,” he said, then seemed to catch himself. “You know, everyone was involved in this decision. You can speculate what Kim Harris’s motives are, you can speculate what Andy’s motives are, you can speculate what my motives are. All I can tell you is at the end of the day, they felt like, you know, there was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward.”
He reminded me, twice, that he’d revived my career after my show was canceled. That we’d been friends. He hoped we could get a beer and laugh about it all in a few months. I struggled to understand what he was asking for. Gradually, he let it out. “I’m just making a plea,” he said. “If the opportunity ever does present itself to you to say that maybe I’m not the villain in all this, I would be grateful.”
And there it was, at the end of his arguments: an unwillingness not just to take responsibility but to admit that responsibility might, in some place, in someone’s hands, exist. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that stopped the reporting. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that bowed to lawyers and threats; that hemmed and hawed and parsed and shrugged; that sat on multiple credible allegations of sexual misconduct and disregarded a recorded admission of guilt. That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld so much silence in so many places. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that protected Harvey Weinstein and men like him; that yawned and gaped and enveloped law firms and PR shops and executive suites and industries; that swallowed women whole.
Noah Oppenheim was not the villain.
“I do not think you will be getting a beer with Noah Oppenheim in a few months,” Jonathan deadpanned later. It was a sunlit afternoon, back at his place in Los Angeles.
“No more morning TV, I guess,” I replied. I was, increasingly, realizing I’d be spending the next year chasing leads about CBS and NBC.
“I’ll take care of you, baby,” he said. “I’ll keep you in finery and smoothies.”
He hugged me around the middle like a kid hugging a stuffed animal. I laughed, put a hand on his. It had been a long year, for me and for us, but we hung in there.
Later, when I decided some of that reporting would make its way into a book, I’d send him a draft, and put in a question, right on this page: “Marriage?” On the moon or even here on earth. He read the draft, and found the proposal here, and said, “Sure.”
The first time I saw my sister Dylan after the stories began to break, she gave me a hug, too. We were at her cottage in the countryside, near my mother and several other siblings, under a blanket of snow—a universe apart from the tempest of unfolding reporting. Dylan’s two-year-old daughter, looking uncannily like her mother—wearing one of her mother’s old onesies even—cooed for something, waving her arms. My sister handed her a pacifier with a little stuffed monkey attached to it, and we watched her bound off on wobbly legs.
I shuffled through mental images of Dylan and me during our own onesie years, and those that followed: dressed up for school plays, waiting for the bus, constructing a magic kingdom together that no one could touch. I remembered us, as we positioned those pewter kings and dragons, and a grown-up voice sounded, calling her away. Her startled look, too frightened. Her asking, if anything bad ever happened to her, whether I’d be there. And me making a promise.
In the countryside with her daughter running around, she told me she was proud of the reporting. She was grateful for it. And here she trailed off.
“No story for you,” I said. When she’d spoken, as a child and again several years before all of this, she felt people had looked the other way.
“Right,” she replied.
It was a time of newfound accountability. But for every story being heard, countless others weren’t. Dylan was frustrated. She, like many of the sources who had suffered at the hands of the unaccountably powerful and whose stories now filled my in-box, was angry. And not long after, she joined the others—in industry after industry—and told the world she was frustrated too. She invited a TV crew into the cottage in the countryside, and they made the place as bright as an operating room. A news anchor beckoned her over, and Dylan took a deep breath, and stepped into the light—and this time, people were listening.
It was dusk when I filed into David Remnick’s office at The New Yorker. I found him flipping through a document. “Oh!” I said, reddening a little. “That was for me.” I’d asked a colleague to print it and leave it for me to pick up. Notes, not a handout. Remnick’s assistant had brought it over to him instead.
“It’s interesting,” he said. A sly smile, a lit
tle mischief.
We took seats near a big window with views of the Hudson. Remnick had been gracious, dispensing advice as I grappled with what to do next. He thought of me as a “TV guy,” perhaps a little too obsessed with seeing my face onscreen. And maybe I was. “You don’t want to keep doing this forever, do you?” he asked, gesturing toward the magazine’s offices around us. But I realized I did.
I pointed at the notes. The next wave of potential stories. Some were about sexual violence. There was the developing reporting around New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, about whom New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and I would eventually publish four allegations of physical abuse, prompting him to step down. There was the investigation into CBS, which would swell to include twelve claims of assault and harassment against Leslie Moonves, prompting his resignation—the first in this new era by a Fortune 500 CEO over such claims—as well as changes within CBS’s board and news division. Other leads were about different forms of corruption: waste and fraud and cover-ups in media and government. Some you have seen, some you have not.
He looked at the document again, handed it back to me.
“Too much?” I asked. Outside of the window next to us, the sky was changing.
Remnick looked at me. “I was going to say we have our work cut out for us.”