by Ronan Farrow
It felt strange, not fronting the package McHugh and I had labored over but being interviewed by another correspondent, assigned to cover it as news of the day. The spot included material Harris and Weiner had struck from my script, including the legion of employees saying they witnessed misconduct. “New accusations are rippling through Hollywood as a recording emerges of an encounter between Weinstein and one of his accusers during a police sting,” Lester Holt intoned on air that evening. “Here’s NBC’s Anne Thompson.” And this, too, was strange: “a recording emerges.” Who could say where it had been before? Not in Noah Oppenheim’s office for five months, surely.
Several hours later, in a greenroom where I’d once greeted guests on my show, I watched Rachel Maddow begin her program on a small screen in the corner. For twenty minutes, she recounted the recent history of high-profile sexual assault and harassment stories, lingering on the media’s failures of responsibility. She traced the line from Cosby to the Fox News allegations and the conflagration around the Access Hollywood tape. “That tape came out a year ago this week,” she said pointedly.
Coming to Weinstein, Maddow, like everyone else, made much of the recording. She sat in front of a backdrop that read “I’m used to that” and questioned how it all stayed secret for so long. “These allegations were so widely known and apparently accepted,” she said. The public was “coming to terms with the fact that a large corporate conspiracy was involved in covering this all up.”
I felt exhausted and conflicted. Oppenheim’s dangled promise to un-fire me had actually worked. Despite it all, I still aspired to be an anchor and reporter at NBC News. And I was looking past this moment of attention, of TV hits and tweets, and wondering what I’d actually do next. But there was Maddow, in her meticulous way, setting up our conversation, and pressing on the doubt I felt about even being in this building.
On set, Maddow sat mascaraed and black-jacketed. She leaned in, both empathetic and wolfish. “Obviously this was a long chase for you,” she said. “You were working at NBC News when you started working on this. You ended up publishing it with The New Yorker—if you can speak to that, I’d love to hear about that.” And when I diverted to other topics, she looked at me hard and said, “Ronan, I have a couple more questions for you about this. I was not supposed to keep you for a second segment, but I’m overruling everybody.” After a commercial break, she returned to the themes of complicity and cover-up, and the question: “Why did you end up reporting this story for The New Yorker and not for NBC News?”
I felt Maddow’s gaze, and the harsh lights overhead. For all the warning shots she’d given, I hadn’t planned an answer. “Look, you would have to ask NBC and NBC executives about the details of that story,” I said. “I will say that over many years, many news organizations have circled this story and faced a great deal of pressure in doing so. And there are now reports emerging publicly about the kinds of pressure that news organizations face in this.” I explained that I’d been threatened with a lawsuit personally. That the Times had been threatened. That I couldn’t describe any threats others might have faced, but you could rest assured there was pressure.
“NBC says that, you know, you didn’t—that the story wasn’t publishable, that it wasn’t ready to go by the time you brought it to them,” she said, referring to Oppenheim’s and Kornblau’s suggestions that I’d pitched the story, come up empty, then gone off to report it elsewhere of my own volition. Maddow pressed an index finger on her Lucite desk. Her real eyebrows arched up and, in the desk, her reflected ones plunged down: a Cirque du Soleil of skepticism. “But obviously it was ready to go by the time you got it into The New Yorker.”
I’d been clear with Oppenheim that I’d avoid, but wouldn’t lie. “I walked into the door at The New Yorker with an explosively reportable piece that should have been public earlier, and immediately, obviously, The New Yorker recognized that,” I said. “It is not accurate to say that it was not reportable. In fact, there were multiple determinations that it was reportable at NBC.”
I could feel my promise of keeping the peace slipping away, and my future at the network with it. Maddow gave me a sympathetic look. “I know parts of this story, in terms of the reporting side of it, is not the easiest stuff to talk about and I know you don’t want to make yourself the center of this story,” she said.
“That is important,” I said. “These women came forward with incredibly brave allegations. They tore their guts out talking about this and re-traumatized themselves because they believed they could protect other women going forward. So, this should not be about me, or the wonderful, important work that Jodi Kantor did… ultimately, we are there in service of women doing something really tough, and I hope people hear their voices and focus on that.”
I walked off set and burst into tears.
CHAPTER 44:
CHARGER
The moment she was off air, Maddow got her call. She paced up and down the set, phone pressed to her ear, Griffin’s raised voice audible even at a distance. Then Oppenheim was calling. “So, am I an ex-NBC-contributing—whatever you came up with?” I joked.
“I cannot account for Rachel Maddow’s behavior. And believe me—” Oppenheim began. “Look, it is what it is. Here’s what I would say. Unfortunately, it has obviously set off a firestorm.”
Oppenheim sounded nervous. He said that he was being told we had to release a statement saying more forcefully, on the record, that NBC never had the story. He wanted me to sign on to it.
Quickly, we were back in the circular arguments from his office, though Oppenheim had now gone from making the case for why the story shouldn’t run to arguing, in effect, that he hadn’t made that case in the first place.
When I asked him if he talked to Weinstein, he said: “I never did!”
“Noah, when you presented me with that article about Harvey working with Woody Allen, you said, ‘Harvey says,’” I reminded him. And at this he groaned, revised, wailed instead: “Harvey Weinstein called me once!”
The call stretched on for hours. Mark Kornblau conferenced in and pressed me to sign a Kafkaesque compromise statement that conceded the story had passed a legal and standards review but said it also failed to meet “our standards.” My head hurt. Kornblau, it turned out, had a track record of dissembling statements about scandals. In 2007, as then–presidential candidate John Edwards’s spokesperson, he spent months stamping out stories that Edwards had fathered a child with Rielle Hunter, a campaign videographer. Kornblau asked Edwards to sign an affidavit denying paternity. When Edwards declined, Hunter later wrote that “it was the moment when Mark knew the truth.” But Mark Kornblau, who remained on the campaign until its end a month later, continued to preside over public denials, evidently believing Edwards’s thin cover story. Later, when Edwards was tried for violations of campaign finance law in the course of covering up the affair, prosecutors accused Kornblau of concealing the incident in pretrial interviews. Kornblau said prosecutors just hadn’t asked the right questions. Edwards was later acquitted of one criminal count, and a mistrial was declared on the others.
At the time, I knew none of this. I still wanted to salvage my future with the executives. I told them I couldn’t join a false statement. But I promised them I’d avoid answering further questions like Maddow’s.
At one point, my phone died, Oppenheim cut off mid-shout. I was still in the greenroom at MSNBC. I borrowed a charger and plugged in. As I waited, a prominent on-air personality who hadn’t yet left the office sat with me and remarked casually:
“Noah’s a sick fuck, and Andy’s a sick fuck, and they both need to go.”
“You mean beyond this?” I asked.
“There have been three things that I know of personally.”
“The Access tape,” I said. “This…”
“And something else. Involving talent here.”
My eyes widened. But the phone was alive again, and Oppenheim was calling back.
Under the lights of stu
dio 1A, Matt Lauer eyed me like a lit stick of TNT and offered the latest reframing of the matter: “You’ve been working this story for a long time, both for NBC News and The New Yorker. I know it has been a long and difficult process to get these actresses to be identified and go on the record with their allegations.” There had been no utopian collaborative effort “both for NBC News and The New Yorker.” Within the first days of shooting, we’d had a woman on the record. You can see, on the tape of the segment, my eyebrows dart up. Lauer seemed strange on set that day, restless. When I spoke about the complexity of workplace sexual misconduct and retaliation, he shifted in his seat, then jumped in to read Hofmeister’s statement about Weinstein. As he moved, a sheen of light slid across his navy blue, impeccably tailored suit.
A few hours later, Oppenheim gathered the producers and reporters of the investigative unit to “clear the air” and allay “misconceptions.” When he reiterated the claim that the network simply never had the story, McHugh spoke up. “Forgive me, Noah,” he said. “But I have to disagree.” Oppenheim looked startled. The meeting turned contentious, the journalists asking one question after another. Why hadn’t the network just run the audio? If Oppenheim had wanted more, why weren’t McHugh and I allowed to seek it? None of the answers seemed to satisfy. “I don’t understand what circumstance would exist as a journalistic organization where—even if they didn’t believe you had it at that moment—they didn’t say, ‘We’re gonna give you more resources, we’re gonna double down,’” said one veteran journalist there that day. “It didn’t ever pass the laugh test for me. And I don’t think it did to the rest of the group.”
The next morning, McHugh got a call on his cell from Oppenheim’s assistant. “Noah would like to see you.” Oppenheim said he wanted to address the concerns McHugh had referenced in front of—he said, with a note of distaste—the whole group. “Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers were calling us all through the seven months and never once did I say to anyone, ‘Don’t do it,’” Oppenheim said.
“I was ordered to stop on the story,” McHugh said. “Ronan and I sensed that NBC was going down a direction where they were not gonna publish this story.”
“I’m the one who launched the fucking story!” Oppenheim said, losing his cool, getting angry. “I’m now being accused widely,” he said, “of being somehow complicit in covering up for a rapist. Okay! As the only person here who gave Ronan a job after MSNBC canceled his show, as the person whose idea it was for the story—”
“I’m not accusing you,” McHugh said calmly.
But Oppenheim was injured now. That David Remnick had answered plainly the questions he was fielding seemed particularly galling. (“From the moment he walked in the doors here, you were determined to get this in print?” a CBS reporter had asked Remnick. “You’re damn right,” he’d replied.) “David Remnick spiked the Ken Auletta story!” Oppenheim shouted at McHugh. “He just did nothing for the last sixteen years until Ronan walked in his door. It’s a little hard to stomach the self-righteousness from somebody like that who killed their story, didn’t do anything for years and years and years, and is now claiming, ‘I’m just a big hero here because I let Ronan continue reporting.’” But Remnick had let me continue reporting. And Oppenheim hadn’t. The meeting was “crazy,” McHugh would reflect later. It seemed clear to him that Oppenheim wanted someone on the inside who’d sign on to the dissembling. He weighed up the stakes. This was his boss’s boss cursing at him. McHugh didn’t have the platform or profile I did. The network’s power to quietly end his ability to make a living was greater, the likelihood of anyone caring smaller. McHugh had his four girls to worry about, and his contract was up soon.
He left the meeting feeling acutely aware that his future was on the line, and wondering how long he could resist these entreaties from the top.
The story left a blast radius, and the NBC executives weren’t the only ones caught in it. Hillary Clinton had said nothing over the weekend between the stories from the Times and The New Yorker, declining inquiries from reporters while other politicians issued moralizing statements. Tina Brown, who had edited Talk magazine for Weinstein, began telling the press that she’d warned Clinton team members about Weinstein’s reputation during the 2008 campaign. The writer and actor Lena Dunham disclosed how, during the 2016 campaign, she’d told Clinton’s staff that the campaign’s reliance on Weinstein as a fund-raiser and event organizer was a liability. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” she recalled telling a communications staffer, one of several she said she warned.
After five days, Clinton issued a statement saying she was “shocked and appalled.” I went back to Nick Merrill, her representative who had expressed anxieties about my reporting, and told him that my foreign policy book was about to feature interviews with every other living secretary of state and my best efforts to explain why Clinton had withdrawn. A call with her was hastily scheduled after all.
Woody Allen, who had expressed his sympathies to Weinstein on the phone the preceding month, expressed sympathies again in public. “No-one ever came to me or told me horror stories with any real seriousness,” he said. “And they wouldn’t, because you are not interested in it. You are interested in making your movie.” And then: “The whole Harvey Weinstein thing is very sad for everybody involved. Tragic for the poor women that were involved, sad for Harvey that [his] life is so messed up.” Later, in response to criticism about the comments, he said he’d meant Weinstein was “a sad, sick man.” In any case, he emphasized, the important thing was “to avoid ‘a witch hunt atmosphere’ where ‘every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.’”
Streep, who had been so surprised to learn of the allegations when I spoke with her, said as much again. She was fielding criticism, much of it unfair. A right-wing guerrilla artist posted around Los Angeles an image of Streep and Weinstein huddled together, with a slash of red paint over Streep’s eyes bearing the words “She knew.” Streep released a statement through her publicist. (Because Hollywood values economy of characters, this was also Woody Allen’s publicist, Leslee Dart, who had overseen his periodic efforts to discredit my sister.) “One thing can be clarified. Not everybody knew,” Streep’s statement said. “And if everybody knew, I don’t believe that all the investigative reporters in the entertainment and the hard news media would have neglected for decades to write about it.” I believed that Streep didn’t know. But her optimism was misplaced: the media had tried, but it had also known, and neglected, so much.
CHAPTER 45:
NIGHTGOWN
The women in the story were reacting too. Some were pained, others ecstatic. All described feeling a weight lifted. McGowan, after her months of ups and downs, thanked me. “You came in with a glorious flaming sword. So fucking well done,” she wrote. “You did a huge service to us all. And you were BRAVE.” McGowan said that she’d been staring down Weinstein’s mounting offensive and her own spiraling legal fees. “I know you’re mad at me and I had to go hard,” she explained. “Behind the scenes Harder and Bloom were terrorizing me.”
It had been a lonely time for McGowan. She’d let few people in, except for her new friend “Diana Filip”—“Anna” in the recent meeting with Weinstein. The day my story broke, she checked in with McGowan:
Hi Love,
I’ ve been thinking about you a lot these past few days. So crazy, everything that’s going on!
How are you feeling? It must be a relief and a lot of stress at the same time. you must be getting a lot of messages, I hope that all of them are supportive.
Anyway, just wanted to tell you how brave I think you are. I’m so proud of you.
I will send an email soon linking you with Paul, so that the two of you can arrange a follow up meeting to discuss the business.
Xx
By then, multiple sources had described contact from individuals they found suspicious. Zelda Perki
ns, the assistant involved in the London settlements, finally began responding to me, first to insist that she was legally barred from speaking about her time with Weinstein, then, over time, to share the full story of the London settlements. She said she’d also received what felt like not quite a normal reporting inquiry from a writer for the Guardian named Seth Freedman.
Annabella Sciorra sent word the day the story broke, too: “You did an incredible job of not only outing him but also conveying the pain that all of those women went through and continue to go through,” she wrote. When I called her back, she began to explain that she was one of the women who continued to experience pain. During our first call, she’d stared out of her living room window at the East River, and struggled to tell her story. “I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life…’” Then, panic had set in. “I was shaking,” she recalled. “And I just wanted to get off the phone.”
