Reporter Ken Auletta slammed NBC News in its handling of the Harvey Weinstein story, claiming that the network succumbed to pressure from Weinstein to cut the story and left Ronan Farrow “vindicated.”
According to Auletta, NBC informed Weinstein that they passed on the story in July 2017, a month before they told Farrow.
“That’s a scandal, that Harvey was so inside,” Auletta said.
The network has previously refuted this version of events many times.
Auletta explores Weinstein’s rise in Hollywood and fall to jail in “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence.”
“Ronan Farrow was vindicated in my mind, and NBC was not,” Auletta said in a Mediate interview released Thursday.
In 2017, Farrow brought his reporting, which featured multiple women’s accounts of abuse perpetrated by Weinstein, to NBC, where he worked at the time. When NBC passed on Farrow’s story and claimed that he did not have enough for a story, he took the piece to The New Yorker, who published the exposé in Oct. 2017.
NBC has also denied this allegation and told Auletta that Farrow “didn’t have the story until he went to The New Yorker.”
For clarity, Auletta went to The New Yorker by contacting Farrow’s editor, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, who verified the amount of on-the-record, on-camera accounts of women accusing Weinstein of sexual assault that Farrow had before bringing the story to The New Yorker.
Auletta’s biography documents the timeline of Farrow’s story, and provides an in-depth look at Weinstein’s humble beginnings, rise to Hollywood power and accusations of abuse that landed him an ouster from Hollywood — and a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault, to boot.