October 17, 2019 • 43 mins
Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein helped inspire a cultural reckoning—and won him the Pulitzer Prize. So why did NBC try to kill the biggest story of the year? On this episode of Next Question, Katie sits down with Ronan to discuss his new book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators—a jaw-dropping account of the extreme measures NBC News and Harvey Weinstein took to keep the producer’s history of sexual violence hidden. From the Russian spies who stalked him to Weinstein’s attempts to use Matt Lauer as leverage, Ronan and Katie talk about the campaign to silence both the press and the victims, the power structures that continue to protect abusers to this day, and where the #MeToo movement goes from here—not just in media, but in workplaces everywhere.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Next Question with Katie Curic is a production of I
Heart Radio and Katie Couric Media. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric,
and welcome to Next Question, where we try to understand
the complicated world we're living in and the crazy things
that are happening by asking questions and by listening to
people who really know what they're talking about. At times,
(00:23):
it may lead to some pretty uncomfortable conversations, but stick
with me, everyone, let's all learn together. Hey guys, going
hello ron In here. He is on stop seventy nine
of the Whistle Stop Tour. How are you looking forward to? Yeah,
(00:44):
me too. Thank you so much for making time. I
think we'll have a really interesting conversation. Guess we will
catch up on This week we're exploring workplace culture, and
not just any workplace NBC News, where I spent nearly
twenty years of my career. The story that Ronan Pharaoh
chronicles in his new book Patch and Kill is full
(01:05):
of intrigue, deception, and accusations of sexual assault and corporate malfeasance.
It's the story I have been thinking a lot about
and processing for the last two years, and one I'm
actually writing about as I work on my own book
about my personal and professional life. But for now, my
next question, how and why did NBC News fail to
(01:28):
give the green light to one of the most important
stories of the year. Ronan Pharaoh is here to answer
that question. Ronan, good morning, good morning. Nice to see you.
And you've been working on this book for two years.
You want to pull a serprise for your reporting of
Harvey Weinstein and The New Yorker. When did you first
(01:50):
become aware of rumors about Harvey Weinstein? You know, people
talk about this question of what did people know in
the orbit of a lot of the bull that I've
reported on. And there's people who knew as in they
had specific information about a serious allegation of a crime.
And there's people who knew in air quotes, right like,
(02:12):
they knew a little bit about a reputation for being gross.
They've heard a thing or two here or there. I
was at most in the latter category. You know. I
had a peripheral knowledge of sort of a larger than
life producer who had a kind of, uh course, bullying style.
And I had seen, you know, a Gawker item or
two about casting couch stuff. And I was working on
(02:35):
for my Today Show series, a mini series about Hollywood
and investigative topics in Hollywood. One of those topics was
casting couch, and very quickly the conversations about Harvey Weinstein
turned from that kind of subject transactional sexual relationships in
the workplace, which is already a serious conversation to have,
to something that was more serious and even criminal. You
(02:57):
mentioned that NBC News President Noah and Heim initially championed
your work. In fact, he was the one who first
suggested you look into Rose McGowan's claims that an unnamed
studio had had raped her. Do you believe at the
time he thought she was talking about Harvey Weinstein. You know,
(03:17):
I can't speak for Noah Oppenheim's state of mind. For
a long time he denied having given that assignment. Um,
he now admits that. Uh. I am grateful for the
fact that, over the course of many years, a number
of people at NBC championed tough reporting that I was doing.
And really I went into this body of reporting with
(03:39):
a lot of positive feelings about those executives outside of
this set of interactions where something suspicious was happening, not
just according to me, but according to working level people.
Including my producer who witnessed the shutdown of the story. Well,
let's talk about some of the elements and your path
to breaking this story rown in because you know, you
(03:59):
did it in a methodical way, gathering your evidence and
obviously getting people to talk to you on camera and off.
You and Rich MQ, your producer. Um, you had a
tape recording of Harvey Weinstein admitting to groping model Amber
guy terrorists. What other evidence had you amassed in the
(04:21):
process of your reporting? In every draft of this story
while it was at NBC News, we had multiple named women,
including Amber gautierres cooperating, having showed us a million dollar
contract to buy her silence and destroy this evidence. Obviously
the damning tape. Um Rose McGowan was on the record,
full face with a wrenching account of this and had
(04:43):
named Harvey Weinstein on the record repeatedly. But then she
sort of didn't. She kind of got back and forth
run yes, And when the story was so slow ruled
for so long, she began to develop suspicions about this
network and pulled out and has talked very openly on
the record in recent days about that there was another woman,
Emily Nestor correct, and the moment Rose pulled out another
(05:04):
brave woman, Emily Nestor, who had already done an extraordinary
thing going on camera anonymously, immediately said I will put
my name on this. She also has gone on the
record in recent days saying, you know, I offered to
go on the record while the story was on television.
She was a former assistant of Harvey Weinstein. Emily nest
was a temporary assistant at the Weinstein Company front desk assistant.
(05:26):
First day on the job, Harvey Weinstein begins sexually harassing her,
and she is a great example of a really upstanding
person who immediately said this is wrong, and potentially it's
a sign of other people going through more serious things.
So she gave a detailed account, and you know what
she has said on the record is I offered to
put my face on my name out there, and NBC
(05:46):
News was not interested in that story. During the course
of your reporting, you write, it's almost a thriller catching
kill because you talk about being tailed by Israeli spies.
You talk about someone suggesting you get a gun put
your research in a safety deposit box. What did that
tell you about the links Harvey Weinstein was willing to
(06:10):
go to to protect his reputation and to keep this
story from going public. You know, both of us, Katie,
have been on tough stories where we see how angry
powerful interests get and how systems get spun up against reporting.
And people talk about reading the book and feeling like
it's a spy thriller, as you said, And on the
(06:31):
one hand that sort of glamorizing in retrospect, but also
I take out of that like this is a country
where we have the First Amendment and spy thriller tactics
shouldn't be thrown at real life reporters. And to me,
that issue is bigger than Harvey Weinstein. It's bigger than
anyone industry. It is about a full frontal assault on
(06:52):
the free press right now, through everything from rhetoric deployed
by politicians trying to say we're the enemy of the people. Uh,
two powerful individuals using lawyers to threaten reporting, which has
happened around virtually every story that I put out, including
these stories and catch and kill um. Right now, this
book is banned by some retailers in Australia because of
(07:16):
spurious legal threats from the top editor at the National
Inquirer who doesn't want some things about his relationship with
Trump exposed. Um, this is a fragile, precious institution, and
thankfully there's still a lot of protections in this country,
but it can go south very fast if we don't
have a conversation about protecting it. Of course, every reporter
has experienced outside pressure, and you're right, I think it's
(07:39):
more intense than ever before in a variety of quarters.
But when you stop to think about it, we're like,
oh my god, this is insane. Yeah, that's exactly what
I thought. I mean, when when you're looking over your
shoulder and seeing the same guys again and seeing the
same car again, and sources are telling you you've got
to get a gun, and you're moving out of your
(08:00):
your place, and you're wondering, am I being paranoid? Is
this too much? And you know, as sources were saying
similar things, I've heard a lot of news executives say,
come on, these ladies are crazy. They think they're being
followed and stuff, And it's pretty soon those same kinds
of lines we're getting thrown at me. You know, you're
sleeping enough, You're doing okay here these are crazy things,
(08:21):
suspicions that you have, and then to be able to
document and prove that now there are actually Russian spies
chasing you and they're subcontractors for Israeli former Massad agents.
It's the reaction that you just described. What are you
still worried about your personal safety now that the book
is out? I do worry. I'll be honest, you know,
(08:41):
I really try to talk about this in a way
that is not woe is me, because I am not
a reporter in Pakistan or in Russia facing the prospect of,
you know, winding up dead the next morning. The moment
you talk about power in your country. That is the
norm in so much of the world, and that is
not my situation, thank god. Um. But I do think
it's worth talking frankly about this because there are a
(09:03):
lot of reporters right here in this country who face
a lot of intimidation tactics. It's bigger than just me,
and and so the answer is yes, you know, I
go through moments where I fear for my safety. You
outline many really disturbing and heartbreaking stories about Harvey Weinstein's victims,
and I remember reading your reporting throughout this in The
(09:24):
New Yorker and being specially affected by Annabella Shiura. Yes,
because this was something that was so upsetting to me,
that story and the details of that story. It took
her a long time to come forward, and in fact,
she didn't initially during the at the early stages of
(09:45):
your reporting. Can you talk about her for a moment,
because I don't know what it was about her story
that just sort of cut me to the core. I
have the same reaction. I get very emotional thinking about
Annabella's story and what she went through and still goes
through to this day in terms of her personal trauma.
She was brave, not just in talking to me, but
(10:08):
in allowing me to tell the full story of the
fact that when I first picked up the phone and
called her, she panicked and said, no, I don't know anything.
By the way, running we should probably just say she's
an actress. I remember her the most from the hand
that rocks the cradle um and then she did kind
of disappear, right, And that's part of her story too.
(10:28):
You know. Annabella Shiora recounted both a brutal, violent sexual
attack that is shocking to the conscience, as are so
many of these stories, and she also described a pattern
of what appears to be stalking afterwards from Harvey Weinstein,
where he was doing everything up to and including, you know,
(10:50):
bursting into her hotel room unannounced and without permission. Years later,
and she finally describes something that is common in a
lot of these instances, which is she is convinced that
she was smeared and blacklisted and that the evaporation of
her ascendant prior to that career was not unrelated to
(11:10):
the fact that she had this series of encounters where
she rebuffed Harvey Weinstein. Let's go back to your reporting
on Weinstein at NBC. Things started to get complicated, Ron,
and you were told to stand down on your story
pending an NBC Universal investigation, which struck me as very
(11:30):
strange because it wasn't an NBC News investigation but an
NBC Universal investigation. Why do you think a corporate review
was underway? And did this go all the way up
to Steve Burke, the CEO of NBC Universal. This is
not just an account of events that comes from me.
This is a documented paper trail of what happened in
(11:51):
this company. This is transcripts, This is conversations between Harvey
Weinstein and executives that they have now admitted to and
previously concealed. And this is testimonials from people at a
working level, including my producer on this story, who saw
the whole thing get shut down. And you know, what
is clearly laid out in this book is that these
(12:12):
executives were embattled that Harvey Weinstein was laying siege to them,
that in at least fifteen secret calls, he extracted promises
from them that this story would be killed. And this
is prior to any kind of authentic journalistic review. And meanwhile,
my producer and I are being ordered to stop, to
stand down, to not take so much as a call.
(12:33):
You know, No Oppenheim, president of NBC News, on six
occasions in this book and in the actual transcripts of
these events, says you got to stop. And what I
uncover here is that at the same time that they
are making these arguments that Harvey Weinstein's attorney has given them,
including the idea that it is not appropriate for a
news organization to report on secret sexual harassment settlements, they
(12:57):
are brokering and enforcing their own secret sexual harassment settlements
within NBC. So we've talked about this in the context
of the CBS story, where I also reported that there
was a chain of executives accused of misconduct, as is
the case at NBC, that there was a chain of
secret settlements to get rid of the problem rather than
address it um And I point out that comparison because
(13:20):
this is bigger than anyone TV exactly who cares. These
are not household names. It's bigger than anyone network. This
is about patterns of complicity and cover up that allow
people to get hurt in an ongoing way at these
companies and allow our most important news institutions to bow
to powerful people. There was a suggestion that you might
(13:42):
not be objective in your reporting because of Harvey Weinstein's
relationship with your strange father, Woody Allen, about what you
believe happened to your sister at the hands of Woody Allen,
and Noah Oppenheim accused you of having an agenda? Did
he have a point in any way in terms of
Ronan you being motivated somehow by Dylan's experience, because you
(14:06):
write very movingly at the end of the book about
what I detected feelings of guilt that you didn't step
forward enough and protect your sister. On every story I
work on, Katie, incredibly personal stuff gets weaponized against me.
One of the first tactics that gets thrown at reporters
is how do we make this personal? And in this case,
(14:28):
I reveal here the legal threat letters from Harvey Weinstein
which raised things like an uncle that I had never
met who was convicted of pedophilia, or the fact that
my sister was sexually assaulted. And you know, the idea was,
it's not always clear what the factual link is, right.
I mean, every reporter has obviously looked at this and said,
there's no conflict of interest in either of those cases.
(14:49):
This is just someone who is familiar with the issue
of sexual assault and violence and how important it is.
And it's a question and theme that I examined in
the book in a real the fourth right way. You know,
I talk about people like Ben Wallace from New York
Magazine and Kenna Letta from The New Yorker being obsessed
with the story, Kenna Letta using words like fixated this
(15:11):
this wonderful New Yorker writer who worked for years striving
to break this thing about Harvey Weinstein and then and
then being generous and helping me along. And I think
I compare him to the homicide beat cop kept up
at night by the case that got away. So there
is a degree of obsession that kicks in when you
are an investigative reporter on a big story. But very clearly,
(15:34):
I think for anyone who was actually looking at that,
including obviously the editors of The New Yorker that ran
the story, that's called caring about an issue, not like
having a business deal gone bad with Harvey Weinstein, right,
And I don't even think it necessarily is. I'm not
suggesting it's a conflict of interest. What I mean it
is became intensely in some ways personal for you. The
(15:54):
the issue. It became one that I understood the stakes
of on a person, the level which is different from
there being any kind of direct factual link. You know,
my sister's allegation is a very different case. And part
of my journey that I described in this book was
being a guy for a long time who spoke to
a sexual assault survivor in his life and said, why
(16:18):
don't you just move on? Why does this matter so much?
And over the course of Catch and Kill, I really
come to realize how wrong I was, and the fact
that I was part of a culture that looks the
other way and moves on because this is an inconvenient
thing to talk about. In fact, when we come back,
we're going to talk about the ramifications, the long term
(16:39):
repercussions of sexual assault, which I think we're only now
starting to truly understand, and what happened after you left
NBC and continue to work on this story. We'll be
right back grown in. After you left NBC, the article
(17:05):
appeared in The New Yorker, and NBC repeatedly claimed that
you didn't have enough evidence, that you didn't meet their
standards for putting a story on the air. Let's talk
about sort of the reaction after you left NBC when
the story did come out, and I would point out,
you know, the indisputable fact is I left that building
(17:29):
and I showed the same reporting that NBC had had
to The New Yorker, and their reaction was, oh my god,
this is a hugely significant body of reporting. We've got
a rush to finish this. Uh. You know, the the
supposition of either me or any of the working level
journalists on this, including my producer, was never that we
couldn't have done more reporting. In fact, we had offered
(17:52):
more interviews that NBC than canceled. Um. The point was
that we were ordered to stop under suspicious circumstances. So
you know, I'll let people judge for themselves whether that
reporting should have gotten on air. Clearly that the judgment
of The New Yorker was this had to get out
and urgently, and there's been a fair amount of misinformation
put out about the timeline. The New Yorker green lit
(18:13):
this story and then four weeks later it was in print,
and it was a Pulitzer Prize winning article, and that
is thanks to the bravery of the women who spoke.
It is thanks to the editors there who were incredible journalists,
and like most journalists who have looked at this, saw
the evidence for what it was. At one point there
was even something changed and was it in Wikipedia or
(18:35):
in another account that said that your reporting took months.
NBC has now admitted to hiring a Wikipedia whitewashing surface
to scrub from the pages of Noah Oppenheim and other
NBC executives references to this scandal to separate out sentences
that mentioned both Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein. In a
(18:56):
connected way, and to remove references is to the New
Yorker running the story rapidly afterwards, which is accurate. And indeed,
in some cases they had this Wikipedia whitewasher inaccurately insert
that month's past before the New Yorker ran the story.
So when you see a news organization scrubbing the public
record in this way and inserting just outright falsehoods um,
(19:20):
it really does raise the ways in which this is
bigger than one network, one company. This is about the truth.
Much of the book is about why NBC didn't go
with this story obviously, and you point to a number
of factors, and I thought we could break them down.
One was, I think the history and the baggage of
the men in charge of making these decisions. I think
(19:40):
the facts make it very clear that while the tone
is really sober, and I don't go beyond exactly what
the facts say. So therefore, you know, you don't see
an account of like a mustache twirling back room, people
in the shadows signing contracts in blood. What you see is,
I think, how this really looks when dirty deals are
cut in context, which is a long chain of secret
(20:03):
calls and conversations and promises to kill a story being made.
In those calls, you see Harvey Weinstein's legal threat letters
to me saying explicitly I have a deal with NBC.
I have written assurances from them that they will kill
this story and assert a copyright claim if you try
to take the reporting elsewhere. And you see a documented
(20:24):
paper trail showing that as Harvey Weinstein was making these
arguments about secret settlements, this company had many of their
own that had been concealed before we talk about those
secret settlements, So you talk about the personal histories of
some of the individuals involved, i e. Andy Lack, No Oppenheim,
and Phil Griffin. In each of these cases, you have
(20:45):
individuals that are accused of either misconduct or some very
troubling beliefs themselves. You know, you have Andy Lack, about
whom multiple women are on the record in this book
saying that when they were associate producers or talent on
his shows, they were propositioned um slept with him and
were retaliated against. This was in the eighties, correct, That's right,
(21:06):
the eighties and nineties. This is his his CBS era
UM And so you know, I think it's relevant that
although time has passed. This is someone who when Harvey
Weinstein says to him, look, we all did this, and
is trying to couch this as affairs with underlings. Uh,
you have an audience that has a specific perspective on that,
(21:28):
you know. And Andy Lack has not denied those relationships.
He's denied that he retaliated against those women. I should
point out Noah Oppenheim, you know, is someone who wrote
voluminously about how women's voices on this issue should be
called into question and how you know, in his words,
women enjoy being pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon
at frat parties. And this was when he was at
(21:51):
the Harvard Crensit's right, and that he's I think, apologized
for those and said he intentionally wrote provocative pieces. Right,
And all of that is textas in the book. You know,
I really strive to be generous to Noah Oppenheim and
these executives in the book. There's one very disturbing story
I think about Phil Griffin, you know, I know all
these people, so uh, and and that is about taking
(22:14):
a photo of Maria Manunos that was I guess taken
by paparazzi printing it out that, you know, exposing herself
unintentionally and then passing it out at a meeting where
you were in attendance. There was one woman there and
the rest were men. Did you say anything at the
time he was doing this. I'm just curious, did you say, Phil,
(22:37):
this is disgusting or why are you doing this? It's
a great question and the answer is no. You know,
and I think that that's how these conversations often go.
You know, this is my boss. This is a kind
of conversation that you see a lot in this book
that when boys think they're in the boys club, and
you know, if there's a woman in the room, then
she's a woman who's not going to talk back, they
do talk like this, and and I'm careful not to
(23:00):
overblow that kind of a charge of sort of gross talk.
But I think that all of this is relevant in
the context of the present day conversations about very serious
news judgment decisions. You know, I say in the book,
Noah Oppenheim wrote those things about women when he was young.
He was trying to be a provocateur. People grow the immature.
(23:21):
But it is also worth noting that in this specific case,
Noah Oppenheim makes the same kinds of arguments in the
present day. He says, in response to a taped confession
of sexual assault, that I play for him. You know,
people say a lot of things like that when they're
they're trying to get rid of a girl like that. Um.
You know, he evinces views on women and about the
extent to which this issue matters that are broadly consistent
(23:45):
with those earlier writings. And you know, similarly, you have
someone like Phil Griffin, who in this book producers described
being dragged to peep shows by him and being you know,
told things that make them extremely uncomfortable. Um. Also, in
conversations with Harvey Weinstein promised to kill a story about
some of these issues. You have Andy Lack, who has
slept with underlings and allegedly retaliated against them hearing from
(24:07):
Harvey Weinstein. You know, this is normal behavior, and I
think therefore it's not a gotcha to include those things.
These are important pieces of context for understanding the people
who make the decisions about our narrative, about our country.
Let's talk about the relationship, the connection between Harvey Weinstein
and Matt Lauer. Explain the evidence you have that Harvey
(24:29):
Weinstein was working with the tabloids, specifically the National Enquired
to exert pressure on NBC not to go with this
story about him. What was he using as leverage and
what evidence do you have of that? So it is
indisputable that Harvey Weinstein had to deal with the National Inquirer.
That's something that I've reported previously that he was huddled
(24:52):
with Dylan Howard, the top editor at the National Enquirer,
and Dylan Howard was being used as an attack mechanism
and secretly recording people on be Weinstein's behalf and running
items on Harvey Weinstein's behalf. It's also indisputable that those
items included an escalating chain of stories about Matt Lower
and either affairs or Piccadillo's or misconduct in the office,
(25:14):
and you know, items about things like NBC executives getting
fed up with his misconduct around the workplace. Um, so
this was an area of focus for them. Those are
items that ran. We also uncover in the reporting in
this book that the National Enquirer was among the first
to obtain the resume of Brooke Neville's the woman who
ultimately got Matt Lower fired. You know, they had pursued
(25:35):
Matt Lower's accusers for years over the course of these events.
While I'm reporting on this story, Dylan Howard pulls the
kill file stories that they've gotten rid of about Matt Lower.
He begins besieging NBC and his reporters began besieging NBC
with calls about Matt Lower. Um and that's not necessarily
formal calls to to the PR department. These are calls
(25:57):
to personnel around NBC. So there is, in addition to
the multiple sourced account that a threat was explicitly delivered here,
and we do have those in the book. Along with
NBC's denial that any such threat was delivered, there is
an indisputable, uh juxtaposition of a situation where Harvey Weinstein
(26:18):
was laying siege to this organization and this organization's secrets
were very much under threat of exposure. Can you tell
me how the threat was explicitly delivered to NBC A
quid pro quo if you will, I'll leave it at
the exact precise reporting in the book, which is very
precisely fact checked and in which we're very confident, But
there are multiple sources of both NBC and ad Am I,
(26:40):
who say that that's the case. We're on, and throughout
the book we encounter women like Asia Argento and Brooke
Nevil's who claimed to have been raped Asia the first
by Harvey Weinstein, Brooke Nevels by Matt Lauer, and then
continued seeing those same men. Both men have denied the allegations.
You also say, quote Weinstein suggested repeatedly that an interaction
(27:02):
wasn't rape if the woman in question came back to
him later, and in defending himself in that open letter,
Matt Loward denies his relationship with Nevill's was ever not consensual,
and wrote that after Neville's claimed the first encounter was
an assault, she quote actively participated in arranging future meetings
and met me at my apartment on multiple occasions to
(27:25):
continue the affair. When people questioned the validity of these
allegations because they were not reported immediately and sexual encounters
continued afterwards, given how much you've studied this issue, how
do you explain that to them? So I'm glad you
raised this because it is one very common facet of
(27:47):
sexual violence that it is perpetrated in many cases by
family members, by bosses, by people that an alleged victim
can't get away from. And you know, we include Matt
or is thinking very clearly in the book. The rebuttals
that are in that letter are also woven into the narrative,
and I think people can judge the facts for themselves.
(28:10):
This is not as Matt Lauer describes Um in Brooke
Neville's Rendering an Affair. This is a case of a
junior employee who has already immediately begun reporting two people
around her that this was an attack, feeling terrified and
placed in a in a position where she is cornered
(28:31):
by these invitations to go to his apartment, have drinks,
all the things he mentioned, who is struggling not to
piss off a powerful man. In her account of events,
um And, who she readily concedes, did everything in her
power to put him at ease, to try to make
him feel that she was okay with things and she
wasn't going to tell on him. Um And And, by
(28:54):
the way, that follow on of contacts between them included
interactions where she just described trying to get away from
him and being forced to interact with him for professional reasons,
having to go to his office to get things or
tape things and UH, and then him propositioning her for
sexual favors, and how demoralizing and brutalizing that was. So.
I hope people read the narrative in the book in full,
(29:16):
because it is both fair to Matt Lowers thinking and
also lays out a much more complicated portrait than the
items that have been planted, saying this is just an affair.
And in fact, your account of Brooke Neville's uh conversation
with you you visit her at her apartment. I think
is is heartbreaking, and I think it does I think
(29:37):
provide a window into the psychology of someone who has
been victimized. This is both about sexual abuse and also
the abuse of power. And you know, one recurring theme
that has been raised by some of these alleged survivors
of Matt Lowers predation is the idea that they were
(30:01):
targeted in part because of their junior position and the
fact that they worked for around people who were peers
of Matt Lowers, and that perhaps in some sense there
was a power play element to that. You know, it
is not for me to psychologize or explain why someone
in a position of that kind of influence would choose
(30:21):
to sleep with underlings and in the workplace rather than
anyone else in the world. NBC News insists, then, when
Matt Lower was fired in November of two thousand and seventeen,
this was the first time they had ever heard of
official allegations of sexual misconduct against him. You write, there
were multiple n d A S two I believe involving
(30:43):
Matt Lower. Tell me about those and about evidence that
you believe refutes their contention. This was their first real
understanding of Matt Lower's behavior in the workplace. Well, there
point on this is some what more modeled than what
you just alluded to. You know, there have been allusions
(31:05):
to the idea that perhaps previous management knew but no
Oppenheim specifically didn't know. So they've said a number of
things around this, and you know, many of those comments
are in the book, and I'll let them stand on
their own. What is not disputable, as there is a
paper trail in this book that shows that in a
period where the General Council of NBC told the reporters
of NBC there were no sexual harassment settlements, in fact,
(31:27):
there were at least seven. Several of those were with
women who had voiced complaints about Matt Lauer within the
company that were discussed at a very senior level years before.
I was going to ask you about that. About the
protocol of you know, how these things work, is that
the legal department do they go up to the very
(31:49):
highest level of management. Is it in fact possible that
these things were happening or transpiring without the knowledge of
the top executives at the organization? You know, and Curry,
a former colleague of ours, is on the record in
this book talking about how she told senior executives, and
I spoke to senior executives who were told by multiple people.
(32:10):
You know, there is a Matt lower problem. Matt Louer
is at least verbally harassing women in the office, maybe more.
And the answer to your question about systems and protocols is,
so often in these cases, what we're seeing is not
systems and protocols, but a failure of those things. You know,
it is true at Fox, at the Weinstein Company, at
(32:33):
CBS that none of the people that ultimately were fired
from misconduct had any record in their HR files about
sexual harassment. You know. Bill O'Reilly pointed out constantly there
is no record in my HR file. Harvey Weinstein pointed
out constantly, there's no record in my HR file. And
you know, human resources officials, who are tasked with monitoring
(32:54):
these kinds of issues in the workplace play a really
important role. And when we see these issues being discussed
but not being formally recorded in companies, that's a serious
failure of systems. I think there should be a separate
organization of HR personnel who do not answer to the
(33:14):
power structure at an organization. There needs to be, and
we see this question of independence all the time. There
are multiple scenes in which the wonderful journalists of NBC
who are now anguished about this and calling for accountability,
including on air, telling their bosses we need an independent
investigation of Matt Louer of the killing of the Weinstein story.
Over and over again this comes up and leadership at
(33:36):
this company refuses. And this is a theme that again
is bigger than NBC. We've seen it at multiple companies
where there is resistance to outside independent review. An internal
review is not a review, and I think that's one
of the lessons of this era. I was surprised that
they ordered an internal review and there wasn't that much
pushback inside NBC although perhaps there was there there was,
(33:58):
and we documented. You know, there's this incredible exchange where, uh,
the journalists of the investigative Unit sit with Kim Harris,
the general counsel of this company, and these wonderful reporters say,
why are we not doing an outside review, even if
it's unflattering, it will help the problem go away, to
be forthright about it. And she says, well, if the
(34:19):
press would stop talking about it, it'll go away. And
a reporter in the room says, we are the press
when we come back. The future of NBC's leadership, Harvey
Weinstein and the me too movement that's right after this, Ronnan,
were you surprised so many people were willing to help
(34:40):
you with your reporting? And why do you think they
were willing to do that? And what does it tell
you about the atmosphere or the environment inside the corridors
of NBC News. This book is a tribute and a
love letter in a lot of ways to fellow reporters,
and a lot of those reporters are at NBC. I
admire them tremendously as journalists. Many of them are sources
(35:02):
in this book, And you know, I fundamentally believe in
our profession, Katie, I think we're tasked with interrogating the
truth in as fair away as possible. I think that
is true of a vast majority of the reporters at
NBC and that CBS organizations I've done reporting on, and
they are correctly trying to help along reporters digging into
(35:23):
this and asking for answers. Did you leave any stories
about sexual misconduct out because you felt, for legal reasons
you were unable to report them? Every story I do, Katie,
there is a wider universe of facts than what makes
it onto the page. And that is true in an
especially huge and significant way with a book that you
(35:45):
actually started as a thousand page draft and then had
to be whittled down. So there's a whole variety of
reasons why you don't include certain stories, even if they
fact check. Um. You know that can be because is
you feel like you want just one extra layer of corroboration,
because everything in this had to be so bulletproof. It
(36:07):
can be because even though it's true, you feel like
it is unfair or prejudicial in some way to include it.
This book actually initially ended with a particularly sort of
personal and withering account of something about one of the
people that I report on in it. And in the
end I felt like ending the book on a note
(36:28):
that is about a person was the wrong move. That
it had to end on a note that was about
systems and about big themes. And in fact, you do
not blame any one person, and you go out of
your way grown In, after I think you're implored by
Noah Oppenheim that he is not the villain, you write
that Noah Oppenheim is not the villain, even though he
(36:48):
said to you that it was quote, a consensus about
the organization's comfort level moving forward, and you go on
to write rown In it was that consensus that stopped
the reporting that out to lawyers and threats that hempden
hot and parsed and shrugged, that sat on multiple credible
allegations of sexual misconduct and disregarded a recorded admission of guilt.
(37:11):
That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld
so much silence in so many places 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. That to me must for
(37:34):
you have been one of the most important paragraphs who
wrote in this book. It was because, Katie, the point
I'm making there, and that kind of Noah Oppenheim perhaps
uh not fully wittingly makes in his speech where he
begs me to to kind of exonerate him in this
is Yes, there was a specific plot that played out
(37:55):
here in terms of the contacts between NBC and Harvey Weinstein. Yes,
there were specific added who's on the parts of these men,
some of whom have been accused of serious misconduct, and
their beliefs about whether this issue mattered. But almost more
than that, Katie, this is also a story about garden
variety corporate cowardice, and people like Noah Oppenheim who sit
there and say, I have a boss. There's other people
(38:17):
making these decisions. I don't know. I got to talk
to legal. And when you see people passing the buck
and looking the other way and feeling that there is
no ownership over decisions at a company, that is what
creates the situations like the ones we've seen at the
Weinstein Company, the ones we've seen at am I, the
ones we've seen at CBS and the ones that we're
seeing at NBC. The l A Times reports at NBC
(38:39):
Universal CEO Steep Burke has read your book and continues
to support Noah Oppenheim. He is in line to succeed
NBC News chairman Andy Lack, who is seventy two and
his contract runs through next year. What is your action
to step Burke's continued support of Noah Oppenheimen What do
you believe should happen to the men who were making
(39:01):
these decisions? You know, I'm a reporter, not an activist, Katie,
and every story that I write, I get a similar question.
What's gonna happen, What's gonna happen in Harvey Weinstein's criminal trial,
What's gonna happen to Les Moonvez before he was fired.
It's not my job to be a part of that conversation.
My job is to fairly and rigorously interrogate the facts.
(39:22):
And I am so grateful that incredible journalists inside and
outside of NBC have taken those facts and pursued them
further and demanded more transparency and accountability. And my hope
in writing a book like this is not to get
anyone fired. It is to prompt a serious and broader
conversation about the need for accountability in media, the need
(39:44):
to defend brave sources and brave reporters. I know you
continue to get hundreds of emails and tips every day. Well,
we continue to hear me too accusations about other people
in the media. Are other shoes still likely to drop?
This story is very much about the bravery of sources.
It ends not on a note of pessimism and darkness,
(40:06):
but on one of hope about people continuing to come forward.
That's true for a reason. My inbox is full of leads,
and I am so grateful to everyone who entrusts me
with evidence. I can't promise that I'll always respond to
every message, but I can promise if you present me
with something newsworthy, I will. If I can't report on it,
try to get it to someone else. And there's a
bigger theme here, Katie, which is the press is not
(40:28):
bowing to cover ups an intimidation. Sources and whistleblowers are
not shutting up, and as long as that's the case,
we've got a shot at transparency and accountability in this country. Finally,
what is the next step in your view and the
me too movement. How do we move the conversation forward,
grown in and see real change implemented at these institutions, organizations, companies,
(40:52):
not just in media but across all industries. That to
me is the real question, because you look get some
of the power structures at some of these organizations, and
they don't seem to budge. Some have. Susan Zarinsky is
now president of CBS News, the first female president ever,
And there's obviously an awakening and a reckoning as everyone
(41:14):
has talked about. But will institutional change actually follow, and
how can the conversation encourage that consumers and people like
us in the media have to call for action and
for unbudgeable companies to budge. CBS, which you mentioned, is
a great example of a company that thought there was
(41:35):
a similar kind of smear campaign against reporting and ultimately
did have a serious conversation about the need for change
and did start to enact changes. It's not perfect there,
but things are shifting. Their need to be reassessments not
just of leadership but of corporate policies. We are seeing
companies like Uber pledged to not use n d A
s with respect to sexual harassment, and in fact, twenty
(41:58):
six states are now considering Legislator Shan making n d
as illegal. Yes, so you know, part of uncovering this
chain of secret settlements at NBC and these nd as
is about this broader phenomenon where thankfully, legislatures and companies
are taking a second look at that kind of practice.
Ronan Pharaoh. The book, if anyone hasn't heard of it
(42:18):
at this point, is called catching Kill Lies, Spies and
a Conspiracy to protect predators. Ronan, thank you very much.
Always such a pleasure to talk to you, Katie, thank you.
Next Question with Katie Curic is a production of I
Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media. The executive producers are
(42:38):
Katie Kuric, Lauren Bright Pacheco, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang.
Our show producers are Bethan Macaluso and Courtney Litz. The
supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. Associate producers are Emily Pinto
and Derek Clemens. Editing is by Dylan Fagin, Derrek Clements,
and Lowell Brolante. Our researcher is Barbara Keene. For more
information on today's episode, go to Katie correct dot com
(43:00):
and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Couric.
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Next Question with Katie Curic is a production of I
Heart Radio and Katie Couric Media. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric,
and welcome to Next Question, where we try to understand
the complicated world we're living in and the crazy things
that are happening by asking questions and by listening to
people who really know what they're talking about. At times,
(00:23):
it may lead to some pretty uncomfortable conversations, but stick
with me, everyone, let's all learn together. Hey guys, going
hello ron In here. He is on stop seventy nine
of the Whistle Stop Tour. How are you looking forward to? Yeah,
(00:44):
me too. Thank you so much for making time. I
think we'll have a really interesting conversation. Guess we will
catch up on This week we're exploring workplace culture, and
not just any workplace NBC News, where I spent nearly
twenty years of my career. The story that Ronan Pharaoh
chronicles in his new book Patch and Kill is full
(01:05):
of intrigue, deception, and accusations of sexual assault and corporate malfeasance.
It's the story I have been thinking a lot about
and processing for the last two years, and one I'm
actually writing about as I work on my own book
about my personal and professional life. But for now, my
next question, how and why did NBC News fail to
(01:28):
give the green light to one of the most important
stories of the year. Ronan Pharaoh is here to answer
that question. Ronan, good morning, good morning. Nice to see you.
And you've been working on this book for two years.
You want to pull a serprise for your reporting of
Harvey Weinstein and The New Yorker. When did you first
(01:50):
become aware of rumors about Harvey Weinstein? You know, people
talk about this question of what did people know in
the orbit of a lot of the bull that I've
reported on. And there's people who knew as in they
had specific information about a serious allegation of a crime.
And there's people who knew in air quotes, right like,
(02:12):
they knew a little bit about a reputation for being gross.
They've heard a thing or two here or there. I
was at most in the latter category. You know. I
had a peripheral knowledge of sort of a larger than
life producer who had a kind of, uh course, bullying style.
And I had seen, you know, a Gawker item or
two about casting couch stuff. And I was working on
(02:35):
for my Today Show series, a mini series about Hollywood
and investigative topics in Hollywood. One of those topics was
casting couch, and very quickly the conversations about Harvey Weinstein
turned from that kind of subject transactional sexual relationships in
the workplace, which is already a serious conversation to have,
to something that was more serious and even criminal. You
(02:57):
mentioned that NBC News President Noah and Heim initially championed
your work. In fact, he was the one who first
suggested you look into Rose McGowan's claims that an unnamed
studio had had raped her. Do you believe at the
time he thought she was talking about Harvey Weinstein. You know,
(03:17):
I can't speak for Noah Oppenheim's state of mind. For
a long time he denied having given that assignment. Um,
he now admits that. Uh. I am grateful for the
fact that, over the course of many years, a number
of people at NBC championed tough reporting that I was doing.
And really I went into this body of reporting with
(03:39):
a lot of positive feelings about those executives outside of
this set of interactions where something suspicious was happening, not
just according to me, but according to working level people.
Including my producer who witnessed the shutdown of the story. Well,
let's talk about some of the elements and your path
to breaking this story rown in because you know, you
(03:59):
did it in a methodical way, gathering your evidence and
obviously getting people to talk to you on camera and off.
You and Rich MQ, your producer. Um, you had a
tape recording of Harvey Weinstein admitting to groping model Amber
guy terrorists. What other evidence had you amassed in the
(04:21):
process of your reporting? In every draft of this story
while it was at NBC News, we had multiple named women,
including Amber gautierres cooperating, having showed us a million dollar
contract to buy her silence and destroy this evidence. Obviously
the damning tape. Um Rose McGowan was on the record,
full face with a wrenching account of this and had
(04:43):
named Harvey Weinstein on the record repeatedly. But then she
sort of didn't. She kind of got back and forth
run yes, And when the story was so slow ruled
for so long, she began to develop suspicions about this
network and pulled out and has talked very openly on
the record in recent days about that there was another woman,
Emily Nestor correct, and the moment Rose pulled out another
(05:04):
brave woman, Emily Nestor, who had already done an extraordinary
thing going on camera anonymously, immediately said I will put
my name on this. She also has gone on the
record in recent days saying, you know, I offered to
go on the record while the story was on television.
She was a former assistant of Harvey Weinstein. Emily nest
was a temporary assistant at the Weinstein Company front desk assistant.
(05:26):
First day on the job, Harvey Weinstein begins sexually harassing her,
and she is a great example of a really upstanding
person who immediately said this is wrong, and potentially it's
a sign of other people going through more serious things.
So she gave a detailed account, and you know what
she has said on the record is I offered to
put my face on my name out there, and NBC
(05:46):
News was not interested in that story. During the course
of your reporting, you write, it's almost a thriller catching
kill because you talk about being tailed by Israeli spies.
You talk about someone suggesting you get a gun put
your research in a safety deposit box. What did that
tell you about the links Harvey Weinstein was willing to
(06:10):
go to to protect his reputation and to keep this
story from going public. You know, both of us, Katie,
have been on tough stories where we see how angry
powerful interests get and how systems get spun up against reporting.
And people talk about reading the book and feeling like
it's a spy thriller, as you said, And on the
(06:31):
one hand that sort of glamorizing in retrospect, but also
I take out of that like this is a country
where we have the First Amendment and spy thriller tactics
shouldn't be thrown at real life reporters. And to me,
that issue is bigger than Harvey Weinstein. It's bigger than
anyone industry. It is about a full frontal assault on
(06:52):
the free press right now, through everything from rhetoric deployed
by politicians trying to say we're the enemy of the people. Uh,
two powerful individuals using lawyers to threaten reporting, which has
happened around virtually every story that I put out, including
these stories and catch and kill um. Right now, this
book is banned by some retailers in Australia because of
(07:16):
spurious legal threats from the top editor at the National
Inquirer who doesn't want some things about his relationship with
Trump exposed. Um, this is a fragile, precious institution, and
thankfully there's still a lot of protections in this country,
but it can go south very fast if we don't
have a conversation about protecting it. Of course, every reporter
has experienced outside pressure, and you're right, I think it's
(07:39):
more intense than ever before in a variety of quarters.
But when you stop to think about it, we're like,
oh my god, this is insane. Yeah, that's exactly what
I thought. I mean, when when you're looking over your
shoulder and seeing the same guys again and seeing the
same car again, and sources are telling you you've got
to get a gun, and you're moving out of your
(08:00):
your place, and you're wondering, am I being paranoid? Is
this too much? And you know, as sources were saying
similar things, I've heard a lot of news executives say,
come on, these ladies are crazy. They think they're being
followed and stuff, And it's pretty soon those same kinds
of lines we're getting thrown at me. You know, you're
sleeping enough, You're doing okay here these are crazy things,
(08:21):
suspicions that you have, and then to be able to
document and prove that now there are actually Russian spies
chasing you and they're subcontractors for Israeli former Massad agents.
It's the reaction that you just described. What are you
still worried about your personal safety now that the book
is out? I do worry. I'll be honest, you know,
(08:41):
I really try to talk about this in a way
that is not woe is me, because I am not
a reporter in Pakistan or in Russia facing the prospect of,
you know, winding up dead the next morning. The moment
you talk about power in your country. That is the
norm in so much of the world, and that is
not my situation, thank god. Um. But I do think
it's worth talking frankly about this because there are a
(09:03):
lot of reporters right here in this country who face
a lot of intimidation tactics. It's bigger than just me,
and and so the answer is yes, you know, I
go through moments where I fear for my safety. You
outline many really disturbing and heartbreaking stories about Harvey Weinstein's victims,
and I remember reading your reporting throughout this in The
(09:24):
New Yorker and being specially affected by Annabella Shiura. Yes,
because this was something that was so upsetting to me,
that story and the details of that story. It took
her a long time to come forward, and in fact,
she didn't initially during the at the early stages of
(09:45):
your reporting. Can you talk about her for a moment,
because I don't know what it was about her story
that just sort of cut me to the core. I
have the same reaction. I get very emotional thinking about
Annabella's story and what she went through and still goes
through to this day in terms of her personal trauma.
She was brave, not just in talking to me, but
(10:08):
in allowing me to tell the full story of the
fact that when I first picked up the phone and
called her, she panicked and said, no, I don't know anything.
By the way, running we should probably just say she's
an actress. I remember her the most from the hand
that rocks the cradle um and then she did kind
of disappear, right, And that's part of her story too.
(10:28):
You know. Annabella Shiora recounted both a brutal, violent sexual
attack that is shocking to the conscience, as are so
many of these stories, and she also described a pattern
of what appears to be stalking afterwards from Harvey Weinstein,
where he was doing everything up to and including, you know,
(10:50):
bursting into her hotel room unannounced and without permission. Years later,
and she finally describes something that is common in a
lot of these instances, which is she is convinced that
she was smeared and blacklisted and that the evaporation of
her ascendant prior to that career was not unrelated to
(11:10):
the fact that she had this series of encounters where
she rebuffed Harvey Weinstein. Let's go back to your reporting
on Weinstein at NBC. Things started to get complicated, Ron,
and you were told to stand down on your story
pending an NBC Universal investigation, which struck me as very
(11:30):
strange because it wasn't an NBC News investigation but an
NBC Universal investigation. Why do you think a corporate review
was underway? And did this go all the way up
to Steve Burke, the CEO of NBC Universal. This is
not just an account of events that comes from me.
This is a documented paper trail of what happened in
(11:51):
this company. This is transcripts, This is conversations between Harvey
Weinstein and executives that they have now admitted to and
previously concealed. And this is testimonials from people at a
working level, including my producer on this story, who saw
the whole thing get shut down. And you know, what
is clearly laid out in this book is that these
(12:12):
executives were embattled that Harvey Weinstein was laying siege to them,
that in at least fifteen secret calls, he extracted promises
from them that this story would be killed. And this
is prior to any kind of authentic journalistic review. And meanwhile,
my producer and I are being ordered to stop, to
stand down, to not take so much as a call.
(12:33):
You know, No Oppenheim, president of NBC News, on six
occasions in this book and in the actual transcripts of
these events, says you got to stop. And what I
uncover here is that at the same time that they
are making these arguments that Harvey Weinstein's attorney has given them,
including the idea that it is not appropriate for a
news organization to report on secret sexual harassment settlements, they
(12:57):
are brokering and enforcing their own secret sexual harassment settlements
within NBC. So we've talked about this in the context
of the CBS story, where I also reported that there
was a chain of executives accused of misconduct, as is
the case at NBC, that there was a chain of
secret settlements to get rid of the problem rather than
address it um And I point out that comparison because
(13:20):
this is bigger than anyone TV exactly who cares. These
are not household names. It's bigger than anyone network. This
is about patterns of complicity and cover up that allow
people to get hurt in an ongoing way at these
companies and allow our most important news institutions to bow
to powerful people. There was a suggestion that you might
(13:42):
not be objective in your reporting because of Harvey Weinstein's
relationship with your strange father, Woody Allen, about what you
believe happened to your sister at the hands of Woody Allen,
and Noah Oppenheim accused you of having an agenda? Did
he have a point in any way in terms of
Ronan you being motivated somehow by Dylan's experience, because you
(14:06):
write very movingly at the end of the book about
what I detected feelings of guilt that you didn't step
forward enough and protect your sister. On every story I
work on, Katie, incredibly personal stuff gets weaponized against me.
One of the first tactics that gets thrown at reporters
is how do we make this personal? And in this case,
(14:28):
I reveal here the legal threat letters from Harvey Weinstein
which raised things like an uncle that I had never
met who was convicted of pedophilia, or the fact that
my sister was sexually assaulted. And you know, the idea was,
it's not always clear what the factual link is, right.
I mean, every reporter has obviously looked at this and said,
there's no conflict of interest in either of those cases.
(14:49):
This is just someone who is familiar with the issue
of sexual assault and violence and how important it is.
And it's a question and theme that I examined in
the book in a real the fourth right way. You know,
I talk about people like Ben Wallace from New York
Magazine and Kenna Letta from The New Yorker being obsessed
with the story, Kenna Letta using words like fixated this
(15:11):
this wonderful New Yorker writer who worked for years striving
to break this thing about Harvey Weinstein and then and
then being generous and helping me along. And I think
I compare him to the homicide beat cop kept up
at night by the case that got away. So there
is a degree of obsession that kicks in when you
are an investigative reporter on a big story. But very clearly,
(15:34):
I think for anyone who was actually looking at that,
including obviously the editors of The New Yorker that ran
the story, that's called caring about an issue, not like
having a business deal gone bad with Harvey Weinstein, right,
And I don't even think it necessarily is. I'm not
suggesting it's a conflict of interest. What I mean it
is became intensely in some ways personal for you. The
(15:54):
the issue. It became one that I understood the stakes
of on a person, the level which is different from
there being any kind of direct factual link. You know,
my sister's allegation is a very different case. And part
of my journey that I described in this book was
being a guy for a long time who spoke to
a sexual assault survivor in his life and said, why
(16:18):
don't you just move on? Why does this matter so much?
And over the course of Catch and Kill, I really
come to realize how wrong I was, and the fact
that I was part of a culture that looks the
other way and moves on because this is an inconvenient
thing to talk about. In fact, when we come back,
we're going to talk about the ramifications, the long term
(16:39):
repercussions of sexual assault, which I think we're only now
starting to truly understand, and what happened after you left
NBC and continue to work on this story. We'll be
right back grown in. After you left NBC, the article
(17:05):
appeared in The New Yorker, and NBC repeatedly claimed that
you didn't have enough evidence, that you didn't meet their
standards for putting a story on the air. Let's talk
about sort of the reaction after you left NBC when
the story did come out, and I would point out,
you know, the indisputable fact is I left that building
(17:29):
and I showed the same reporting that NBC had had
to The New Yorker, and their reaction was, oh my god,
this is a hugely significant body of reporting. We've got
a rush to finish this. Uh. You know, the the
supposition of either me or any of the working level
journalists on this, including my producer, was never that we
couldn't have done more reporting. In fact, we had offered
(17:52):
more interviews that NBC than canceled. Um. The point was
that we were ordered to stop under suspicious circumstances. So
you know, I'll let people judge for themselves whether that
reporting should have gotten on air. Clearly that the judgment
of The New Yorker was this had to get out
and urgently, and there's been a fair amount of misinformation
put out about the timeline. The New Yorker green lit
(18:13):
this story and then four weeks later it was in print,
and it was a Pulitzer Prize winning article, and that
is thanks to the bravery of the women who spoke.
It is thanks to the editors there who were incredible journalists,
and like most journalists who have looked at this, saw
the evidence for what it was. At one point there
was even something changed and was it in Wikipedia or
(18:35):
in another account that said that your reporting took months.
NBC has now admitted to hiring a Wikipedia whitewashing surface
to scrub from the pages of Noah Oppenheim and other
NBC executives references to this scandal to separate out sentences
that mentioned both Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein. In a
(18:56):
connected way, and to remove references is to the New
Yorker running the story rapidly afterwards, which is accurate. And indeed,
in some cases they had this Wikipedia whitewasher inaccurately insert
that month's past before the New Yorker ran the story.
So when you see a news organization scrubbing the public
record in this way and inserting just outright falsehoods um,
(19:20):
it really does raise the ways in which this is
bigger than one network, one company. This is about the truth.
Much of the book is about why NBC didn't go
with this story obviously, and you point to a number
of factors, and I thought we could break them down.
One was, I think the history and the baggage of
the men in charge of making these decisions. I think
(19:40):
the facts make it very clear that while the tone
is really sober, and I don't go beyond exactly what
the facts say. So therefore, you know, you don't see
an account of like a mustache twirling back room, people
in the shadows signing contracts in blood. What you see is,
I think, how this really looks when dirty deals are
cut in context, which is a long chain of secret
(20:03):
calls and conversations and promises to kill a story being made.
In those calls, you see Harvey Weinstein's legal threat letters
to me saying explicitly I have a deal with NBC.
I have written assurances from them that they will kill
this story and assert a copyright claim if you try
to take the reporting elsewhere. And you see a documented
(20:24):
paper trail showing that as Harvey Weinstein was making these
arguments about secret settlements, this company had many of their
own that had been concealed before we talk about those
secret settlements, So you talk about the personal histories of
some of the individuals involved, i e. Andy Lack, No Oppenheim,
and Phil Griffin. In each of these cases, you have
(20:45):
individuals that are accused of either misconduct or some very
troubling beliefs themselves. You know, you have Andy Lack, about
whom multiple women are on the record in this book
saying that when they were associate producers or talent on
his shows, they were propositioned um slept with him and
were retaliated against. This was in the eighties, correct, That's right,
(21:06):
the eighties and nineties. This is his his CBS era
UM And so you know, I think it's relevant that
although time has passed. This is someone who when Harvey
Weinstein says to him, look, we all did this, and
is trying to couch this as affairs with underlings. Uh,
you have an audience that has a specific perspective on that,
(21:28):
you know. And Andy Lack has not denied those relationships.
He's denied that he retaliated against those women. I should
point out Noah Oppenheim, you know, is someone who wrote
voluminously about how women's voices on this issue should be
called into question and how you know, in his words,
women enjoy being pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon
at frat parties. And this was when he was at
(21:51):
the Harvard Crensit's right, and that he's I think, apologized
for those and said he intentionally wrote provocative pieces. Right,
And all of that is textas in the book. You know,
I really strive to be generous to Noah Oppenheim and
these executives in the book. There's one very disturbing story
I think about Phil Griffin, you know, I know all
these people, so uh, and and that is about taking
(22:14):
a photo of Maria Manunos that was I guess taken
by paparazzi printing it out that, you know, exposing herself
unintentionally and then passing it out at a meeting where
you were in attendance. There was one woman there and
the rest were men. Did you say anything at the
time he was doing this. I'm just curious, did you say, Phil,
(22:37):
this is disgusting or why are you doing this? It's
a great question and the answer is no. You know,
and I think that that's how these conversations often go.
You know, this is my boss. This is a kind
of conversation that you see a lot in this book
that when boys think they're in the boys club, and
you know, if there's a woman in the room, then
she's a woman who's not going to talk back, they
do talk like this, and and I'm careful not to
(23:00):
overblow that kind of a charge of sort of gross talk.
But I think that all of this is relevant in
the context of the present day conversations about very serious
news judgment decisions. You know, I say in the book,
Noah Oppenheim wrote those things about women when he was young.
He was trying to be a provocateur. People grow the immature.
(23:21):
But it is also worth noting that in this specific case,
Noah Oppenheim makes the same kinds of arguments in the
present day. He says, in response to a taped confession
of sexual assault, that I play for him. You know,
people say a lot of things like that when they're
they're trying to get rid of a girl like that. Um.
You know, he evinces views on women and about the
extent to which this issue matters that are broadly consistent
(23:45):
with those earlier writings. And you know, similarly, you have
someone like Phil Griffin, who in this book producers described
being dragged to peep shows by him and being you know,
told things that make them extremely uncomfortable. Um. Also, in
conversations with Harvey Weinstein promised to kill a story about
some of these issues. You have Andy Lack, who has
slept with underlings and allegedly retaliated against them hearing from
(24:07):
Harvey Weinstein. You know, this is normal behavior, and I
think therefore it's not a gotcha to include those things.
These are important pieces of context for understanding the people
who make the decisions about our narrative, about our country.
Let's talk about the relationship, the connection between Harvey Weinstein
and Matt Lauer. Explain the evidence you have that Harvey
(24:29):
Weinstein was working with the tabloids, specifically the National Enquired
to exert pressure on NBC not to go with this
story about him. What was he using as leverage and
what evidence do you have of that? So it is
indisputable that Harvey Weinstein had to deal with the National Inquirer.
That's something that I've reported previously that he was huddled
(24:52):
with Dylan Howard, the top editor at the National Enquirer,
and Dylan Howard was being used as an attack mechanism
and secretly recording people on be Weinstein's behalf and running
items on Harvey Weinstein's behalf. It's also indisputable that those
items included an escalating chain of stories about Matt Lower
and either affairs or Piccadillo's or misconduct in the office,
(25:14):
and you know, items about things like NBC executives getting
fed up with his misconduct around the workplace. Um, so
this was an area of focus for them. Those are
items that ran. We also uncover in the reporting in
this book that the National Enquirer was among the first
to obtain the resume of Brooke Neville's the woman who
ultimately got Matt Lower fired. You know, they had pursued
(25:35):
Matt Lower's accusers for years over the course of these events.
While I'm reporting on this story, Dylan Howard pulls the
kill file stories that they've gotten rid of about Matt Lower.
He begins besieging NBC and his reporters began besieging NBC
with calls about Matt Lower. Um and that's not necessarily
formal calls to to the PR department. These are calls
(25:57):
to personnel around NBC. So there is, in addition to
the multiple sourced account that a threat was explicitly delivered here,
and we do have those in the book. Along with
NBC's denial that any such threat was delivered, there is
an indisputable, uh juxtaposition of a situation where Harvey Weinstein
(26:18):
was laying siege to this organization and this organization's secrets
were very much under threat of exposure. Can you tell
me how the threat was explicitly delivered to NBC A
quid pro quo if you will, I'll leave it at
the exact precise reporting in the book, which is very
precisely fact checked and in which we're very confident, But
there are multiple sources of both NBC and ad Am I,
(26:40):
who say that that's the case. We're on, and throughout
the book we encounter women like Asia Argento and Brooke
Nevil's who claimed to have been raped Asia the first
by Harvey Weinstein, Brooke Nevels by Matt Lauer, and then
continued seeing those same men. Both men have denied the allegations.
You also say, quote Weinstein suggested repeatedly that an interaction
(27:02):
wasn't rape if the woman in question came back to
him later, and in defending himself in that open letter,
Matt Loward denies his relationship with Nevill's was ever not consensual,
and wrote that after Neville's claimed the first encounter was
an assault, she quote actively participated in arranging future meetings
and met me at my apartment on multiple occasions to
(27:25):
continue the affair. When people questioned the validity of these
allegations because they were not reported immediately and sexual encounters
continued afterwards, given how much you've studied this issue, how
do you explain that to them? So I'm glad you
raised this because it is one very common facet of
(27:47):
sexual violence that it is perpetrated in many cases by
family members, by bosses, by people that an alleged victim
can't get away from. And you know, we include Matt
or is thinking very clearly in the book. The rebuttals
that are in that letter are also woven into the narrative,
and I think people can judge the facts for themselves.
(28:10):
This is not as Matt Lauer describes Um in Brooke
Neville's Rendering an Affair. This is a case of a
junior employee who has already immediately begun reporting two people
around her that this was an attack, feeling terrified and
placed in a in a position where she is cornered
(28:31):
by these invitations to go to his apartment, have drinks,
all the things he mentioned, who is struggling not to
piss off a powerful man. In her account of events,
um And, who she readily concedes, did everything in her
power to put him at ease, to try to make
him feel that she was okay with things and she
wasn't going to tell on him. Um And And, by
(28:54):
the way, that follow on of contacts between them included
interactions where she just described trying to get away from
him and being forced to interact with him for professional reasons,
having to go to his office to get things or
tape things and UH, and then him propositioning her for
sexual favors, and how demoralizing and brutalizing that was. So.
I hope people read the narrative in the book in full,
(29:16):
because it is both fair to Matt Lowers thinking and
also lays out a much more complicated portrait than the
items that have been planted, saying this is just an affair.
And in fact, your account of Brooke Neville's uh conversation
with you you visit her at her apartment. I think
is is heartbreaking, and I think it does I think
(29:37):
provide a window into the psychology of someone who has
been victimized. This is both about sexual abuse and also
the abuse of power. And you know, one recurring theme
that has been raised by some of these alleged survivors
of Matt Lowers predation is the idea that they were
(30:01):
targeted in part because of their junior position and the
fact that they worked for around people who were peers
of Matt Lowers, and that perhaps in some sense there
was a power play element to that. You know, it
is not for me to psychologize or explain why someone
in a position of that kind of influence would choose
(30:21):
to sleep with underlings and in the workplace rather than
anyone else in the world. NBC News insists, then, when
Matt Lower was fired in November of two thousand and seventeen,
this was the first time they had ever heard of
official allegations of sexual misconduct against him. You write, there
were multiple n d A S two I believe involving
(30:43):
Matt Lower. Tell me about those and about evidence that
you believe refutes their contention. This was their first real
understanding of Matt Lower's behavior in the workplace. Well, there
point on this is some what more modeled than what
you just alluded to. You know, there have been allusions
(31:05):
to the idea that perhaps previous management knew but no
Oppenheim specifically didn't know. So they've said a number of
things around this, and you know, many of those comments
are in the book, and I'll let them stand on
their own. What is not disputable, as there is a
paper trail in this book that shows that in a
period where the General Council of NBC told the reporters
of NBC there were no sexual harassment settlements, in fact,
(31:27):
there were at least seven. Several of those were with
women who had voiced complaints about Matt Lauer within the
company that were discussed at a very senior level years before.
I was going to ask you about that. About the
protocol of you know, how these things work, is that
the legal department do they go up to the very
(31:49):
highest level of management. Is it in fact possible that
these things were happening or transpiring without the knowledge of
the top executives at the organization? You know, and Curry,
a former colleague of ours, is on the record in
this book talking about how she told senior executives, and
I spoke to senior executives who were told by multiple people.
(32:10):
You know, there is a Matt lower problem. Matt Louer
is at least verbally harassing women in the office, maybe more.
And the answer to your question about systems and protocols is,
so often in these cases, what we're seeing is not
systems and protocols, but a failure of those things. You know,
it is true at Fox, at the Weinstein Company, at
(32:33):
CBS that none of the people that ultimately were fired
from misconduct had any record in their HR files about
sexual harassment. You know. Bill O'Reilly pointed out constantly there
is no record in my HR file. Harvey Weinstein pointed
out constantly, there's no record in my HR file. And
you know, human resources officials, who are tasked with monitoring
(32:54):
these kinds of issues in the workplace play a really
important role. And when we see these issues being discussed
but not being formally recorded in companies, that's a serious
failure of systems. I think there should be a separate
organization of HR personnel who do not answer to the
(33:14):
power structure at an organization. There needs to be, and
we see this question of independence all the time. There
are multiple scenes in which the wonderful journalists of NBC
who are now anguished about this and calling for accountability,
including on air, telling their bosses we need an independent
investigation of Matt Louer of the killing of the Weinstein story.
Over and over again this comes up and leadership at
(33:36):
this company refuses. And this is a theme that again
is bigger than NBC. We've seen it at multiple companies
where there is resistance to outside independent review. An internal
review is not a review, and I think that's one
of the lessons of this era. I was surprised that
they ordered an internal review and there wasn't that much
pushback inside NBC although perhaps there was there there was,
(33:58):
and we documented. You know, there's this incredible exchange where, uh,
the journalists of the investigative Unit sit with Kim Harris,
the general counsel of this company, and these wonderful reporters say,
why are we not doing an outside review, even if
it's unflattering, it will help the problem go away, to
be forthright about it. And she says, well, if the
(34:19):
press would stop talking about it, it'll go away. And
a reporter in the room says, we are the press
when we come back. The future of NBC's leadership, Harvey
Weinstein and the me too movement that's right after this, Ronnan,
were you surprised so many people were willing to help
(34:40):
you with your reporting? And why do you think they
were willing to do that? And what does it tell
you about the atmosphere or the environment inside the corridors
of NBC News. This book is a tribute and a
love letter in a lot of ways to fellow reporters,
and a lot of those reporters are at NBC. I
admire them tremendously as journalists. Many of them are sources
(35:02):
in this book, And you know, I fundamentally believe in
our profession, Katie, I think we're tasked with interrogating the
truth in as fair away as possible. I think that
is true of a vast majority of the reporters at
NBC and that CBS organizations I've done reporting on, and
they are correctly trying to help along reporters digging into
(35:23):
this and asking for answers. Did you leave any stories
about sexual misconduct out because you felt, for legal reasons
you were unable to report them? Every story I do, Katie,
there is a wider universe of facts than what makes
it onto the page. And that is true in an
especially huge and significant way with a book that you
(35:45):
actually started as a thousand page draft and then had
to be whittled down. So there's a whole variety of
reasons why you don't include certain stories, even if they
fact check. Um. You know that can be because is
you feel like you want just one extra layer of corroboration,
because everything in this had to be so bulletproof. It
(36:07):
can be because even though it's true, you feel like
it is unfair or prejudicial in some way to include it.
This book actually initially ended with a particularly sort of
personal and withering account of something about one of the
people that I report on in it. And in the
end I felt like ending the book on a note
(36:28):
that is about a person was the wrong move. That
it had to end on a note that was about
systems and about big themes. And in fact, you do
not blame any one person, and you go out of
your way grown In, after I think you're implored by
Noah Oppenheim that he is not the villain, you write
that Noah Oppenheim is not the villain, even though he
(36:48):
said to you that it was quote, a consensus about
the organization's comfort level moving forward, and you go on
to write rown In it was that consensus that stopped
the reporting that out to lawyers and threats that hempden
hot and parsed and shrugged, that sat on multiple credible
allegations of sexual misconduct and disregarded a recorded admission of guilt.
(37:11):
That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld
so much silence in so many places 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. That to me must for
(37:34):
you have been one of the most important paragraphs who
wrote in this book. It was because, Katie, the point
I'm making there, and that kind of Noah Oppenheim perhaps
uh not fully wittingly makes in his speech where he
begs me to to kind of exonerate him in this
is Yes, there was a specific plot that played out
(37:55):
here in terms of the contacts between NBC and Harvey Weinstein. Yes,
there were specific added who's on the parts of these men,
some of whom have been accused of serious misconduct, and
their beliefs about whether this issue mattered. But almost more
than that, Katie, this is also a story about garden
variety corporate cowardice, and people like Noah Oppenheim who sit
there and say, I have a boss. There's other people
(38:17):
making these decisions. I don't know. I got to talk
to legal. And when you see people passing the buck
and looking the other way and feeling that there is
no ownership over decisions at a company, that is what
creates the situations like the ones we've seen at the
Weinstein Company, the ones we've seen at am I, the
ones we've seen at CBS and the ones that we're
seeing at NBC. The l A Times reports at NBC
(38:39):
Universal CEO Steep Burke has read your book and continues
to support Noah Oppenheim. He is in line to succeed
NBC News chairman Andy Lack, who is seventy two and
his contract runs through next year. What is your action
to step Burke's continued support of Noah Oppenheimen What do
you believe should happen to the men who were making
(39:01):
these decisions? You know, I'm a reporter, not an activist, Katie,
and every story that I write, I get a similar question.
What's gonna happen, What's gonna happen in Harvey Weinstein's criminal trial,
What's gonna happen to Les Moonvez before he was fired.
It's not my job to be a part of that conversation.
My job is to fairly and rigorously interrogate the facts.
(39:22):
And I am so grateful that incredible journalists inside and
outside of NBC have taken those facts and pursued them
further and demanded more transparency and accountability. And my hope
in writing a book like this is not to get
anyone fired. It is to prompt a serious and broader
conversation about the need for accountability in media, the need
(39:44):
to defend brave sources and brave reporters. I know you
continue to get hundreds of emails and tips every day. Well,
we continue to hear me too accusations about other people
in the media. Are other shoes still likely to drop?
This story is very much about the bravery of sources.
It ends not on a note of pessimism and darkness,
(40:06):
but on one of hope about people continuing to come forward.
That's true for a reason. My inbox is full of leads,
and I am so grateful to everyone who entrusts me
with evidence. I can't promise that I'll always respond to
every message, but I can promise if you present me
with something newsworthy, I will. If I can't report on it,
try to get it to someone else. And there's a
bigger theme here, Katie, which is the press is not
(40:28):
bowing to cover ups an intimidation. Sources and whistleblowers are
not shutting up, and as long as that's the case,
we've got a shot at transparency and accountability in this country. Finally,
what is the next step in your view and the
me too movement. How do we move the conversation forward,
grown in and see real change implemented at these institutions, organizations, companies,
(40:52):
not just in media but across all industries. That to
me is the real question, because you look get some
of the power structures at some of these organizations, and
they don't seem to budge. Some have. Susan Zarinsky is
now president of CBS News, the first female president ever,
And there's obviously an awakening and a reckoning as everyone
(41:14):
has talked about. But will institutional change actually follow, and
how can the conversation encourage that consumers and people like
us in the media have to call for action and
for unbudgeable companies to budge. CBS, which you mentioned, is
a great example of a company that thought there was
(41:35):
a similar kind of smear campaign against reporting and ultimately
did have a serious conversation about the need for change
and did start to enact changes. It's not perfect there,
but things are shifting. Their need to be reassessments not
just of leadership but of corporate policies. We are seeing
companies like Uber pledged to not use n d A
s with respect to sexual harassment, and in fact, twenty
(41:58):
six states are now considering Legislator Shan making n d
as illegal. Yes, so you know, part of uncovering this
chain of secret settlements at NBC and these nd as
is about this broader phenomenon where thankfully, legislatures and companies
are taking a second look at that kind of practice.
Ronan Pharaoh. The book, if anyone hasn't heard of it
(42:18):
at this point, is called catching Kill Lies, Spies and
a Conspiracy to protect predators. Ronan, thank you very much.
Always such a pleasure to talk to you, Katie, thank you.
Next Question with Katie Curic is a production of I
Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media. The executive producers are
(42:38):
Katie Kuric, Lauren Bright Pacheco, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang.
Our show producers are Bethan Macaluso and Courtney Litz. The
supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. Associate producers are Emily Pinto
and Derek Clemens. Editing is by Dylan Fagin, Derrek Clements,
and Lowell Brolante. Our researcher is Barbara Keene. For more
information on today's episode, go to Katie correct dot com
(43:00):
and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Couric.
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Host
Katie Couric
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