‘That Was a Scandal’: Ken Auletta Condemns NBC’s ‘Outrageous’ Handling of Ronan Farrow’s Weinstein Story

“Ronan Farrow was vindicated in my mind,” says Ken Auletta. “And NBC was not.”

It’s a damning verdict from the legendary media reporter and New Yorker writer — whose new book on Harvey Weinstein examines why NBC News passed on a story that would finally expose the movie mogul’s decades of sexual abuse.

I spoke to Auletta for this week’s episode of The Interview about his new book — Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence — which examines how Weinstein went from humble beginnings, to the top of Hollywood, and then to a jail cell, where he’s serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault.

In Hollywood Ending, Auletta seeks to understand how Weinstein, despite considerable talent as a producer, was such an abusive monster. It also documents, in enraging detail, the web of complicity that shielded Weinstein from accountability, allowing his abuse to remain an open secret for decades.

That complicity, Auletta says, continued until 2017 when it was finally punctured by a pair of bombshell reports — by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in the New York Times and days later Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker — which featured multiple women, on the record, accusing Weinstein of sexual abuse.

The dispute between Farrow and NBC News, where he worked in 2017, is well documented. NBC passed on his Weinstein story, which he then brought to New Yorker. He claims NBC bowed to pressure from Weinstein — who has had remarkable success over the years in bullying not just his accusers, but also the media, into silence. NBC claims Farrow did not have enough to run a story.

Auletta investigated the dispute, and concluded the conflicting accounts were not a murky he said/she said as long assumed.

Because NBC News maintains Farrow did not have a story until he went to the New Yorker, Auletta contacted his editor at the magazine, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn. She said Farrow brought three women who were named, five more women with their identities shielded, and an audio tape in which Weinstein admits to groping a model — more than enough for a story.

Those elements were, according to Auletta, “all the things [Farrow] said to me that he had before he went to The New Yorker. So Ronan Farrow was vindicated in my mind. And NBC was not.”

According to Auletta’s reporting, NBC News committed another grave sin: the network informed Weinstein that the story was dead in July 2017, the month before they told Farrow.

“That’s a scandal,” Auletta said. “That Harvey was so inside.”

NBC has denied that it informed Weinstein before Farrow that the story would not run.

I asked Auletta why, if Farrow is right, NBC News was so eager to protect a Hollywood film producer.

“We don’t know the answer to your question, but I came up with five possible theories to explain why they’d kill this story,” he said. Those theories, which are spelled out in the book, include NBC News president Noah Oppenheim’s side hustle as a successful screenwriter, and Weinstein’s close friendships with executives at the network and its parent company.

“Those are the theories that are out there for what explains NBC’s odd and I think outrageous behavior,” Auletta said.

Whatever the reason for NBC spiking the story, it landed safely at the New Yorker — thanks in no small part to Auletta.

Nearly two decades earlier he wrote a definitive profile of Weinstein for the magazine, and came close to reporting on the allegations of misconduct against him, but couldn’t get any women on the record. David Remnick, the longtime editor of the New Yorker, decided they could not run anonymous allegations.

Years later, in 2017, Farrow interviewed Auletta for his own story on Weinstein, one which focused solely on the allegations of abuse. When Farrow told Auletta that NBC would not be running the piece, Auletta reached out to Remnick and said he thought Farrow was “judicious” and had finally nailed Weinstein.

“And the rest is history,” Auletta said.

We also discussed his thoughts on the work of Kantor, Twohey and Farrow and how they were able to get these women to speak out.

One of the things that’s really interesting is people will say to me to minimize the feat that they perform, these reporters perform. They will say, we as a culture had changed and wasn’t that really why Harvey was exposed by them? And the answer is, yes, there are certain things that changed. Bill Cosby had been tried and exposed. Roger Ailes had been fired from Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had been fired from Fox News. But that minimizes what they did. They made women comfortable enough to talk to them and overcome their fears and describe what this monster did to them. And one of the clever things they did, they got the women to talk in groups so they weren’t isolated one on one. And so suddenly they were doing so with other fellow victims of Harvey Weinstein. And it was just brilliant.

I asked whether he had any concerns about humanizing Weinstein — or even aggrandizing him — by chronicling his remarkable success in Hollywood:

No, I didn’t. I mean, a biography is not a prosecution brief. It’s a whole person’s life. And if you write about someone and describe them as a cardboard cutout figure, you failed as a biographer. You want to be able to describe the whole person. I felt in no danger after describing the horrible things that Harvey did to women, that when I described the talents and movies he made and distributed. I felt in no danger that I was minimizing his beastly behavior.

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