NBC News has hit back at accusations by the journalist Ronan Farrow that management knew of and took steps to hide sexual misconduct by the news anchor Matt Lauer before he was fired in November 2017.
Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, is published in the US on Tuesday. The author alleges that NBC knew about Lauer’s alleged behavior, including the alleged rape of Brooke Nevils in 2014 at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and sought to cover it up.
Farrow also alleges that his own reporting on the now disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein was quashed in order to protect Lauer.
In an email to employees on Monday that was published by Deadline.com, the NBC News president, Noah Oppenheim, accused Farrow of taking the company’s denial that it knew of Lauer’s “abhorrent” actions and “twists it into a lie – alleging we were a ‘company with a lot of secrets’”.
“We have no secrets and nothing to hide,” Oppenheim said.
“Not only is this false, the so-called evidence Farrow uses in his book to support the charge collapses under the slightest scrutiny,” Oppenheim continued in the email.
In his book, Farrow alleges that there were employees who reported on Lauer’s behavior before his firing and were paid settlements, euphemistically known as “enhanced severance”, to silence them.
“Over a period of six to seven years, a period in which NBC had previously denied any settlements, there were seven non-disclosure agreements, multiple ones of those were with Matt Lauer accusers,” Farrow told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday.
At the time of Lauer’s firing, a spokesperson for the network said: “We can say unequivocally, that, prior to Monday night, current NBC News management was never made aware of any complaints about Matt Lauer’s conduct.”
In his letter, Oppenheim said NBC’s legal team had now had an opportunity to review the book and its allegations. He said the agreements Farrow cites that are Lauer-related involve employees who by their own admission made no complaint to management and whose departures were unrelated to the news anchor.
They include Ann Curry, who left after clashing with Lauer, an “on-air personality” who departed in 2012, and a “senior member of the Today show team”.
Oppenheim concedes: “We can all agree those misdeeds should have come to light sooner, and that we should have had a culture in which anyone who knew about his abuse would have felt comfortable telling management.”
But he accused Farrow, a former employee at NBC who ultimately published an investigative #MeToo piece on Harvey Weinstein in the New Yorker, of wrongly saying NBC obstructed his reporting on the disgraced movie mogul.
In the book, Farrow reconstructs a telephone conversation between Weinstein and Andy Lack, the chairman of NBC News, in which Weinstein allegedly griped that “your boy Ronan” was digging up stuff from “the ’90s” and added: “We all did that.”
Last week, Lauer described the allegation that he hd raped his co-worker as “categorically false, ignores the facts, and defies common sense”. He described the encounter with Nevils as an “extramarital affair” and dismissed the claims as “part of a promotional effort to sell a book”.
In his book, Farrow does not say how he was able to report the conversation between Lack and Weinstein, though a note in the book states: “Because this is a story about surveillance, third parties often witnessed or surreptitiously recorded conversations, and I was sometimes able to obtain their testimonials and records.”
In an interview with the Guardian Farrow said the underlying reason for the alleged cover-up “is just baseline casual misogyny. And misogyny is a very damning word, but actually it looks quite banal a lot of the time: it’s not believing that it’s an issue that matters.
“A lot of others who, informed by a whole lot of cultural and identity factors, just didn’t care, and didn’t think anyone else would ever care,” he added.