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Did NBC Threaten Ronan Farrow About Reporting on Harvey Weinstein?

Did NBC Threaten Ronan Farrow About Reporting on Harvey Weinstein?

A bit lost in the huge cultural moment unleashed by Ronan Farrow’s dogged 2017 New Yorker report on disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is that when he first started researching the vast, ugly underbelly of Hollywood’s infamous exploitation of sex he was still working at NBC News. The piece helped launch the #MeToo movement and would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

There’s been some back and forth about just why Farrow and NBC parted ways. NBC News has insisted that Farrow’s piece wasn’t ready for primetime, a claim Farrow himself has disputed. But a new report from The Daily Beast has some alarming allegations, including multiple unsourced reports that say NBC News General Counsel Susan Weiner threatened to smear Farrow if he didn’t stop looking into Weinstein’s sordid history.

NBC News denies the allegations.

The Daily Beast article is lengthy, and details Farrow’s determination to investigate the story and NBC’s reluctance to help him, so much so that Farrow began to suspect that some of the execs—one of whom also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood—may have been communicating with Weinstein himself about his investigation. In one instance, The Daily Beast claims that NBC refused to let Farrow use a network camera crew to interview one of Weinstein’s accusers. Farrow allegedly paid for a team of freelancers out of his own pocket.

Eventually, Farrow became so frustrated with NBC’s ongoing dismissal of Farrow’s reports that he left the network for The New Yorker.

The whole story is worth a read, and is probably just the beginning of the headache NBC is going to endure as questions continue to swirl about just why they couldn’t pull the trigger on what was obviously a bombshell story.

You can read it all here.

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