Ronan Farrow: NBC Knew of Years of Matt Lauer Abuse Allegations Before They Were Finally Shamed to Act

Farrow disputes NBC news chief Andy Lack's claim that he only heard of the one complaint.

Investigative journalist Ronan Farrow has accused NBC News executives of being aware of multiple other misconduct allegations against former Today host Matt Lauer and arranging other settlement agreements years before his firing in 2017. Farrow's new book, Catch and Kill, revealed the complaint behind Lauer's firing--one of his colleagues accused him of rape at the Sochi Olympics in 2014.

When Lauer was fired in 2017, NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack called it the "first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years" Lauer had been at the company. Farrow has now disputed that, telling Good Morning America on Friday: "What we show in this book, with a paper trail, with documents, was that there were multiple secret settlements and nondisclosures being struck with women at NBC News." He went on to say there were seven nondisclosure agreements struck with women at NBC News, adding: "Multiple ones of those were with Matt Lauer accusers. This is years before this [Sochi] incident with Brooke Nevils and the firing, and I spoke to senior executives who were told about those earlier incidents."

Meanwhile, NBC employees are demanding answers from the network president Noah Oppenheim.

Oppenheim took some kind of conference call with NBC "news" employees, who pretended to be real journalists asking tough questions and who also pretended to not have heard about any of this before.

Oppenheim did not have answers for some of the staff's most pressing questions, sources told The Daily Beast. Most notably, he dodged employee questions about whether Lauer's accuser Brooke Nevils had informed the network that the ex-anchor had anally raped her when she initially made an internal complaint. At the time, the network claimed the accusation was simply "inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace" that was "a clear violation of our company’s standards."

One staffer pointedly asked Oppenheim, "Did she [Nevils] use the word 'assault' when she reported this?" The network president allegedly "deflected," a source said, and did not answer the question, citing a need to protect a "person's confidentiality."

...

"It is an absolute disgrace these two [Oppenheim and Lack] are dirtying our doorstep," a senior staffer told The Daily Beast following the meeting. "We were lied to and are pissed."

In any small industry and/or office, rumors travel fast. But all of these "journalists" are just shocked and stunned to hear about scandalous things that happened just two floors away.

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:55 PM

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