NBC News denies paying out settlements to past Matt Lauer accusers, calls Ronan Farrow's book a "smear" and "conspiracy theory"

Mediaite

"Now that we’ve read Farrow’s book, it’s clear — his smear rests on the allegation that NBC’s management knew about and took steps to hide Matt Lauer’s misconduct before his firing in November of 2017," NBC News president Noah Oppenheim wrote in a staff memo today, one day before Catch and Kill's publication. "Without that, he has no basis on which to rest his second conspiracy theory — that his Harvey Weinstein reporting was squashed to protect Lauer.  Not only is this false, the so-called evidence Farrow uses in his book to support the charge collapses under the slightest scrutiny.” Oppenheim adds: "Matt Lauer's actions were abhorrent, and the anger and sadness he caused continue to this day. As we've said since the moment he was fired, his abuses should never have happened. Ronan Farrow's book takes that undeniable fact and twists it into a lie — alleging we were a 'company with a lot of secrets.' We have no secrets and nothing to hide."

ALSO:

• NBC News president Noah Oppenheim expresses regret for his sexist late 1990s Harvard Crimson columns: “My reaction to seeing those excerpts is that I’m mortified by them,” Oppenheim told the Los Angeles Times. “I couldn’t be more sorry I wrote them. They are totally inappropriate. I wrote hundreds of columns for my college paper over 20 years ago, many of them meant to be satirical or intentionally provocative, and those idiotic, inappropriate excerpts in no way reflect what I actually believe in any way, and certainly don’t reflect the way I’ve conducted my actual life, professionally or personally.”
• Ronan Farrow's book claims MSNBC president Phil Griffin once waved around a revealing photo of Maria Menounos at a staff meeting