NBC News president Noah Oppenheim railed against sexual assault accusers and mocked feminists when he was a student at Harvard

The Daily Beast

Copies of Oppenheim's Harvard Crimson columns from the late 1990s have been circulating in the NBC News newsroom, according to The Daily Beast. In one column, Oppenheim attacked NBC's decision to fire Marv Albert in 1997 after the sportscaster pleaded guilty in sexual assault case. “The trial was a sham and that the network’s action was an injustice,” Oppenheim wrote in the October 1997 column. He lamented how Albert’s accuser, Vanessa Perhach, was “permitted to remain shielded in anonymity” while Albert’s sex life faced public probing. As The Daily Beast notes, Perhach accused the sportscaster of throwing her on a hotel bed, biting her, and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. “It is certainly a noble goal to protect the victims of sexual assault from mistreatment in the courtroom,” Oppenheim wrote, “but why should Marv’s past conduct have been subject to the closest scrutiny, while Perhach’s character history have remained off-limits?” Oppenheim joined NBC News in 2000, rising up the ranks until he was named NBC News president in 2017.