Ronan Farrow's producer: NBC News bosses behaved like members of Harvey Weinstein's PR team in killing sexual harassment story

Vanity Fair

Rich McHugh, who worked closely with Farrow on his NBC News Weinstein sexual misconduct investigation, describes in detail all the ways that NBC News chairman Andy Lack and NBC News president Noah Oppenheim allegedly bowed to pressure from Weinstein in trying to quash the sexual misconduct story. Not only did they kill the Weinstein story before it broke, they also allegedly made sure to downplay it when the story broke. "They had not only killed our investigation—they continued to bury our reporting, even after it became a national news story," he writes in Vanity Fair. "An NBC anchor asked me to do an interview for the Today show—but rescinded the invitation after Oppenheim vetoed the idea. When she asked him why, he replied, 'It’s complicated.'" McHugh, who left NBC News in August of last year, writes: "As I witnessed firsthand during the year I spent at NBC News after Ronan published our reporting in the New Yorker—and as Ronan has further documented in his forthcoming book, Catch and Kill—Lack and Oppenheim were the ones who were lying. They not only personally intervened to shut down our investigation of Weinstein, they even refused to allow me to follow up on our work after Weinstein’s history of sexual assault became front-page news. As the record shows, they behaved more like members of Weinstein’s PR team than the journalists they claim to be. Thanks to them, a leading national news organization, in broad daylight and with zero remorse, abdicated its single greatest responsibility—to relentlessly pursue and tell the truth." McHugh also suspects his phone was hacked by Weinstein's people. But, he adds, "what I faced from my bosses at NBC, though, felt worse than being spied on by Weinstein’s paid thugs. As a reporter, you expect the powerful people you’re investigating to play rough. What’s harder to experience is the stress and anxiety of being attacked from the inside, by the people who are supposed to have your back."