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You know how I can barely watch cable news in the evening anymore? I go through phases where – in Trump’s America – I just can’t watch the daily/nightly onslaught of Trump bulls–t anymore. But after all of the increasingly vile revelations about Harvey Weinstein yesterday, I actually tuned in to All In with Chris Hayes and The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. I was hoping to sort of disconnect from my work-life. I was surprised to find that both Hayes and Maddow devoted large chunks of their shows to Weinstein. The story is a confluence of politics, power, Hollywood, media, women’s issues and more. So, basically, it was not the escape I was hoping for.
Maddow had an exclusive interview with Ronan Farrow on her show. Ronan spent the better part of a year working on the article which would eventually be published by the New Yorker yesterday. I finally finished reading the New Yorker piece (a few hours after I wrote about it) and it is clear that Ronan took the time to build relationships (journalist-to-subject) with the women who agreed to go on the record about the abuses and assaults. Farrow also spoke to more than a dozen current and former employees of The Weinstein Company, many of whom knew or suspected that Weinstein was abusing young women. Since Farrow was working on this piece for nearly a year, that gave a lot of people a lot of time, in both good and bad ways. Harvey knew that Ronan Farrow was digging around and interviewing people. And Harvey tried to shut it down, predictably.
Ronan Farrow told Rachel Maddow on Tuesday that he was threatened personally with a lawsuit by Harvey Weinstein while reporting on what turned out to be a New Yorker feature.
“In the course of this reporting, I was threatened with a lawsuit personally by Mr. Weinstein,” Farrow said on MSNBC. In anticipation of the story, Weinstein had enlisted a crisis management team and several attorneys, including lawyer Lisa Bloom, who resigned from the film mogul’s team on Saturday. When Maddow asked why Farrow’s feature ended up at The New Yorker rather than at NBC, where he is employed as a correspondent, he replied, “You would have to ask NBC and NBC executives about the details. I’m not going to comment on any news organization’s story that they did or did not run.”
He added: “I will say that over many years, many news organizations have circled this story and faced a great deal of pressure in doing so.”
Farrow had said that he worked for 10 months to investigate claims of harassment and assault against Weinstein. His report, published Tuesday in The New Yorker, included on-the-record recollections by actress Asia Argento and model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. It included audio of Weinstein admitting to groping Gutierrez.
“I walked into the door at The New Yorker with an explosively reportable piece that should have been public earlier, and immediately, obviously, The New Yorker recognized that, and it is not accurate to say that it was not reportable. In fact, there were multiple determinations that it was reportable at NBC,” Farrow recalled.
I’m not as interested in the insider-y media aspect to this story, because I think it’s pretty clear that many, many media outlets had bits and pieces of the larger Weinstein narrative over the years and none of them did much about it. The New York Times, the New Yorker, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and all of the trade papers likely killed critical Weinstein stories at various points in the past 25 years, at least that’s what I believe. The media side to this is only interesting to me because it’s a reflection of what NY Mag’s Rebecca Traister said from the beginning: that this story could only come out now because Harvey Weinstein’s power has been diminished. Even huge media outlets were scared of running critical stories of Weinstein in the ‘90s and throughout the 00s because of his power, because of the fear of lawsuits, because of his octopus-like reach, and because he would pull his advertising money.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.