How NBC and Ronan Farrow Ended Up in a Feud Over Weinstein

The disagreement between reporter Ronan Farrow and NBC News goes back to 2017, when he was reporting on the alleged sexual misconduct of film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Farrow later took his reporting to The New Yorker and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

The dispute grew heated last week, when Rich McHugh, a producer who worked with Farrow at NBC, gave an interview to The New York Times in which he accused the network of impeding the reporting of the Weinstein story in what he described as “a massive breach of journalistic integrity.” NBC News has denied the accusation.

With both camps offering very different explanations of what happened last year, let’s take a step back and examine how they ended up at an impasse.

This is one of many points of contention between the reporter and the network.

According to the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim, the idea to leave started with Farrow, who asked to pursue the Weinstein story for another news outlet on Aug. 17, 2017. In an interview with The Times, Oppenheim said that “Ronan reached out to us and said: ‘I want to get this out now. I have a magazine that’s willing to do it. Will you be OK if I take the reporting to this magazine?’ And we granted him permission to do so.”

Farrow challenged that interpretation in a statement he posted on Twitter on Monday. “The suggestion to take the story to another outlet was first raised by NBC, not me, and I took them up on it only after it became clear that I was being blocked from further reporting,” he said.

That is what McHugh claimed in his interview with The Times, saying that he sensed something was amiss not long after Farrow interviewed actress Rose McGowan in February.

“From that point on, I think it’s fair to say Ronan and I felt resistance,” he said. “We were told to put the story on the back burner. Fortunately, we did not. We hit the gas. But we did so discreetly.” He added that he and Farrow confronted “obstacles” from within NBC throughout the reporting process.

Oppenheim said that NBC never expressed reluctance toward Farrow’s reporting. “For eight months, we gave him everything he asked for to pursue it, because we found it compelling,” he said.

Farrow and his producer say yes. NBC says no.

McHugh, the producer, cites the events of Aug. 18, 2017, to make the case that the network pulled the plug on the Weinstein story.

“It was a Friday, three days before Ronan and I were going to head to L.A. to interview a woman with a credible rape allegation against Harvey Weinstein, I was ordered to stop, not interview this woman,” McHugh told The Times. “And to stand down on the story altogether.”

McHugh added, “I told them at that point by ordering me to stand down, NBC was killing the Harvey Weinstein story.”

Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News, disagreed. In an email he sent to NBC News staff members on Monday, he said, “Contrary to recent allegations, at no point did NBC obstruct Farrow’s reporting or ‘kill’ an interview.”

Oppenheim said that what happened on Aug. 18 was moot, because Farrow was no longer reporting the Weinstein story for NBC: “We said, ‘You’ve asked for permission to go elsewhere. You can’t use an NBC camera crew for another outlet. You can do whatever you want to do. And you don’t work for us.”

The two sides have widely different views on this matter. Both focus their arguments on whether Farrow had interview subjects who were willing to make on-the-record allegations against Weinstein.

Lack and Oppenheim, in their recent statements, echoed an internal report prepared by NBC in saying that Farrow’s story was not ready for broadcast.

In his email to the staff, Lack wrote, “We spent eight months pursuing the story but at the end of that time, NBC News — like many others before us — still did not have a single victim or witness willing to go on the record. (Rose McGowan — the only woman Farrow interviewed who was willing to be identified — had refused to name Weinstein and then her lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter.) So we had nothing yet fit to broadcast. But Farrow did not agree with that standard.”

Farrow said in his statement that NBC’s account of the reporting process was “incomplete and omits women who were either identified in the NBC story or offered to be.”

One of Farrow’s interview subjects, Emily Nestor, came to the reporter’s defense on Tuesday. A temporary employee at The Weinstein Co., Nestor said she was sexually harassed by Weinstein. She was on the record in Farrow’s first article for The New Yorker, which was published Oct. 10, 2017.

Nestor said Tuesday that she “actually did film a spot for NBC, albeit in silhouette, and had tentatively agreed with Farrow to reshoot the interview in full-face or attach my name to the already filmed interview in silhouette.” She said NBC was “not interested in this interview.”

Through a spokeswoman, NBC denied Nestor’s version, saying that it had asked a producer to review Farrow’s reporting at the time when he was working on the Weinstein story, and “at no time then or since did Nestor tell her or NBC News she was willing to be named.”

A second person apparently willing to go on the record was McGowan. That is what NBC’s Megyn Kelly reported Tuesday on “Megyn Kelly Today.”

The host said that McGowan’s “on-the-record, off-camera assertion” about Weinstein was available to NBC last year. Kelly based this statement on interviews with McHugh and McGowan conducted for her program. Kelly added that McHugh said NBC executives were aware of McGowan’s willingness to go on the record.

In a statement, NBC countered, saying that Farrow had not included McGowan’s account in any draft of the Weinstein story until she appeared in a script on July 23.

The statement added, “Within days of that July 23 draft script being submitted, while Farrow attempted to get McGowan to name Weinstein on camera, she canceled a follow-up interview and her attorney sent NBC a cease-and-desist letter revoking all permission to use any material related to her.”

Farrow: Yes.

NBC: No.

“The story was twice cleared and deemed ‘reportable’ by legal and standards only to be blocked by executives who refused to allow us to seek comment from Harvey Weinstein,” Farrow said.

NBC said that his reporting “was never cleared or approved” by NBC’s standards or legal departments. “While he was told by his editors that several elements of the draft script were technically ‘reportable,’ he was consistently advised that — even taken together — they were not yet sufficient to air a story alleging serial sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein without at least one victim or witness on the record,” the network said.

Last fall, but only in a tepid way.

Soon after Farrow published his first New Yorker article on Weinstein, he implied that he disagreed with the network’s position during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

“I walked into the door at The New Yorker with an explosively reportable piece that should have been public earlier,” Farrow told Maddow.

That was as far as Farrow went in his criticism of NBC until Monday night, when the disagreement grew heated.