As it turns out, NBC’s investigation of NBC showing there is no evidence of a “culture of sexual harassment” at NBC may not have been so thorough as the network would have you believe.
MSNBC president Phil Griffin, for example, grew so comfortable in whatever culture produced disgraced former host Matt Lauer that he once touted photos of NBC star Maria Menounos’ vagina during a meeting with colleagues, according to journalist Ronan Farrow.
Farrow reports in his forthcoming book, Catch & Kill:
“Would you look at that? Not bad, not bad,” Griffin reportedly remarked.
Remember: This is the president of a major cable news network. He reportedly said this of an NBC employee’s vagina in a meeting with other NBC employees. That Griffin apparently felt comfortable enough to do something like this in front of colleagues should tell you a little something about how Lauer was able to get away with his alleged sexual depredations for as long as he did.
Speaking of the former NBC host: This anecdote about Griffin sharing illicit photos of Menounos comes on the heels of a separate excerpt from Farrow’s book alleging Lauer anally raped an NBC News colleague in a Sochi hotel in 2014. Lauer denies the allegation, though he concedes he did indeed cheat on his then-wife Annette Roque with the young NBC staffer.
Nearly as vile as the reported act itself is that the alleged victim informed her superiors in two separate NBC divisions about what supposedly happened to her in Sochi, and they did nothing.
“This was no secret,” Farrow writes.
For good measure, here are excerpts from the New York Times’ 2017 reporting on additional allegations leveled against Lauer:
The woman said Mr. Lauer asked her to unbutton her blouse, which she did. She said the anchor then stepped out from behind his desk, pulled down her pants, bent her over a chair and had intercourse with her. At some point, she said, she passed out with her pants pulled halfway down. She woke up on the floor of his office, and Mr. Lauer had his assistant take her to a nurse.
You may ask yourself: “How would Lauer be able to get away for so long with this sort of behavior?” For an answer to that question, we may have to look at his superiors, including NBC and MSNBC chairman Andy Lack, who reportedly has a reputation within the company for preying on female subordinates.
CBS news anchor Jane Wallace, for example, tells Farrow that Lack was “almost unrelenting” in asking her out “every day for almost a month,” and that she “didn’t just get flirted with” but that she “got worked over.”
“If your boss does that, what are you gonna say?” said Wallace, who clarified that her sexual interactions with Lack were consensual. “You know if you say ‘I don’t want to celebrate with you,’ you’re asking for trouble.”
Farrow adds that after Wallace “left the show, she recalled [Lack] yelling, ‘You will never get credit.’ Then the network deployed a tactic that the public was barely conscious of at the time: it offered her a substantial payout to sign a binding nondisclosure agreement.”
I feel like now is an appropriate time to remind you that NBC is certainly no stranger to burying allegations of sexual misconduct. Nearly three years ago, in 2016, the network tried to squash Farrow’s reporting on the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
That same year, NBC allowed itself to get scooped by the Washington Post somehow on a major election year story involving a certain former NBC host boasting that he can do whatever he wants, including grabbing women “by the pussy.”
Earlier than that even, in 1999, the network sat on its exclusive interview of Juanita Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton raped her in the 1970s, until after the president had been acquitted on two articles of impeachment.
For people like Lauer to operate in the way he did, and for the network to get into the habit of killing major but potentially damaging news stories, it would require a substantial network of enablers.
The story now is no longer about just Matt Lauer. It is about NBC itself and the culture that allowed someone like the disgraced morning host to operate freely for so long. As the saying goes, a fish rots from the head down.
