Disgraced former NBC News anchor Matt Lauer has accused Ronan Farrow, the reporter who broke the story of an alleged rape against him, of failing to fact-check the claims his accuser made.
Farrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein, recently faced accusations that he does not vet all aspects of his stories before publishing them in a New York Times column, and Lauer’s allegations could put a larger spotlight on his old and future reporting.
While Lauer denied the allegations at the time they became public, he wrote a column, published Tuesday on Mediaite, calling Farrow’s reporting into question. The title of the piece, “Matt Lauer: Why Ronan Farrow Is Indeed Too Good to Be True,” is a play on words based on the New York Times column, which was titled, “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?”
The New York reporter, who has a poor relationship with NBC News from his time working there, published an allegation that Lauer raped a co-worker in his book Catch and Kill, which was published last fall. In the book, Brooke Nevils accused Lauer of sodomizing her in his hotel room at the 2014 Winter Olympics and that they continued an affair with each other back in New York because Nevils was afraid of what could happen if she stopped.
The former Today host, who was fired in 2017 for inappropriate workplace behavior, painted Farrow as a reporter with an ax to grind against his former employer because they tried to silence his reporting on Weinstein, which Farrow alleges in the book.
“He had his show on MSNBC cancelled, and he openly claimed that the network spiked his reporting on the Harvey Weinstein scandal. He spoke about his dissatisfaction publicly. It would be hard for anyone to argue that, when Ronan set out to write his book, he was even close to objective or unbiased when it came to NBC,” Lauer wrote before noting that he’s “not suggesting that everything Ronan has written in his book is untrue or based on misinformation, but it is clear that over the course of nearly two years he became a magnet and a willing ear for anyone with negative stories about the network and people who worked for it.”
He also accused the reporter of “routinely present[ing] stories in a way that would suit his activist goals, as opposed to any kind of journalistic standards.”
Lauer alleges that if Farrow had spoken to the people whom Nevils claimed to have talked to about the alleged sexual assault, they would have told a different story, and Lauer says he did speak to those people, and some would defend him. Mediaite included an editor’s note that said they “independently fact checked the accounts of the four witnesses/subjects Lauer spoke with and cites in this piece. All confirmed in early February that Lauer’s account of their conversations was accurate.”
Farrow, in response to Lauer’s comment, directed the Washington Examiner to a tweet that said, “All I’ll say on this is that Matt Lauer is just wrong. Catch and Kill was thoroughly reported and fact-checked, including with Matt Lauer himself.”
He also told the Washington Examiner after publication: “We called dozens of corroborators around the Lauer allegations described in the book, and more than a dozen around Brooke Nevils specifically.”
All I’ll say on this is that Matt Lauer is just wrong. Catch and Kill was thoroughly reported and fact-checked, including with Matt Lauer himself.
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) May 19, 2020
Similarly, Farrow’s publisher Little, Brown and Company defended Farrow’s reporting.
“Little, Brown and Company fully supports Ronan Farrow and his reporting in CATCH AND KILL,” a spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner. “Ronan’s dedication to a deep and thorough fact-check of his reporting, his commitment to the rights of victims and his impeccable attention to detail and nuance make us proud to be his publisher.”
In Ben Smith’s column for the New York Times, he questions whether Farrow falls into the trap of being too salacious and omitting facts that would complicate his stories.
“He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove,” Smith argued, but noted, “His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up.”
