Revelations of a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and abuse at NBC just keep getting worse.
On Monday, writer Sil Lai Abrams shared in the Daily Beast that Ronan Farrow isn’t the only one who has had a sexual abuse story killed by the media company.
Abrams says she was raped by film producer Russell Simmons in 1994 and sexually assaulted by former Extra co-host A.J. Calloway in 2006. When she reached out to NBC’s Joy-Ann Reid with the story, it got stalled through an increasingly nebulous set of hurdles.
“When I approached Joy,” she wrote, “I had no idea that NBC had a reputation for not breaking news about men accused of sexual assault.”
After months of waiting for NBC to finish its vetting process and run an interview with her, Abrams got a call from Reid.
Abrams recounts that Reid told her on the phone, “I’ve never done a story that has this much evidence before. I have more evidence than the LA Times and the New York Times stories combined. So the whole thing is, if my company will trust the evidence that I’ve shown them, which is substantial, they will do the story.”
But by April 2018, NBC reportedly stopped responding to Reid’s inquiries about the story.
“Just like that, NBC threw Joy and me under the bus,” Abrams wrote. “It killed her story and — at least temporarily — silenced me.”
“The media is supposed to be a watchdog for abuses of power,” she continued. “Yet we keep learning how NBC uses its power to protect those in power.”
NBC has been in the news lately for ignoring a new sexual abuse accusation against former host Matt Lauer, silencing Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein, and harboring multiple executives accused of sexual misconduct.
This certainly seems like enough corruption and intrigue for a Hollywood film.
There’s already a market for it. In December, Lionsgate is releasing Bombshell, a film about sexual abuse allegations against former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. The upcoming Apple TV Plus series, The Morning Show, is not technically about Matt Lauer, though it’s basically about Matt Lauer.
If Hollywood cares about telling stories about abuse at the highest echelons of the journalism world, what better story to tell than the apparent cover-ups and misdeeds at NBC? The story could make a film just as intriguing as a movie about Fox News or a show about a single television host.
Bombshell, which is already drumming up Oscar buzz, looks like a powerful film about sexism and power dynamics in the media. There should be a similar movie about NBC, but that will only happen when Hollywood decides to care about women in the workplace as much as it cares about taking shots at Fox News.
