The New York Times is reporting, and some of us saw it in real time, that “Rachel Maddow publicly confronted the leadership of her own network on Friday night, declaring live on air that she and other NBC News employees had deep concerns about whether the organization had stymied Ronan Farrow’s reporting on the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.”
“In a prime-time monologue, Ms. Maddow questioned why NBC News executives had not invited an independent investigation of the Weinstein episode or the workplace behavior of Matt Lauer, the former Today show anchor who was fired in 2017 after a colleague accused him of sexual misconduct.”
“I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs in this company since I’ve been here. It would be impossible for me to overstate the amount of consternation inside the building around this issue.” Maddow said.
Also Friday, the organizer of a performance Harvey Weinstein attended apologized for letting the alleged rapist in and for making one of the women who heckled him leave.
“Mr. Weinstein will not be attending any future Actor’s Hour events,” said Alexandra Laliberte of the Actors Hour via social media. She also said it was wrong to ask one of the women who yelled at Weinstein to leave.
“Then and there, I should have shut down the event or given her the microphone to vocalize her feelings, but I was in total shock and I let my fear and inexperience paralyze my decision-making ability,” she wrote. Laliberte said she allowed the disgraced movie mogul to attend this week’s event because no one objected after he attended the last one.
Harvey Weinstein is an American former film producer and co-founder of Miramax, which produced a string of successful films. He’s won an Academy Award and seven Tony Awards. He was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.
In October 2017, following sexual abuse allegations against him, he was dismissed from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. By October 31, over 80 women had made allegations against him. The allegations sparked the #MeToo social media campaign and many similar sexual abuse allegations against and dismissals of powerful men around the world, now called the “Weinstein effect”. On May 25, 2018, Weinstein was arrested in New York, charged with rape and other offenses, and released on bail.
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning The Rachel Maddow Show on msnbc. She is also the author of DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list in March 2012, and the best-selling Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth.
She voices the character Vesper Fairchild, a TV and radio news commentator, in the CW series Batwoman.
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