01x05 - The Editors

[bunniefuu]

What was the craziest moment

in the fact-checking process

on that first Weinstein piece?

When we're on the phone with Weinstein

and there were some disturbing moments

where I was kind of shocked by how

much he expected things to go his way,

for no good reason,

except that he was who he is.

That certainly emboldened us

to do better.

We knew that the facts and crimes

have to be quite large,

to take someone like that down.

CATCH AND k*ll

THE PODCAST TAPES

THE EDITORS

We're living in a precarious moment

when it comes to the free press.

Five employees gunned down inside

the Capital Gazette newsroom.

Washington Post journalist,

Jamal Khashoggi, was m*rder*d.

There's a new w*r on journalists,

with blurred geographic lines

and intense digital media.

Protestors have ganged up

on the press in several cities.

But there are people on the

front lines of that fight

who make sure the truth

doesn't get buried.

Hey Ronan, this is David Remnick.

I'll be back. I'm just gonna go

meet my son for a quick lunch.

I'll be back by about 2:15.

That's a voicemail from the first

time David Remnick,

editor of The New Yorker, called me.

All that year, I'd been working on

the Weinstein story for NBC News.

But the network, which was receiving

legal threats from Weinstein,

had ordered me to stop reporting.

I had called Ken Auletta, who had

written a profile of Weinstein in 2002

and he had introduced me to David.

I called Remnick and I'll never

forget the word I used.

I said, Ronan Farrow

has broken the code.

He's got the goods

on Harvey Weinstein.

That's how, on the morning

of August 16th, 2017,

I wound up in a New Yorker

conference room

on the 38th floor of 1 World Trade

Center, pitching the story to editors,

David Remnick and

Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn.

You were nervous

and floating out into Nowheresville

with the story.

And you could tell that you were

really pitching hard.

And there was a relentlessness in your

desire to get the facts out there

and to tell us everything and to make

sure that we were observing it.

And, of course, I remember you

playing us the recording.

Five minutes. Don't ruin your

friendship with me for five minutes.

And outlining the reporting that

you had which seemed significant.

And that there was material

there already

that was strong enough

that the world should see it.

At the time, I was still fighting

to get the story on-air at NBC.

David made it clear that if I lost

that fight, he was interested.

It was an uncertain time for the

reporting. Soon after that meeting,

NBC finally said they didn't wanna be

associated with the story in any way.

And that's when Weinstein

and his intermediaries

started threatening me personally

with legal action,

saying they knew I no longer had the

protection of a news organization.

More women were still going

on the record

and I didn't know whether

to cancel those interviews

or keep pursuing the story

without an outlet.

I got a call from an editor

at The New Yorker who said,

Ronan's gonna call you in a minute.

He needs some help.

I was paralyzed

by the pressures of these

legal threats coming at me.

And you agreed to talk to me

even though The New Yorker hadn't

signed onto the story yet, formally,

and you had no obligation

to talk to me.

And even as standard practice

might have wanted to avoid

talking to someone who wasn't yet

under the egis of the magazine.

I think I made it clear to you

in that conversation,

I don't represent you at this point.

I'm a lawyer for the magazine.

I'm not your lawyer, but if I were,

these are the issues that I would

advise you to be concerned about

and these are the issues that I would

advise you not to worry so much about.

I had sat in rooms with these NBC

executives and even the lawyers

and heard them sort of parrot

Weinstein's argument on this.

If you're interviewing people

who have nondisclosure agreements,

that could put us

in a difficult position,

that could expose us to all

of this legal jeopardy.

I thought then that it's silly

and I think it's proven

to be a silly argument.

People threaten prior to publication

but they're unlikely to sue

prior to publication because

a lawsuit would be public,

and they would be publicizing the facts

that they wanna keep confidential.

And it made such a huge difference in

my life and in the life of the story,

hearing you articulate

that simple common sense logic

galvanized me in a huge way.

After speaking with Fabio,

I kept interviewing sources.

That included moving ahead

with an interview with a woman

who had agreed to speak

for the NBC story,

with her face in shadow

since she feared retaliation.

Rolling.

Obviously, without giving

any identifying information,

what did Mr. Weinstein do to you?

I don't know how to answer that.

Sorry, I know this is hard.

You used the term sexual as*ault.

Yes.

When you say sexual as*ault,

what do you mean, exactly?

What did Mr. Weinstein do to you?

He forced himself on me sexually

when it was unwanted

and unbidden and unwarranted.

He forced himself on me.

Why are you speaking out

about this today?

Cause I don't want

anyone else

to have to live with this.

I don't want him to be able

to do it to someone else.

There are people who will

watch this and say,

this is one of the most celebrated

high-profile executives in Hollywood.

How could it be that

there are multiple stories

and never come out publicly?

He's a very scary person.

He does a really good job

of making you believe

that he's your only lifeline,

that he's your only opportunity.

And that if you abuse his trust

in some way

or disloyal in some way,

that he will make your life

very difficult.

She would later go on the record.

Her name is Ally Canosa.

She said that she was repeatedly

r*ped, assaulted and harassed

over the seven years

she worked for Harvey Weinstein.

The reason why any of this matters

is because of the people involved,

because of the sources, right?

These people were dehumanized

and as a society, that's not okay.

And the reluctance to say

this is not okay is just shameful.

On August, 25th, I sent in a draft

version of the story.

And on September 5th,

I went to The New Yorker offices

to hear their final decision.

You came in and you did seem

a little desperate.

You were pitching.

You were pitching a story.

And you were pitching a set of facts

and you were making

a case for your journalism.

We sort of grilled you. What are

the foundational elements here?

What are the facts? What do we have?

What, what do we know for sure?

And you had it.

David decided to proceed

with the story NBC had passed on.

Once I got the green light,

The New Yorker began

the arduous process

of getting the work to print.

In journalistic circles, there's a lot

of mystique around The New Yorker

and some of that is due to its

legendary fact-checking process.

The checking ethos,

it's not there to be a cute,

eccentric, Santa's workshop.

It's got real purpose.

When we publish, I publish so I can

sleep that night, selfishly.

But that we're doing the right thing.

Fergus and I were called into our boss,

Peter Canby's office,

and they said, there's a story

coming in from Ronan.

Of course, me being allergic

to celebrity, I was skeptical.

But like what is this?

Why are there two checkers on this?

What is this?

What are the stakes?

We just knew that there was

a piece by Ronan Farrow

that they weren't going to say

what it was until it was assigned.

And I'd never experienced

that before.

It was kind of a top-secret thing.

Like, obviously,

we weren't supposed to talk about

the fact that we were working on it.

But once we understood the stakes,

we were very happy to work together.

I think we also agreed that it was

probably good to have a woman checker,

which isn't to say a man can't do it

and Fergus did it incredibly well.

But, you know, there are

these sensitive moments.

Tammy and Fergus were essentially

the story's first line of defense.

They were gonna be tasked

with recontacting all my sources,

corroborating their stories,

looking for more evidence

and going over every word, number

and claim, in hairsplitting detail.

My first reaction was this is something

that will have an enormous impact

on this guy's life and on the lives of

the people who are named in the story.

And we can't f*ck this up.

I think that compassion

is probably the most important aspect

of working on a story like this,

compassion not meaning

just being warm and fuzzy.

But really trying to enter someone's

head and heart and feel with them.

That's what half your brain is doing

and the other half is sitting back

and saying, what about that?

What about that?

Cause you have to go over it

in a clinical way.

Like while being sensitive and you

don't do that in a normal conversation.

With even your closest loved ones.

I'd heard some stories like

this from people I know.

And I was very sympathetic

and outraged for them.

But I didn't really feel it

quite so deeply

and I did in a new way

after working on these stories.

Part of the fact-checking process

not only involves

going back to all the sources but also

reaching out to Weinstein's team

who pushed back

on every facet of the story.

Weinstein's team was pushing

very hard for us

not to use the term r*pe,

to use as*ault.

And it seemed that that was

the direction things were going.

as*ault. An attempt or apparent attempt

to inflict bodily injury upon another

by using unlawful force,

accompanied by the apparent ability to

injure that person if not prevented.

I think there were probably a couple

of colleagues who maybe were skeptical

or thought readers would be skeptical

if we characterized

certain acts as r*pe.

r*pe. Act of unlawful

sexual intercourse

accomplished through force

or threat of force by one party

and implying lack of consent

and resistance by the other party.

There was no doubt that

the allegations in the story

fit the legal definition of r*pe.

- Was this a sexual as*ault?

- Yes.

- This was r*pe?

- Yes.

He forced himself on me sexually,

when it was unwanted.

He forced me to have

oral sex with him.

And I tried to struggle away.

But he's a big guy, you know,

so he overpowered me.

But would using the term

be sensationalist?

Being cautious about something

isn't an excuse for fudging it or

for not telling the truth about it.

Being cautious about it means being

really sure about what happened.

If you're sure about what happened

- Call it what it is?

- Yeah.

It went up to Remnick's office

and I was kinda nervous about it

but I took a deep breath

and I went into his office

and I said, these women

call it r*pe themselves.

It fits the legal definition of r*pe.

We will be whitewashing it

and undermining their own voices

if we do not call it r*pe.

We won't be calling a thing what it is,

which is so important in this moment.

Deirdre said, well, we need to call

things by their proper name.

And I don't mind telling you that

when you're told that by a woman

while you're having this

kind of serious discussion

and a woman of enormous

intelligence and integrity

and not inclined to sensationalism

or anything of the like, you listen.

Now, the stakes of calling it

that are high.

But they were right.

And we made that change.

As we closed in on publication,

things got intense.

We were contacting sources

all over the world

and so sometimes you would get a call

or a text at two or three or four am.

Okay, yes.

I'm totally ready to talk to you.

Right and you're ready

and you pull out your sheet.

There was a lot of kind of carrying

around the story.

Deirdre holed up in her office

for a lot of long nights

to work on drafts of the story.

That building turns off

the air circulation system

at a certain point in the evening

and on the weekends.

So, we were not only in a sort of

pressure cooker to get the story out

but we were in a hot house, more or

less. There were a bunch of weekends

where we were there just sweating,

eating terrible snack food,

fighting over which lines would

stay in and which wouldn't.

In the weeks before publication,

Harvey Weinstein turned his legal

threats from me to the magazine.

On October 2nd, Weinstein sent

his first threat letter

directly to The New Yorker.

It came from Charles Harder, the lawyer

best-known for representing Hulk Hogan

in the case that ended Gawker.

The letter called any pending

reporting on Weinstein defamatory.

And it said that because

my sister, Dylan,

had made an allegation of sexual abuse,

I wasn't impartial on the subject.

Ninety-nine point nine

percent of cases,

the lawyer on the other side knows

this argument is bullshit.

And it bothers me that they would

assert a bullshit argument.

One thing that really shocked me,

he claimed to have written assurances

that NBC agreed that they

would not do any stories

relating to the allegations

contained in your reporting.

Again, as a lawyer

for a journalistic outlet,

I don't know why anyone would ever

agree that they would never do a story.

Again, we've not done stories.

But we would never promise a source

we're never gonna do it.

Harder's letter was 11 pages long.

Fabio's response was shorter.

Dear Mr. Harder, I write in response

to your letter dated October 4th, 2017,

to David Remnick and me regarding

a possible article by Ronan Farrow

concerning Harvey Weinstein.

With regard to your statements

about the independence

and ethics of Mr. Farrow,

we find the issues you raised

to be without any merit whatsoever.

- Sincerely

- Fabio Bertoni.

You know, that was a moment where

my job felt like it got easier

because this is the best

you can come up with?

Yes, well, we'll be sure to preserve

all our documents

related to your stupid claim.

There was one more person

we needed to talk to,

the subject himself, Harvey Weinstein.

We had a big group call, where it

was Weinstein and several lawyers.

We were all in David Remnick's office

and Harvey Weinstein was on the phone.

- On speaker.

- On speaker.

Large portions of the calls

were off the record.

But other parts were explicitly

on the record.

Weinstein's tactics were a lot like

what you've heard in the police tape.

He would play nice. He would

say that he sort of understood

what we did as journalists,

how much he respected us.

He expected it to just go away

with a call to Remnick.

It was clear that he believed

that he was speaking to a peer

and that, you know, if he just said

come on, gentlemanly agreement,

let's make this go away.

He would be able to and that kind

of sent a shudder down my spine.

Cause he had ruled the way he

wanted to rule for a long time.

When that didn't work,

he would wheedle and sort of beg.

He would threaten.

We're gonna see you into the ground.

You're gonna never work again.

Your magazine is going down.

Ronan Farrow is a fraud.

It was more the kind of Loony Tunes

hammer than the little chisel.

At moments, he would deny everything.

He'd say because he'd remained

in contact with some women,

that was evidence that all his

interactions with them were consensual.

At other moments, he seemed

to be admitting to the behavior.

One time he got confused about who

was making an allegation against him

and started going into details about

an allegation we hadn't even heard

and weren't writing about.

At one point, he seemed to make

an admission and the line went dead.

The universal sign for shut up

from lawyer to client

in those situations is this, right?

And it's just a gentle

gesture like this

where it's just a signal to your client

to shut the f*ck up right now.

I will bet all the money in my pocket

that the reason that call got cut off

was that Harvey's lawyers

pressed the button to do so

cause they knew he was going too far.

Do I know that for a fact? I don't.

But the phone company's not that bad.

And we reconnected and they were like,

I, did we lose you?

In the end, Weinstein didn't

spend much time

denying the individual

allegations in the piece.

What they offered

was a single statement.

Harvey Weinstein denies all allegations

of nonconsensual sex.

Do you guys remember the night

before the story published?

I think that we still had work to do

in the morning, going through it.

The grim task of counting up the

different kinds of sexual as*ault

We got all the numbers right

and are any of them overlapping?

And are we counting anyone twice?

You were double

and triple checking things?

The day we published, I stayed

at the office until three or four am

and then I came back before dawn

and watched dawn

sort of come up over

the State of Liberty

and the tip of lower Manhattan

which I could see from my office.

I was waiting for the final

copy edit to come back

before we pressed publish.

It was a sort of calm

before the storm.

At 10:47 am, we hit publish.

There are growing allegations of sexual

harassment and now outright as*ault

by movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein.

New Yorker magazine reporting

new claims of sexual harassment,

as*ault and r*pe.

The New Yorker pushes the story further

and makes the open secret nature

of this alleged behavior

all the more unfathomable.

One of his accusers going to police,

secretly recording her confrontation

with Weinstein.

What do you remember

about publication day?

Relief.

I think we really weren't sure

how the world was going to react.

And I was amazed at both how positive

the reactions of the sources were

and how quickly

it sort of blew up.

Huge number of sexual as*ault

and harassment survivors

are sharing their stories online.

#MeToo.

Many of the women say they are reliving

painful personal traumas

while hoping to break the cycle.

It blossomed into something

much bigger,

much faster than I think we ever

could have expected.

I don't think we could have known

that this would break open so much.

And I was feeling very amped up

about what it is to exist as a woman

in this particular moment.

Journalism is dwindling

in a way as a profession.

There aren't that many outlets

that have the resources,

the time and the guts to do that.

And that's a really sorry thing

for society as a whole.

Even when the story hit newsstands,

I was still unaware

of the extraordinary lengths that

Weinstein and others had gone to

in order to silence reporters.

Once I started to find out,

I got increasingly worried.

I started looking over my shoulder,

wondering if I was being followed.

And I met Igor and I realized I was.

My boss assigned me

to follow Ronan Farrow.

The goal was to isolate

and identify sources.