Catch and Kill Page 13

  CHAPTER 21:

  SCANDAL

  On a muggy morning not long after the meeting with Oppenheim, I made my way through the sweating crowds, past the tilted cube at Astor Place, toward the East Village. I’d texted McGowan and she’d agreed to meet. At the Airbnb where she was staying, she emerged in pajamas, a half-moon silicone pad under each eye. She gestured to the absurd room around her, which was princess-pink, with fuzzy pillows everywhere. “I didn’t decorate,” she deadpanned. She was drawn, nervous, even more stressed than when we’d last met. I told her we had stronger material than ever, but that her voice was going to be important. I wanted to take her up on her suggestion that we shoot more, and her offer to name Weinstein to the NBC lawyers.

  “I don’t trust NBC,” she said.

  “They’ve been”—I paused—“careful. But I know they’re good people and they’ll do right by the story.”

  She took a breath, seeming to steel herself. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  She agreed to shoot a follow-up interview a few days later. She had to go replace Val Kilmer at Tampa Bay Comic Con first. “That’ll be fun,” I said, as I stepped back out into the heat. “No, it won’t,” she replied.

  I was back at work, in the cafeteria, when my phone rang. It was Greenberg.

  “Great news,” I said. “I spoke with Rose and—”

  “Can you talk?” he said.

  In his small office, Greenberg let me babble through my update on McGowan.

  “So I know you’ve been asking for an update,” he said. In the two days since the meeting with Oppenheim, I had stopped by Greenberg’s office three times to ask if he had any word from Lack.

  Greenberg took a breath, as if bracing for something. “The story is now under review by NBCUniversal.” He wrapped his mouth around these last words strangely, like he was quoting a lyric in a foreign language. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

  “NBCUniversal,” I said. “Not NBC News.”

  “It’s gone upstairs. I don’t know whether that involves Steve Burke or Brian Roberts,” he said, referring to the top executives at NBCUniversal and its parent company, Comcast, “but it’s under legal review.” Greenberg was fidgeting, jiggling a knee under the desk. “Maybe once, when we got close to air on a tough story, I saw a high-level corporate review. But this is very atypical.”

  “What are they basing this review on?” No one had asked us for additional copies of material, or for the audio.

  “I don’t know,” he said absently.

  An NBCUniversal legal review meant Kim Harris, the general counsel of NBCUniversal—who had, with Weiner, presided over the “pussy grab” tape imbroglio the year before. Harris had also, years earlier, recruited me as a summer associate at Davis Polk.

  “I’d be happy to send the material to Kim,” I suggested. “I can play her the tape.”

  “My gosh, no!” Greenberg said, mortified, like I’d proposed an orgy with his grandparents or something. “No, no, no! Let’s—we’ll respect the process and remain at arm’s length. I’ll make sure Susan sends them whatever they need.”

  I wondered what logic we could have for keeping our own lawyers at “arm’s length,” but said, instead, “Well, I’d like to know as much as I can, when I can. And I’ll keep you updated on the follow-up interview with Rose.”

  He flinched. “We’re supposed to pause all reporting.”

  “Rich. It’s been hell keeping Rose hanging in there at all. Now we have more from her and you want me to go back to her and cancel?”

  “Not cancel,” he said, “pause.”

  “There is an actual interview date set. I would be canceling.”

  I asked him how long we were supposed to “pause.”

  “I—I would anticipate that it won’t move fast,” he said. “I mean, I have no idea what their process is. But this could take more than a few days.”

  “Rich. I don’t think anyone in our chain of command wants to be in the position, as a matter of record, of having canceled hard-fought pieces of reporting during a corporate review by our parent company.”

  “Things get canceled for all sorts of reasons. Nobody outside the company has to know why.”

  “If you tell them what you told me and Rich, it will matter for what happens to this story,” I said, referring to his “fuck it, let him sue” and his decision to go to Weinstein for comment. It was hard to square that guy with this guy.

  “This is a Steve Burke decision. It’s an Andy decision,” he replied. His eyes flicked away from mine. “What I say is not gonna matter.” I believed Rich Greenberg when he said he cared about journalism. I believed, absent friction, that he would have supported the reporting and pursued the interview with McGowan. But several colleagues of his said he shied from messy confrontations. “He’s really good as long as he’s not in front of the pack,” one veteran correspondent later told me. “He doesn’t have the stomach for somebody’s-gonna-be-mad-at-you investigative reporting.” Few stories got people madder than this one. That day in Greenberg’s office, I remember thinking how small he seemed—not defeated so much as comfortable within the narrow bounds of what he could and could not do inside an organization to which he had devoted seventeen years of his life.

  Exasperated, I told him, “Look, Ken Auletta just turned to the camera and said, Andy Lack, this is a scandal if you don’t run this.”

  Greenberg’s eyes snapped up. “Do we have that? Is that in the script?”

  I looked at him, puzzled. “It’s in the transcript.”

  “Send that to me,” he said.

  As I pushed out of the back doors of 30 Rock and into the summer heat, McHugh and I texted, debating what to do. There seemed to be no interest, in the loftiest echelons of the corporation, in hearing the tape or learning the full extent of the reporting. The only person who might have access to the corporate review that Greenberg hadn’t discouraged us from reaching out to was Weiner, who, as the top lawyer in the news division, reported to Harris. I’d begun calling her the moment I emerged from the meeting with Greenberg. An assistant I reached told me not to stop by. After hours of calls, Weiner emailed to say she was busy, then leaving for a long weekend.

  Then there was the dilemma about what to do about the interview with McGowan. “We are shooting with Rose. We are not canceling,” McHugh texted. We both knew postponing could mean losing the interview entirely. On the other hand, refusing Greenberg’s order to cancel the shoot might mean jeopardizing the increasingly tenuous support for the story within the network.

  With the legal department not taking our calls, I grappled with whom to turn to. Arriving back at my apartment, I decided to take a risk and call Tom Brokaw. “Tom, I’m going to need to rely on that promise you made,” I said. “About not talking to the subject of that story we discussed.”

  “You have my word,” said Brokaw.

  I told him about the corporate intercession. I ran him through the list of interviews and evidence.

  “This is wrong,” he said. He told me he’d reach out to the network’s leadership about it. “You need to talk to Andy. You need to go in and play that tape for him.”

  I sent Greenberg the Auletta transcript, as he requested, with the comment about how it would be a scandal not to air the story highlighted. Then I forwarded it to Oppenheim.

  A few hours later, the phone rang.

  “I got your email,” said Oppenheim. “Sooo”—he drew out this word, like an emphatic teenager—“I hope, based on our two-and-a-half-year, or whatever, relationship, that you know you can trust me to do this process right. And this isn’t about ‘Andy doesn’t want to do this,’ or ‘I don’t want to do this.’ If we can establish that he’s a—a ‘predator,’ to use your term—”

  “To be clear, that’s not coming from me. We have documents and sources from within his company making that claim.”

  “Alright, alright,” he said. “I hear you. If we could establish that he’s, whatever, of course we’d want
to get it out. We just need to, um, stress-test this, and Kim, who I know you’ve known since you were, like, sixteen, is going to do that and tell us what we can really be bulletproof in saying, what can hold up in court.”

  I told him that was all well and good as long as reporting wasn’t being interrupted. I mentioned the interview we’d scheduled with McGowan.

  “You just can’t, Ronan,” he replied. “If Kim decides that tortious interference or inducement to breach contract are big concerns for us, we can’t be rushing ahead with an interview before she makes that call.”

  “That’s not how this works,” I told him. “We can get it in the can and then decide to review it later. Airing it is what makes it subject to litigation.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, defensively. “I’m not a lawyer. If they’re saying tortious interference, I’ve gotta listen.”

  “I am a lawyer, Noah. That’s just not a real rationale. Half our political reporting wouldn’t be possible if we refused to talk to sources who were breaching contracts.” It was true: there were few solid cases that supported the idea that news organizations, acting in good faith, could be exposed to significant liability in cases like this.

  “Well, forgive me if I take Kim Harris’s legal advice over yours,” he said tartly.

  I tried to think how to underline the stakes while conveying that I was a team player. “My sense is this is gonna come out,” I said, “and the question is whether it comes out with or without us sitting on the evidence we have.”

  A long silence. “You’d better be careful,” he said at last. “’Cause I know you’re not threatening, but people could think you’re threatening to go public.” I knew what he meant, but the choice of words struck me as odd. Weren’t we in the business of going public?

  “But that’s just it,” I said. “I think threatening us is exactly what Ken Auletta was doing. And I think that’s why Rich asked me to send him that quote. And why I forwarded it to you. A lot of people know we have this.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’re not ‘sitting on it,’ we’re reviewing it carefully.”

  He softened a little, tried something different. “Ronan, you know in my years of supporting you, we’ve run a series of stories that could get us sued, and we’ve stood by them.”

  “I trust you’ll do the right thing,” I said. “There have just been some odd signals.”

  “We’re just hitting pause while we wrap our arms around this,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.” On some level, I knew these euphemisms—the “pauses,” the wrapping of arms—to be absurd. Canceling an interview was canceling an interview. The word doubleplusungood wandered through my mind. But I needed Oppenheim’s support to get the story over the finish line.

  I looked out of the window. Across the street, the lights were off and the dance studio was in shadow. “I’m glad you called,” I said. “I do trust you.”

  “Just hang tight,” he said. “No more reporting for a little bit.”

  CHAPTER 22:

  PATHFINDER

  “We were right to keep our mouths shut,” McHugh texted. We decided we’d pushed Oppenheim as far as we could. “I’d just sit back, work the phones and whatnot, but let the NBC team be. You’ve said your piece.” But this still left the tricky proposition of the shoot with McGowan and the order to cancel it.

  “Did Noah say don’t do it?” McHugh wrote.

  “Yes.”

  “Quandary.”

  “It’s tempting to just push it back and risk losing her,” I replied. “Just to avoid the fight with Noah. Think I can freely consult Greenberg on this?”

  “Not sure any more,” he wrote.

  We were starting to concede that we might have to take the risk of rescheduling with McGowan. “I’m not sure another rose intv is critical to our story. But nbc having our back, in some ways, will be,” McHugh wrote. “I am thinking, maybe there’s a way to push it to LA and buy ourselves a little more time?”

  I took a deep breath and dialed McGowan. “We were looking at maybe doing a later date,” I said, feeling her out. “We could shoot more with you in Los Angeles, go back to your place.”

  Her voice was small on the other end of the line. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she said. “There’s a lot coming at me.”

  “Just—just hang in there,” I said. “Please. For the other sources involved. I promise you it’s just a little longer.”

  “I knew NBC wasn’t going to take this seriously.”

  “They’re taking it seriously. I’m taking it seriously.”

  “I offered to call the lawyers.”

  “They—we’re going to do that, they’re just reviewing things,” I said. She didn’t say anything. “If Tuesday’s all you can do, we’ll do Tuesday,” I said quickly. “Don’t worry about it.”

  She said we could look at options. But I could hear the uncertainty creeping into her voice.

  A few minutes later, Jonathan, on the phone from Los Angeles, was working up a lather. He thought I should flout Greenberg’s orders and call Kim Harris. He was incredulous at the legal arguments Oppenheim had raised. For any layperson with a dim recollection of the term, “tortious interference” was probably best known as the specious rationale used by CBS News’s parent company to shut down that network’s tobacco reporting. That day McHugh and Jonathan both made the same comparison: “Hasn’t anyone in this company seen The Insider?” Jonathan asked, exasperated.

  The next morning, I called Kim Harris’s office several times before she responded by email. Harris wrote that she’d been traveling for several days. We could meet the following week, perhaps. But this would be too late for the McGowan interview. I pleaded. “Canceling it could mean we don’t get it back,” I replied. I offered to pre-brief with Harris and let her dictate my posture in the interview, as I’d done with Chung before the early interviews. Then I called Weiner and left her a voicemail making the same points again. “Susan, as a matter of record, I don’t want us to have to be canceling reporting. I know you’re both out, but please respond.”

  As I hung up, Greenberg motioned me into his office. “So,” he said, “I called Harvey back.”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I told him legal is vetting it and nothing’s running for now.” He said Weinstein had told him he wanted to send a letter to NBC’s legal department, and Greenberg had directed him to Susan Weiner. “He may accuse you of maligning him in conversations,” he added.

  I laughed. Greenberg stayed serious. “Obviously, I’ve been incredibly careful not to malign him beyond asking neutral questions,” I said. “I’ll stand by anything I’ve said or put in writing.”

  “Just be careful,” Greenberg said.

  I asked him if he had any word on the McGowan interview, and he said legal was still deciding if it could go ahead. I thought of McGowan’s fraying resolve, her reeling at my attempt to cancel.

  Not long after, word came back. My begging had worked. Legal would allow the interview to proceed the following week. But the wavering had exacted its toll. As they decided, McGowan texted: “I can’t film. Or be in your segment. I’m so sorry. The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse.”

  Over the following hours, my attempts to bring her back into the fold went nowhere. “I’m hamstrung,” she said finally. “I can’t talk.” McGowan seemed increasingly distraught. In the following weeks, her lawyers would follow up with aggressive cease and desist letters.

  I walked into Greenberg’s office and told him immediately. “I’m going to try to get her back on board,” I said. He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Honestly, it makes me less nervous if she’s not in the script,” he said. “She always sounded a little—well, you know.”

  “Emily Nestor was close to going on camera full face. I can go back to her.”

  “Just wait,” he said.

  “It’d be calling an existing source.”

  “Let’s just do this by the book from here. No
new reporting for now,” he said, as Oppenheim had.

  I got home from work and my phone chimed: another text asking me to opt into weather alerts. I swiped it away. Another ping: this time, it was an old school friend calling. I pressed my eyes shut. “I can’t go out, Erin,” I said. Erin Fitzgerald had the kind of high-end consulting job that repeated explanations shed little light on.

  “No one’s seen you in, like, six months,” she said, over a hum of cocktail conversation. “What’s going on with you?”

  “You know. On a big story.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, you’re coming tonight.” And she wouldn’t take no for an answer. I sat with her and another friend on a crowded rooftop in Brooklyn and looked at the city, and realized I’d barely left my apartment that summer. “I’m on this assignment where I feel like I’m burning all my bridges one by one,” I said. She shrugged. “Here, come!” she said, pulling me over to the parapet. We stood in front of the glittering Manhattan skyline and posed for a picture.

  The next day, Ostrovskiy began his routine inspection of my social media accounts and those of my friends and relatives. Coming to an Instagram post showing me and a pretty girl against the Manhattan skyline, he lingered and felt, for a moment, relieved. I was in town after all.

  By then, he and Khaykin had begun their latest assignment, but without much success. They’d billed a few hours following the woman from the New York Times, taking some photographs of her on the subway and then giving up after she disappeared into the Times building. The client’s attention soon turned to the television reporter with the story that seemed to be in a state of flux.

  But this was proving to be a challenge, too. Seeing that I was on the Today show one morning, Ostrovskiy and Khaykin disagreed about how best to capitalize on the opportunity.