NBC News president claims Ronan Farrow is trying to 'defame' the network because he has an 'axe to grind'

NBC News' war with Ronan Farrow just keeps escalating.

Farrow's new book Catch and Kill hits stores Tuesday after a week of excerpts revealing some of the most damning allegations against the network, including that it paid settlements to Matt Lauer accusers years before his firing and that Harvey Weinstein may have pressured it to kill Farrow's investigation into his alleged sexual abuse using dirt about Lauer. Farrow's investigation into Weinstein was originally intended for NBC News, but he ultimately had to take it to The New Yorker.

Now, NBC News President Noah Oppenheim is out with a forceful response to Farrow's allegations, in an email accusing him of pushing conspiracy theories and smears.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"Farrow's effort to defame NBC News is clearly motivated not by a pursuit of truth, but an axe to grind," Oppenheim writes in the email, per journalist Yashar Ali. "It is built on a series of distortions, confused timelines, and outright inaccuracies."

Oppenheim refutes Farrow's reporting that settlements were made to Lauer accusers before his 2017 firing, writing "there is no evidence of any reports of Lauer's misconduct before his firing, no settlements, no 'hush money' — no way we have found that NBC's current leadership could have been aware of his misdeeds in the past." He also refers to the suggestion that Farrow's Weinstein report may have been killed because Weinstein had dirt on Lauer as a "conspiracy theory."

"We have no secrets and nothing to hide," Oppenheim writes.

Farrow has continued to stand by his reporting amid criticism from NBC, telling Good Morning America on Friday it's "indisputable based on the evidence in this book that there was a chain of secret settlements at this company that were covered up ... this was a pattern."