NBC News tried to torpedo Ronan Farrow’s story about the numerous sexual assault and misconduct allegations against former Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein. The big wigs at the news division were dragging their feet. It seemed odd. There were numerous allegations. They couldn’t all be lying in one massive conspiracy. And allegedly it was because the network knew that they had a Matt Lauer problem. Lauer was fired for sexual misconduct and now faces a rape allegation from when he was covering the Sochi Olympics in 2014. If this Weinstein story got out, the dam could break—and it did. Farrow published his reporting in The New Yorker. Now, we have another story of the network trying to suppress another rape allegation (via The Cut):
In a lengthy essay published today on The Daily Beast, author and domestic-violence activist Sil Lai Abrams claims that NBC News similarly buried her allegations that she was sexually assaulted by Extra host A.J. Calloway and Russell Simmons. (Both men have vehemently denied all allegations against them.) In November 2017, Abrams says that she told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that Simmons raped her in 1994 and that Calloway sexually assaulted her in his car in 2006. At the time, Simmons had already been accused of rape, but Calloway had not yet faced any such allegations. Abrams was optimistic that her story — which was scheduled to air on NBC and run alongside a print story published in New York — could bring down an alleged sexual predator.
But what came next left her feeling less hopeful: According to Abrams, Simmons’s attorney started to threaten NBC, compelling the network to put the story on hold, even though Reid told Abrams that she had “never done a story that has this much evidence before.” Meanwhile, NBC allegedly subjected the pair to “an elaborate and bizarre vetting process,” requiring Abrams to turn over hospital bills and legal documents. At this point, in early 2018, Abrams was starting to worry.
“I asked Joy repeatedly if NBC was going to do to her what it did to Ronan, and she said that she didn’t think so,” she writes. “We both agreed that it would reflect very poorly if word got out that the network had suppressed yet another story of alleged sexual assault.”
And yet, Abrams writes that the network did just that.
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Both instances are terrible, but it shows the level from which the liberal media will defend its allies—no matter what. It’s bad when Republicans and conservatives are accused to sexual misconduct—but if Democrats do it—it’s okay. It’s a tale of the two separate rules protocol coming back and biting them right in the ass. Everyone has a plan until someone punches you in the mouth, and for the liberal media—they found themselves on the brink of a public relations disaster with Weinstein and Lauer. It looks like they decided to deploy countermeasures and hope this all just goes away. It didn’t. The bomb went off. CNN reports that obviously this has had a rippling effect with the network’s rank-and-file. Yes, it’s CNN, but there are other reports of the newsrooms being pretty much in revolt.
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