How Ken Auletta Helped Ronan Farrow Nail Harvey Weinstein
The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta reveals a conversation with Ronan Farrow ahead of his bombshell piece and shares stories about Harvey Weinstein’s enablers that are in his new book.
Spencer Platt/Getty
New Yorker writer Ken Auletta may not have been the one to nail Harvey Weinstein back in 2002 when he was profiling the disgraced Hollywood producer for the magazine, as “close” as he was in doing so, but he did have an assist.
According to Auletta on this episode of The New Abnormal podcast, when journalist Ronan Farrow, who did break the story, told him that NBC had killed it, he helped connect him to an editor at the New Yorker, the publication that ended up running the piece.
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“I said, ‘Ronan, give me your number, I’ll call you back.’ I called David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker. And I said, ‘David, this kid, I just met him once. I think Ronan Farrow has broken the code,’” recalls Auletta to co-host Molly Jong-Fast.
Although both Farrow and the reporters at The New York Times brought the story home, Auletta was not finished with his reporting on the convicted rapist. Enter his new book: Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, which paints an even more detailed picture of Weinstein, and the enablers around him.
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He tells Molly one anecdote from the book about a woman who was offered a job at Miramax but didn’t take it due to eerie warnings. It’s this story, he says, that epitomizes what the enabling looked like around Weinstein for all those years.
“She goes to have drinks with these four executives, someone from human resources, someone who is a longtime assistant of Harvey’s, one of the four that Harvey had, and two other executives. And they say to [her], ‘don’t come to work here. You’re an attractive woman. He will assault you, sexually assault you.’” says Auletta. “If four people knew that how many other people knew it?”
Also in the episode: Auletta updates Molly on Weinstein’s health, why he thinks the guy is a sociopath, and how much Weinstein’s brother Bob Weinstein knew, or didn’t know about the crimes.
“Bob paid with his own canceled checks, a total of almost $500,000, for the two women. But he says he did it because Harvey said he was being blackmailed. Not because Harvey had raped or attempted to rape,” says Auletta.
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