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Second Ex-Weinstein Co. Staffer Disputes NBC’s Weinstein Memo

Says network provided “misleading” account of why it wouldn’t run Ronan Farrow’s bombshell reporting.

A former Weinstein Co. executive has accused NBC News of providing a “misleading” account of its handling of Ronan Farrow’s bombshell reporting on Harvey Weinstein. In a statement released on Twitter on Tuesday, the former executive, Abby Ex, identifies herself as the unnamed “former Executive A” mentioned in a leaked memo NBC News chief Andy Lack sent to staffers on Monday. In the memo, Lack defended the network’s decision to let Farrow take his reporting on Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults to The New Yorker, saying, among other things, that by “widely accepted journalistic standards” Farrow didn’t have enough on-the-record testimony from Weinstein’s accusers. Ex, who was described in the memo as offering her own account of events “based on suspicion alone,” called the statement “factually incorrect” on Tuesday. The former executive said she actually offered firsthand knowledge of Weinstein’s “dubious” late-night meetings with women in bars and hotel rooms, “meetings, we now know, he used to sexually harass and assault women.” “Harvey asked me, many times, to join these meetings, to which I refused. But I was a witness to them, and in fact, was a firsthand witness to physical and verbal abuse at his hands as well, all of which Ronan has on camera from my interview,” she wrote.