Author Ken Auletta has been the chief political correspondent for the New York Post, a weekly columnist for the Village Voice, contributing editor at New York magazine and contributor to The New Yorker since 1977. He is the author of twelve books, including five national bestsellers —Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. His latest book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, serves as a biography, an examination of the circumstances that led to the abuses and the final chapter of Auletta’s reporting on Weinstein that began with a New Yorker profile two decades ago. Ken Auletta and Alec discuss Auletta’s upbringing in Coney Island, his early career in politics and the culture of Weinstein’s many enablers.
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. The Harvey Weinstein scandal was first brought to light in October of two thousand seventeen by Megan Twey and Jodi Canter in the New York Times. Just one week later, Ronan Faraoh's expose on Weinstein was published in The New Yorker. And just when you thought you may be suffering from Harvey Weinstein fatigue, my guest today, Ken o Letta is out with the new book that is very much worth reading. Oletta explores how Harvey got away with it for so long. He names those who either looked the other way or enabled Weinstein to commit his various sexual crimes. Ken Oletta has had a remarkable career as a journalist, a New Yorker contributor, and the author of thirteen books. His latest is Hollywood Ending Harvey Weinstein, The Culture of Silence. Kenno Letta is known as a profiler of industry titans, Silicon Valley heavyweights, and media moguls. I wanted to know why he felt this book was an important addition to such a heavily reported story. Well, there were still mysteries to me about Harvey, and as brilliant a work as Jodi Cantor and make to Erna Farrow performed, they exposed him and broke the damn of silence, which was great. But the mysteries included what made Harvey Weinstein the monster he was, What explains the culture of silence that enabled him to abuse women for more than four decades, What was the nature of his power and his abusive power that made people so frightened, and what was the nature of the relationship and how it changed between e and his younger brother Bob, who were inseparable and business partners, and then Bob Weinstein fired his brother Harvey. So I was interested. I was interested in the biography. That to me is because I read Cantor into his book. They were on the show. That's what's so clear in your book, which was the enabling How did all these people, dozens and scores of people who knew I mean, you know, with Harvey it's a combination. And these are glib phrases. I'm so uncomfortable employing any of these phrases because they're tossed around so regularly now. But with Harvey, it's the toxic masculinity and the sexual predation. There are men who possess a toxic masculinity who do not victimize women that way. They're just bluster and screaming. Ruden. There was never an allegation that rude and sexually harassed anybody that I know of. But like Harvey, he was throwing things at people and screaming at people and so forth. And the thing that I was really taken with your book was this idea of how Harvey is the is really the last of a breed of men who could scream their way and pound tables and behave the way they did in order to achieve their results, and bully people. That this level of bullying that was like unseen Harvey. Women who were abused by him, raped by him, said that they went the room with him alone. They were terrified that he would lose his temper because when he lost his temper, he was out of control. Harvey has an impulse control problem, and he had it in eating. I mean, he has severe diabetes, and yet he shovels chocolate into his mouth all the time. I mean, he spent money which he shouldn't have spent, and the company was losing money in the end, but in part because of his extravagant spending and his abusive women, and if people just verbally was just he couldn't control his impulses, and so people were terrified of that. But they were terrified he had real power. He had power with the press. He was perceived as a as a figure who can get stories on his behalf and the press and against you. They knew he would soothe them if they challenged him in any way, and would go at them very aggressively. If you just look at who was who attended Harvey's second wedding to Georgina Chapman, Rupert Murdoch, his two daughters were flower girls, Lauren Michael's executive produce Senate Live, the head of NBC, then Jeff Sucker, the head of the parent company of NBC, Bryan Roberts. I mean, just look at that powerhouse of people who were in his relationship, and you had to be afraid. Well, the thing that also is interesting to me is all of these things, or some of these things I should say, that you delve into in the book. Now, I'll do my best to encapsulate all things Harvey that happened to me in one week at can I go to cam This is in two thousand and twelve. Uh, We're there and I'm going to host the MPHAR auction. He was on the board twenty he ran the whole show. Twenty different designers have contributed clothing to what they call the Black on Black Ensemble. I'm gonna be the m C. We're gonna go do an interview for the film at the party of Lenn blevot Nick at the Duke Up And then we get a phone called tell me us that Blevotnick is canceled and he was requested by Harvey to cancel to keep us away from the party. We were gonna go there with one camera and interview everybody at the party about Ken. Harvey kills it. I'm sitting at a table at a cocktail party, no but a brunch, and someone informs me that Blevotnick is canceled. And I say that fucking Harvey, he's the biggest asshole in all and this whole fucking town. And a writer from the Wall Street Journal is right there and he writes it in the paper the next day. Now, Harvey says, you either apologize to me publicly that you said that, or you're not invited to the m for event. You can't be the host of the thing, Like I really care, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to apologize. And then they said, then you can't be the m C. Now one of the producers of our film, Larry Herbert, bought a table. Larry buys a table, and they say, you can't come to the event. Ago are you in the habit of telling people that bought two d and fifty dollar tables to your event that they can't bring their guests. I'm coming as his guest. So I came. And then at the behest of my wife, who's far more dag Hammer Show than I'll ever be in my life, she says, go and apologize to Harvey. I woke up to Harvey's table because he had said, you know, how would you like it if your daughter's read things that someone said about you? You know what that's like. So I woke up to Harvey's table and I said, I want to say I'm sorry, and he literally lunges for his phone, calls up a contact of The New York Post and says, I want you to say that into the phone. He thrusts the phone at me so that the person on the other end of the phone from the New York Post can hear me make the apology to Harvey, so that they could print it in the paper. He gave book contracts. Two people who worked at the New York Post gave a screenwriter screenplay contractor Richard Johnson when he edited page six. What Harvey among his reasons for his power in the press. He had talk books and talk magazine, and of course he gave out screenplays. So Richard Johnson, who was the editor of Page six, he had given a screenwriting um contract too, And several editors at of Page six had gotten book contracts over the years with Harvey, as did Meeker and Joe you know, Tim Russett, who produced the best seller By the Way, and some other and other journalists. So that again, that was all a pattern of Harvey's power. Everything was transactional. Everything was trans including his sex. I mean, I the question I asked him. We had an email exchange when he was in prison, and I could ask him any questions, and he asked about twenty five of them. But the question he didn't one of the questions he did not answer is one I was desperate task Harvey. When you put your head on a pillow at night after raping let's say Jessica Man, who was a woman who testified against them, how did you explain to yourself what you had just done. He never answered that question, but I think if he had, he would say it was transactional. She it to something from me, a career in Hollywood, and I wanted something from her. So everything with him is transactional. But I do go back that I look at people and I think about alternatives. I think about what might have been. And in your book you paint this wonderful picture of their ascension and Buffalo and the concert business and Harvey screaming at a room full of people to watch the French film. He shows these other films. But and you realize that beyond his sexual issues, beyond his criminality, is that Harvey was also a monster to work with in terms of him wanting to control the content of the film. But that doesn't take away the fact he loved movies and what is good at it? He loved movies and he could have been a great Because the world we live in now, every single man and woman who runs the production to sides of a movie studio or television network today are all from marketing or fine if they don't know a thing about making movies. They don't know. There's not one person today in art of a movie studio or a television number who knows anything about putting together a TV show creatively or lived zero DNA creatively zero. Every one of them topped a bottom. So in the old days, going back to Zanik, going back to Mike Metavoy, Reuden, I think was a creative beast and Harvey. I mean, you look at Harvey, go what a tragedy, because he really did love films. You look at the films he produced so distributed, starting with his first hit, you know, Sex Lives and Video Tape and then going to the Crying Game, which was the reason it was his success was the reason that Disney decided they had to acquire Merrimax, which they did. In my left foot, Shakespeare loved the English patient. I mean the list goes one Academy Awards. So Harvey was the real thing. He wasn't a suit. But even the people who he abused, like Onyneth Paltrow or her then boyfriend Brad Pitt who threatened to kill Harvey. If you haven't touched her again, continue to do movies with him? Why? Because he was producing the of movies they wanted to be in and no one else was. Another thing you get into in great detail is Bob. Now. I've met Bob on a number of occasions where I used to run into him periodically in a certain part of town. I would just bump into him for some reason, And in my bogus psychoanalytic way, I look at him and think, oh God, you just woke around all day with the burden of being Harvey Weinstein's brother. I mean, you're his partner, and I want to ask you about that in terms of that bond, meaning all brothers have a bond, presumably very few don't, but almost none have a bond as thick as that bond. I mean, in the end, you know, Harvey goes down and Bob is part of that. Why do you think Bob waited so long before he took that opportunity. Bob had this contradictory feelings about his brother. On the one hand, he loved him and was they shared a room in Queen's growing up. They went up to Buffalo. In the same time, they became co equal partners in Merrimax and then the Weinstein Company. Uh, they dominated. No, we can get between the two brothers. And yet Bob over the years, Harvey would treat him as Bobby the young kid, as Harvey's friends often often did, and Bob took it, and some days he felt, I got to divorce my brother. Some days he said, my brother really loves me. I think he was somewhat insecure about his relationship with Harvey, who was a more dominant person. Bob then had an alcohol problem and went to a and became a very introspective person who believed in therapy, and he became a better person because of that. Harvey. He would constantly say, Harvey, you're a sex attic. You should get some help. He said he didn't know Harvey was raping woman. He knew he was cheating on his wife, by the way, which is what all of Harvey's assistance and people who worked there said, we knew he was cheating on his wife, but we didn't know he was raping woman. Well, some as my book shows, did know he was. But nevertheless, Bob went through this thing. Should I divorce my spouse or should I not? Or maybe he really still loves me and will work out okay in the end, in two thousand fifteen, Bob was constantly berating his brother for overspending and for losing focus on the movie business, getting too fashion, getting into TV, buying companies he shouldn't be buying, like Alson and stuff like that, And Harvey got so enraged that he sucker punched his brother and broke his nose in two thousand fifteen, but Bob still made peace with him, And then in the end, when Harvey was exposed by Jodi Canton make twoey in October of two thousand seventy and by Ronan you know a week later in The New Yorker, Bob provided the critical vote to fire his brother. And yet, interestingly, what happened is that because his name, as you mentioned earlier, was Weinstein, he also was punished as Harvey was. Harvey went on trial, but Bob couldn't get a job, couldn't get an agent, couldn't get a lawyer in Hollywood because his name was the thing about your book. I'm not saying this was your intention, but what I took from this was that Bob stayed loyal to Harvey until Harvey's behavior actually was going to sink the company and rob Bob of his share of what was once a very healthy business. Meaning, you punched me in the face, that's one thing. You rape women, that's another thing. All the things you do that are wrong another thing. But now I'm gonna lose my shares of stock in the company because if you were be here. I mean, I wonder if there was a bit of that with Bob. There has to have been a bit of that. But I don't think that's all of it. No, no no, I want to say it's all of it. But I wonder if with Bobo, all of a sudden he was wanted. I mean, the truth is what Harvey's behavior and the aftermath of that sunk Bob as well. As the company company declared bankruptcy, Bob, it was over for Bob. And yet Bob was a more successful financially producer with his Dimension Films then Harvey Bob. In the beginning, people said Bob made the money, not Harvey. Do you think it was possible for Harvey to get a fair trial? That's a good question. You know, I sat in it was I attend the trial every day, and I sat in the jury selection process, and these jurors would come in and fill the room about a hundred and twenty or so at a time, and the judge asked, how many of you think raise your hand if you think you could not be fair to Mr Weinstein. One third of the hands went up, So people knew about Harvey the ogre going in, and that vegs your question, which is is it possible that he couldn't find fair montagers who didn't have an opinion before they sat in judge. Eventually the twelve jurors selected said they could sit in fair judgment, but there were questions about that and Harvey's appeal. They questioned during number eleven, who was a woman who had written a novel that was coming out in the summer of twenty twenty, a couple of months after the trial, but it was already done about an older man who was a sexual prayer, And they said, if you have such strong opinions about that, how can you judge fairly this Harvey Weinstein and the defense made that argument, and the judge overruled him and kept him in. That was part of their appeal. So there were questions about Harvey had a very strong appeal, I thought in reading it, and I wonder whether the Pellet Division would overturn the New York City Criminal Court. But in the end, the five justices are all women, by the way, who asked more tough questions of the prosecutor in the appeal than they did of Harvey's defense, unanimously voted that it was a fair trial and that Harvey deserved to go to prison and deserve to be sentenced for twenty three years. Now one area, you go on trial and you say to people, these women had sex with him, claimed they were raped, and then associated with him and even socialized with him after the four of the sixth that what research did you do? Who were you able to speak with anybody about that concept of the victims continuing the relationship with their A lot report and write a fair amount about that. The biggest obstacle the prosecution had to prosecute Harvey successfully was how do you explain why these women who claimed to have been abused by him were so ambitious that they continue to keep in touch with them and in two cases actually continue to have sex with them. And so the prosecution. What the prosecution did was on the witness stand. They called Dr Barbera Zev of Temple University, an expert on rape. She testified into Bill Cosby trial, and she testified in this trial on behalf of the prosecution. And she cited one fact that just punched the jury and punched me as well in the nose. She said, forty of women in America who are raped continue to have a relationship, either friendly or sexually with a person of them. And that was very compelling. And then the women understand the six women who testified, they all talked about the different reasons why they kept quiet. I was afraid he would attack me in the press or sue me. He I signed a nondisclosure agreement. I was in denial that it ever happened. I blame myself for it happening. They gave various reasons. Ultimately the prosecution was able to take their biggest weakness and turn it into a strength. And Harvey, who thought his defense, thought they really had a good case. And is it's a compelling argument. How could these women explain why they were continuing to happen. At the very least, it's confusing for a lay audience. But then it goes to your point about where the trial took place. Harvey's lawyers argued that with the court, you should move the trial to another jurisdiction like Albany or upstate New York and out of New York right. And actually one of his lawyers said whispered to me, he said, you know, one of the dangers with that as you get more anti semitism in more rural areas, and maybe Harvey would have been even more vulnerable there. But in any case, that was an argument they made. They certainly argued that after he was indicted in Los Angeles, during the trial in New York, you should take a break for a few a few weeks because the press was writing about Harvey being indicted and it was going to corrupt the juror's mind. You look at someone like Harvey, and whatever your concept of justices, here's a man who's in a situation now where he can't do anything that he wants to do. He's in that reality where you don't do anything that you want to do. To balance out the fact that he was a man who for decades did everything he wanted to do, regardless of cost impact. He wanted to shove the eminem's in his mouth in spite of his diabetes. He did it. He wanted to have sex with the woman. He threw her on the ground and he raped her. He wanted to get out of a business deal. He and the I mean all of the things, the level frus and the knobs and the dials and the switches of the control freak. There's probably never been a control freak alive in human history to equal Harvey weinste in terms of what he did to everyone in his environment. And now he's sitting in a place where I mean, I'm assuming he's medicated to a fairly well. He's in a wheelchair, he has theenosis in a hospital ward of a prison now in l A. Because he goes on trial on October of this year. But he was in recovering that No, I'm done. I don't want to another you said that, Oh, Ken, please run a different bunk. I have no interest in Harvey's past tense, But in any case, he's sitting there. He has severe diabetes, he has a stent in his heart, he has high cholesterol, he's blind in one eye. I mean, and he eats baked beans. So I mean, I mean people ask me, do I feel sorry for Harvey? The answer is no, I don't feel sorry for him, but I feel as a human being, I wonder how the pain he must be going through the problem with Harvey I mean, and this is the problem I talked about in the book in terms of me too. We group everyone who is accused of any kind of sexual offense with Harvey. But grouping everyone with Harvey is quite unbelievable, and yet we do that. And so if you're Matt Lower or Mike Oreski's or you know whoever, you group with him. And the truth is, very few people are as guilty as he was of doing the awful things he did. Larry Nassa, the gymnast doctor, was, but very few others are. Cosby. Cosby was when the person is talking to you, when they're interviewing you, that person's alarm, that person's intellectual vanity, or their ability to conceal that because they're probably as smart, if not smarter than many people they're talking to because of their career. Do you think being this very polished man makes your job easier? You don't give off that energy field of aggression and Zella Tree, there's a there's an aura to you that's very relaxed and very composed. You're a very handsome guy. I think personality matters, particularly when you Personality and appearance matters when you're trying to get someone to talk to you. And the other thing that matters is being a good listener. If you go into an interview like a dentist, I want to drill your teeth, then no one's going to talk to you. They don't want to go through pain. So I begin my interviews on the several assumptions I assume if I'm profiling someone, it's going to be many interviews that when I happen this person, not just one. So that first interview, I'm not drilling teeth. I'm actually asking questions about your childhood, where you go up, tell me about your parents, tell me about your dreams as a kid. Now you Someone might think that's manipulative, but in fact becomes incredibly valuable to me to understand that person, and therefore they relax some more. People will talk if you convey to them that you're not playing at you, that you're not on edge, and you're looking for some angles, some headline tomorrow, and people will be more company. But when you have Donald Trump out there saying, and increasingly Republicans saying, I'm not going to talk to these people because this is fake news. Our misbehavior has contributed to allowing Donald Trump and some Republicans to make that argument about fake news and we can't trust reporters. And I mean, I saw. I think when you think about journalism and what the big worries are, it's the fact that there's no more universal facts. People don't trust the journalists, but they don't trust facts. And if you get if you watch Fox News, yeah, if Fox News you get one set of facts. In New York Times you got another, and you can't bridge the gap between the two. I'll now go on from this interview on to admit that I stole everything from you, because that's what I do. The people I work with, my producer, we call it. We call the first question the Billiard break. How do I line up all the shots on the table from the one question that we're gonna start with, which is gonna open you up precisely. And the thing is, if you think that I'm lunging for it, if you think I'm trying to take it from you, I've got to relax and wait for you to give it to me, right. And what I always say on here when I when I interviewed, I did a profile with Murdoch in ninety four, and Murdoch had reason to suspect me. When he took over New York magazine. I quit rather than work them, and I've been critical of his journalism, and yet he agreed to cooperate with me and opened himself more than he ever had with any reporter over four months for The New Yorker. And one of the things I said in that first interview, which is something I say to everyone i'm going to profile, my job is to understand you, and I'm gonna ope myself so I can understand you. And I really believe that I'm not there to prosecute with Murdock. I'm here to understand him. And the end, when I understand him, I shouldn't tell me when I understood him. In the end, he hated the profile. It was called a pirate and he should live because his invidious influence on journalism. I mean, he's really been a harmful influence son journalists, and I reported that. But I think as a businessman and what he does how bold he is. He's a fascinating character, and I'm going to capture that side of him as well. Which profile for you, because you've written these long pieces, which profile give me an example of one that was really tough like you. Eventually you had to employ all your artist try to get this person to talk to you. Well, actually, the worst human being I've ever met or profile was Roy Cone. And it was actually a cover story of Esquire magazine in and Roy Cohne refused to cooperate with me. And so what I did, It's like a prosecutor doing plea bargaining. I would say, Okay. I called Stanley Freeman, who was a low partner, was a Bronx County democratically who later went to jail by the way for corruption. I called Stanley Freeman, who I knew and I covered before. I said, Stanley, I can't believe Roy Cone, your partner wants me just to talk to his adversaries and enemies, because that's what's gonna happen if he shuts down his friends and him and within five minutes where he can't call me on the phone and then cooperated. But to spend time with this disgusting man who, by the way, he will go. The first interview we did at the twenty one Club. At lunch, we had a table and I ordered a twenty one burger and French fries. He orders nothing. He's sitting next to me in a banquette and with his little hands he would reach into my plate and take French fries off my plate and just just eat off my plate. Basically a total stranger, and sit there looking around the room and see's best Myers, and he's these other people he represented. He said, let me tell you about them. And he would literally betray his former clients too, in order to entice me as a journalist. When I was in Oh, he was disgusting. What do you think made him tick? He had an ideology, uh, you know in the end, which was, you know, McCarthy, the reds are taking over the country. We got to stop that. But he also had a lot of Democratic friends. His father was a Democratic judge in the Bronx, and he had Democratic friends, childhood friends, et cetera, who he continued support. So he was loyal to them, which is a bit of a complication with but I think it was also power. He loved the fact he goes to Donald Trump, who I also interviewed at that point. He said, Roy Kona is my mentor, and he sees Donald Trump at a social club and Donald Trump says, oh, Mr, can I ask you a question. He said, you know, we have this case. We were accused by the federal government of discriminating and housing at Trump properties in our apartment houses. What do we do about that? And he says, let me look at it. He says, this is all they have, the federal government. He said, I'll represent you and we'll win the case. Don't worry about it. Well, he lost the case, but he did something that was very Trumpian. He announced, even though they lost the case, that we won the case. Even though they will find over an hundred million dollars. He announced that they won because they were not demanded to plead guilty. They didn't have to plead guilty. So if we didn't play guilty, we won the case. Well, they actually lost the case. But and Trump forever went on that route, never apologizing, never meeting defeat. Author Ken Oletta, if you'd like to know more about the reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story, listened to my conversation with Jodie Cant and Megan Tooey from The New York Times. We interviewed him several times. I think that we were able to see in person sort of the spectrum of his behavior that he would swing from kind of charm and compliments and kind of ingratiating himself and like, well, the New York Times, it's the best paper in the world. And in terms of how he was able to pray on women, I think that that is a separate question from how he was able to sort of keep people in his orbit and maintain his power. That really is one of the most important questions is that there were actually people who got glimpses of his alleged misconduct over the years, and what do they do about it? How can we explain the fact that there were so many individuals and institutions, including his own companies, that became complicit in his abuse. Here the rest of my conversation with Jodie Canter and Megan Twoey in our archives at Here's the Thing dot org. After the break Ken Oletta discusses Ronan Pharaoh's early findings on Weinstein and his theories on y NBC Killed Pharaoh's story I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. Ken Oletta's most recent book digs into how Harvey Weinstein manipulated countless people to conceal his shocking levels of abuse. I was curious why Weinstein's wife at the time, Georgina Chapman, didn't speak out against Harvey. Well, you know, she wouldn't talk to me. No wheldive children his first wife, and I found out that they each signed, as did Harvey, non disclosure agreements, so they would Harvey was not allowed to talk about them. They're not allowed to talk about him without sacrificing significant financial support. But I talked to their friends for the book, and their friends say that each of them did not know he was cheating on them, and each of them actually loved him. I mean, most people who know Harvey find both claims to be absurd, but nevertheless, you know they did, That's what they said. So I just was thinking, in the hell, hath no fury department? But apparently Nda is trumped that. Yeah, and Eve children his first wife, doesn't talk to him. The air three daughters who were adopted don't talk to him now, and his brother doesn't talked to him, and Georgian and Chapman politely will talk to him, but obviously not now in prison. But there are two kids, obviously can't visit him. He was a good apparently a good father, I found out in the reporting I did. But you know, Harvey is alone in person, without friends, without a family. Um, you touch upon Ronan Pharaoh and his MSNBC period. Why do you think NBC is courting and massaging and treating Ronan Pharaoh like he's a piece of Kobe beef over there, and then they cut his stroke and they won't air his story. Well, obviously they had some desire to protect Harvey and Ronan. Actually I was when Ronan interviewed me about Harvey. I was worried that he was a zealot because of the Woody Allen thing. And yet when he interviewed me, I was impressed that he was acting like a journalist. He was asking good questions. He was judicious, was the word I later used to recommend him to David Remnick. And I said, so he comes out here to he said, I need to interview more about Harvey. I'd given him my tape recordings and stuff for my two thousand two profile in New Yorker. I said, you have to come out here to bridge him because I'm finishing a book. He comes out. I said, so what do you got? It's like a three or four hour interview. And he says, I have three women on camera claiming that Harvey abused them by name. I've got five women on camera but shielded their identity, shield saying Harvey abuse him. And I've got the audio tape of the Italian model who Harvey admitted he grabbed her breasts as a police audio tape. I said, oh my god, you've broken the case. I said, what's the next step? He said, I meet with Noah Open I am the president of NBC News on August eighth, summer of two thousand seventeen. So on August eighteen, that cale rowning because I said, I was really excited that finally someone's gonna nab this pick. And he says, they killed it and they said you can take it anywhere. But who would want it? He said, uh, And it wasn't a question. He believed that it was over. I said, a can I call you back? I called Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, and I said, David, I think this kid Running Farrell, who I thought was judicious, has broken the case, finally, the case I couldn't break in two thousand two, and I tried to and he said, haven't call me Monday. So it begs the question, which I later reported for the book, why did NBC kill the Running Faroll story? So I'm doing Morning Joe one morning and someone comes up to me from NBC. Would you meet with this high muck a muck at NBC News and but off the record where you can't quote the person. I said sure, so I've never used the person's name. So we got to lunch and this person tells me Ronna didn't have the goods. He only had the goods exposing Harvey after he came to The New Yorker. And so the press at the time played it like he said, she says story, NBC says this, Running says the opposite. They negate each other. But there was a third party you could go to, which is the New Yorker. So I went to the person who edited him at the New Yorker, Deadre, and I called Deirdre and I said, dear Drew, tell me, what did Ronan bring to The New Yorker when he came in August of two thousand seventeen for piece that wouldn't appear until October. She said he brought three women by name, were five women unnamed, but nevertheless, and the audio tape. So he had everything. And so I then speculated in the book, well, what could explain NBC's acquiescence. And there are five theories, and I don't know which is true, or if all of them are true, but nevertheless, One is that no Oppenheim as a screenwriter, and he was carrying favor with the studio head, Harvey Weinstein. Two is that Steve Burke, the CEO of NBC, head of Universal, it does business with Harvey's company all the time. Studios always co produced and co finance movies. Third explanation is that Andy Lack, the chairman of NBC News was he and his wife were social friends of Harvey Weinstein. For the reason, Brian Roberts, the head of Comcast, the parent company of NBC, was a social friend, I mean an intimate friend of Harvey's math Martha's Vinyon mafia. Harvey called him one of his mafia friends from Martha's Vinyond and the fifth reason, which seems more far fetched than other, is that Harvey knew had information about Matt Lower abusing women at NBC and made a trade. I won't say anything about malar if you don't run the story about about me. Are any of them too? I don't know, but those are you any explanations that have any plausibility? What's the story that you wrote in your many, many profiles of people that you were surprised that you learned something about the person. You went in with some sense of them, and when you when you were done, they changed your mind about it. I'll tell you one of my favorite stories is mcclandish Phillips was a New York Times reporter who Gay Talise, the Great Gay Talisa did the show Tale said the best writer on the New York Times was mcclandish Phillips. Mcclandish phillips is reporting his story and he gets the story that the head of the American Nazi Party is a Jew. So he interviews this guy to dinner and Queen's the guy's film queens, and he sits across from him. He said, you're Jewish. And the guy is handling a knife, you know, knife and four and he's handling, and mcclandish, who's about six ft six, then thanks, the guy's going to stab him. The guy doesn't stab me. Said, if you run that story, Mr Phillips, I will kill myself. So mcclandish Phillips goes back to a rosenthal on Artho Gelb, the editors senior rieditors at the New York Times, and he says, here's the story. And they said, this is a page one story. This is a great story. He said, if you run it, I'm afraid he's going to kill himself and should we really be doing this? They run the story on page one the New York Times. The head of the American Hazy Party kills himself. Mcclandish phillips resigns from The New York Times, says journal him is too ruthless of business for me. I don't would do it. He said he was an evangelical Christian. Phillips was. He goes, and I hear that he's outside of Columbia University walking handing out Christ's literature as an evangelical leader. So I said, oh my god, what a great story. I actually track him down and wind up profiling him for The New Yorker, and he was one of the great men I've ever met in my life. You grew up in Coney Island. How many kids in your family? Older brother, younger sister. And when we lived in a row house on West seventeenth Street, father was he had a little sporting good store and still all Avenue. He'd been a long showman before that. My mother is Jewish and my mother had two sisters who married Italian and all lived on West seventeenth Street. And the thought when the Catholic Church, you go to Catholic Church and some priests would say that Jews killed Christ. My father stopped going to church. And because when Jews you couldn't stereotype. You knew Jewish people and new Italian people, and it overcame all the stereotypes. Now you where do you go to high school? A ram Lincoln High School? Okay, where'd you go to college? State University? As you only goes to the baseball coach got me in that's what you did? You play baseball there? Base and graduate school? No I did. I then became a more serious dudeent. I was a school up in high school and I went to Maxwell School at Syracuse University, got a mask, I was in a PhD pro I got a master's pardon. That's both my parents and both sets of my grandparents went to s So Joe Biden, by the way. So you go to Maxwell for journalism, for political science, science, and what was the plan? The plan was, I thought, you know, maybe I'd be a diplomat or working government, but not not politics. And the dean of the school I was writing for the school newspaper. I was the editor of the off campus literary magazine, Investigated Magazine, really, and I said, I'm bored. I don't want to get a PhD. I don't want to say you do that. He introduced me to a guy named Howard Samuels the upstate in Dust was the guy who invented baggies in the plastic clothesline as an engineer at M I T. And so I drove over to Cannon, Daego, where his business court his business was, and I go to work for him as a speechwriter, code holder, travel companion, and then later became his campaign manager in nineteen seventy four. He was the first Democrat to endorse John lindsay independent race for re election in nineteen sixty nine, and Lindsay then turns him and asked, would you run. We're starting the first off track betting company in the country. He was called Howie the Horse, and he ran. I was the executive director. So I was how long did you do that? We did three years and I quit to plan his campaign for governor. And when he started as government he was twenty points ahead in the poll. Everyone thought he's gonna win. He lost. I was campaignment by twenty points. To you. Well, what happened was he was actually one of the most hilarious experience in my life. His wife was two year is old in born in France, and her father, Camille Shawtan was his name. He was the attorney general of the Vichy government, the pro Nazi government in France, and carries people. David Garth was the empressari on. It put out that she was defending she was the daughter of a Nazi collaborator. She was, but she was two years old, you know. But she insisted, the wife of the candidate that the campaign should also be not just about my husband, but about restoring my father's good name. I said, no, no, you can't do that. Jewish Howard Jewish, You'll get killed. Well, six of the Jewish voters in New York State at Cornia polls voted for an Irish Catholics. It's mclandis Philips all over again with people not wanting to know and he she dragged him down. Well the first press conference where Phil Tracy was the person who wrote the story investigative story in the Village Voice. And he's sitting there, Howard's announcing for governor. Tracy raised his hand asked the question, tell me about your father in law and being in you know, anti semi and part of governor Samuel's this is he's announcing for governor. He launches this defense of his father who he didn't know right and I'm sitting there and saying, oh my god, it's over. And of course it was over. My author Ken Oletta, if you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Ken Oletta tells us how things at the New Yorker magazine have changed over time. I'm Al Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. Ken Oletta's latest book details one of the highest profile cases of the me Too era, Harvey Weinstein. I was curious about another towering figure who left public life in disgrace, New York's former governor Andrew Cuomo. First of all, I mean he had to resign, even though he shouldn't have. The votes were not there. He was going to get impeached if he didn't resign. He was accused of two things, as was Charlie Rose. He was accused of misbehavior in the office, creating a culture of fear, yelling at people, the kind of things that Scott Ruden and Harvey did. He was accused of that. And the other he was accused of sexual abuse. So the question is do you believe the first that he was he was not a friendly place, was hostile? Yes? Is that an impeachable defense that you should quit office for? No? I mean no, did he abuseman? Well, if the women have claimed that, I haven't heard a counterclaim that says they are lying. Now, you have had a long career in these essays in the time. I mean, I am in the New Yorker. I'm a New Yorker junkie. That way, give me a good long story about so and so, and I literally thumbed through and go it's thirty pages long. This is great, And I just love The New Yorker for those profiles. But um, how would things change in your business? Well, when I I still, I was hired by William Shaun who was the editor, the second editor in ninety seven. And after I quit New York magazine and you quit New York Why I quit. Chris Murdock did a hostel takeover and the editor when you were there, Felker was the editor New York and Murdoch was going against Felker, and about forty of us went on strike, and when he succeeded, roughly forty of us quit. So I went to started writing for The New Yorker, then the New Yorker. Then, for instance, my first piece was two parts. I did a piece called the Underclass on poverty, which was three parts. You don't have two and three part pieces anymore. That's certainly a change. And the assumption is the reader doesn't have that kind of a patience to do that. But the New Yorkers editor since David Remnick. He's a brilliant editor and very much in the traditions of great traditions of the New Yorkers. So you can still find a twenty thousand word piece. And I just read a piece on on mega yachts, you know, I mean, I said, look how long this is, But it was totally engrossing to me after covering someone as unsettling as Harvey in his life. Who's your next book going to be about? You know? I view what I do as visiting other planets, get to know the natives and novelty something different, and so I would see it as visiting another planet, whatever that next planet might be. But it's going it's only going to come about after I've really this not only perched Harvey, but also I thought long and hard about who do I want to marry this subject? So tell me more about the Book of the Underclass. It began as a three ports series in The New Yorker, and its aim was to focus on the hardcore poor who were responsible for the disproportionate amount of our crime, disproportioned amount of our welfare dependency, disproportionate amount of drugs, et cetera. This is in the period of the early eighties and late seventies, and so I set out to find out who these people were, who were the hardcore poor who did not escape poor and often entered lives of crime. So I went to spending time with a group of these people, and it was a book called The Underclass Hollywood Ending Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. Again, kenn of Letter, this is a great book because when you say the culture of silence, I mean how this guy was able to get away with this for so long? But your book explains vividly how he was able to be evade justice with all the bargaining and horse trading he did, almost almost brilliantly, like you can't believe how agile this guy was in terms of his politically speaking, how did he get away with it for so long? So I encourage people to read this book. My thanks to Kenna Letta. Here's the Thing is produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeice and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by my Heart Radio.