MSNBC President Phil Griffin once shared a revealing photo of “Access Hollywood” star Maria Menounos at a staff meeting, according to a report on Ronan Farrow’s new book, which is set to be published on Tuesday.
Yashar Ali, a journalist for New York Magazine and HuffPost, shared an excerpt he obtained from Farrow’s “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.” It includes what Ali describes as a “particularly disturbing scene” of Griffin “waving around a zoomed in photo of Maria Menounos’s vagina in a staff meeting.”
“Would you look at that?” Griffin allegedly said to staffers before repeating, “Not bad.”{mosads}
Farrow also writes that Griffin once pressured female staffers to attend a Times Square peep show in the 1990s while serving as a senior producer for “NBC Nightly News.”
MSNBC declined to comment.
Farrow told ABC News in an interview last week that he has seen a paper trail of documents that show “multiple secret settlements and nondisclosures” were struck by NBC News with women making sexual misconduct allegations against former “Today” anchor Matt Lauer.
The new book documents the Lauer case and has already made news by reporting on new allegations from one NBC News employee who alleges the former “Today” anchor raped her in a hotel room at the Sochi Olympics. Lauer has firmly denied the allegations, saying it was a consensual affair.
The book has already hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list.
“What we show in this book, with a paper trail, with documents, was that there were multiple secret settlements and nondisclosures being struck with women at NBC News,” Farrow told “Good Morning America” on Friday.
NBC News President Andy Lack said in a memo to staff this week that after Lauer’s firing, the network’s legal team did “an exhaustive investigation” of records and interviews of current and former staff.
“They uncovered no claims or settlements associated with allegations of inappropriate conduct by Lauer before he was fired,” Lack wrote. “Only following his termination did NBCU reach agreements with two women who had come forward for the very first time, and those women have always been free to share their stories about Lauer with anyone they choose.”
An NBC spokesperson also said the network had done an exhaustive search of records.
“The first time we learned about Matt Lauer’s sexual misconduct in the workplace was the night of November 27, 2017, and he was fired in 24 hours,” the spokesperson said. “Any suggestion that we knew prior to that evening, paid any ‘hush money,’ or tried to cover up any aspect of Lauer’s appalling behavior is absolutely false.”
Farrow won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his reporting on allegations of sexual misconduct and rape against former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
The former MSNBC host had conducted his investigation for NBC News, but says he was compelled to take the story to The New Yorker after the network said the story hadn’t passed its editorial standards.