| | | | | On Thursday Amazon's top content exec Roy Price went on a "leave of absence," hours after a producer on one of Amazon's shows lodged a harassment allegation through an interview with THR. The producer said she was inspired to speak out by the women who spoke out about Harvey Weinstein. Elsewhere on Thursday, the NYPD said detectives are looking into the rape claims published by The New Yorker. London police said they are investigating an alleged assault by Weinstein. And there were several new signs that The Weinstein Co. is falling apart... | | "This is only going to get worse" | | | Can the Weinstein Co. survive? Right now it's an open question. According to multiple sources, the two men now running the firm, Weinstein's brother Bob and the company's president David Glasser, could be the next out the door. They're both under severe scrutiny. There's a sense in media circles that lawsuits and lingering questions about complicity are going to haunt the company for years. "This is only going to get worse," a studio chief told Jamie Gangel. I teamed up with Gangel for this story about how the company is "under siege..." | | Hollywood execs are talking about the possibility of a sale or bankruptcy. Deadline has an excellent story about how Weinstein Co. is "near the brink," with financiers and agents looking for "outs." The business is in "extreme limbo," with one high-level media exec likening it to "a run on the bank." The story says "numerous agents and executives at studios believe it will be next to impossible to detoxify" the company.
--> So: A fire sale? A bankruptcy? Variety's sources say it would not be a surprise for "the senior lenders to ask for a trustee to be appointed to begin the reorganization process..."
-- The LAT says "potential buyers are beginning to circle..." | | "In The Heights" movie in question | | | Weinstein Co.'s next big production was supposed to be "In The Heights." But on Thursday Quiara Hudes, who's adapting the play into the movie, said she wants out: "I hope Weinstein Company has enough grace, in the wake of these allegations, to respect my stand as a woman, and to allow us to extricate In The Heights from them." Hudes said the play "deserves a fresh start in a studio where I'll feel safe (as will my actors and collaborators)." Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted his support for her statement... | | Here's what else happened on Thursday | | -- Those NYC and London police investigations were confirmed...
-- Harvey's revenge? TMZ reported details from Weinstein's 2015 contract and said he "may have been fired illegally..."
-- A Weinstein-branded book imprint at Hachette was disbanded, effecting about ten books a year. The books will still be published by Hachette without the Weinstein name...
-- Another accuser, Sophia Dix, came forward: "An English actor who was on the brink of a career in the British film industry in the 1990s has told how her trajectory was 'massively cut down' after an alleged sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein in a London hotel..."
-- Jane Fonda told Christiane Amanpour: "Let's not think this is some unique, horrific [incident]. This goes on all the time. It's this male entitlement..."
-- Oliver Stone said of Weinstein, "It's not easy, what he's going through..." | | Producers Guild will vote on Saturday, just like the Academy... | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: The Producers Guild on America is planning to vote Saturday at noon PT on Weinstein's membership. A source close to the board told me he is likely to be expelled. This source called the vote "historic" and said "we need to be first and foremost taking a stand."
The Guild's decision to vote on Weinstein's future was announced a day after The Academy announced they'd be reviewing Weinstein's standing in a meeting of their own on Saturday... Read Sandra's full story here... | | Rose McGowan alleges Weinstein raped her | | Rose McGowan granted an interview to Ronan Farrow earlier this year -- an on-the-record, on-camera interview. She repeatedly said Weinstein raped her. It was a key part of Farrow's investigation for NBC. But McGowan called him months later and asked him to remove her accusation from the story. "I'm so sorry," she said. The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse."
According to the NYT, she settled with Weinstein in 1997, so she's subjected to an non-disclosure agreement. But she's been leading the social media charge against Weinstein and his enablers, and it all came to a head on Thursday. In a tweet to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, she said "I told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said it. He said it hadn't been proven. I said I was the proof."
McGowan is the fourth woman to level a rape accusation against Weinstein. Here's our story... | | Weinstein camp's response | | | A repeat of Tuesday's statement: "Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein." | | | As Lisa Respers France reports here, McGowan was suspended from Twitter on Thursday morning. The company claimed it was because she violated the terms of service by posting a private phone #. Not a satisfying explanation. Later in the day, Jack Dorsey said the company needs "to be a lot more transparent in our actions in order to build trust..." (TechCrunch) | | McGowan didn't tweet his name, but she called out "the head" of Amazon's studio, i.e. Roy Price. Little more than an hour later, THR published Kim Masters' exclusive interview with Isa Hackett, who charged that Price made obscene comments to her in 2015. Masters has been pursuing this story for a long time. She tweeted that it was "truly a nightmare to break" the story "thanks to Weinstein team of Lisa Bloom and Charles Harder." Yep, some notable overlap in lawyers... Bloom says she is no longer representing Price...
-- Amazon spokesman Craig Berman emails: "Price is on leave of absence effective immediately." Here's the full story by me and Jackie Wattles...
-- You might remember that Masters wrote about the alleged wrongdoing two months ago -- but the story appeared on The Information, not THR. Recode's Peter Kafka wrote about the reasons why THR and other outlets said they passed on it. The tick-tock might remind you of NBC and Ronan Farrow...
-- Q's: What would cause this "leave of absence" to end? How badly will this hurt Amazon's TV efforts? | | Interview with Jodi Kantor | | It's been one week since the initial NYT investigation by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey came out. I headed over to the Times HQ to interview Kantor (podcast and TV segment coming soon!) and she signaled that she is still busy doing more reporting about Weinstein:
"I've been in touch with a lot of" the accusers since the story ran, she said, "and the past week has been really emotional for them. Because they had no idea of the extent of the allegations -- which, by the way, may not be fully uncovered yet..." | | >> Maybe "everybody knew" something, but they didn't "know everything" | | On Thursday I interviewed a former assistant of Weinstein's -- the same person who spoke with Bianna Golodryga on "CBS This Morning." He said he had no idea there was harassment happening behind closed doors. "Worst kept secret in Hollywood?" he said. "Amongst us day-to-day employees, we knew that Harvey was a philandering creep. We knew that Harvey flew around the world at the whim of his sexual urges or whatever the hell it was. But we all believed he was just cheating on his wife -- which is horrible in its own right, but at no point did we ever think or imagine that he was raping people. We had no idea what was going on behind those closed doors."
The former assistant insisted on anonymity because of a past nondisclosure agreement and a present fear of being sued by Weinstein... | | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: There's something in the air as a result of this Weinstein fallout. So many women who have experienced sexual harassment or worse in their industry are mad -- and talking. BuzzFeed's Doree Shafrir reported about a document that's circulating with names of dozens of men in media who have exhibited improper behavior toward women. BuzzFeed calls it "a collection of misconduct allegations and rumors..." | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Tom Kludt's latest: "Explosive Weinstein stories expose mogul's power over media" (CNNMoney)
-- If you only have time for one long read today, let it be this very comprehensive explainer by Alexis Madrigal piecing together all the different facets of the story of Facebook's influence on American democracy. (The Atlantic)
-- Trevor Timm, the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, says Trump's tweeted threats to TV licenses amount to a First Amendment violation... (CJR)
-- Reddit is partnering with Time magazine to produce content based on threads on the platform... (Digiday) | | "West Wing does damage control amid bad headlines" | | ...That was the banner on "AC360." President Trump's chief of staff John Kelly fielded Q's in the briefing room on Thursday, and CNN's Dan Merica has a complete recap here...
-- Margaret Brennan on the "CBS Evening News:" "Despite his denials, we know Kelly is fatigued by the president's Twitter habit and by his temper..."
-- CNN's Jim Sciutto tweeted: "To be clear, Kelly was a different messenger delivering the same message: criticizing press, denying WH discord, defending Trump..." | | NBC News is in bad company 😉 | | | POTUS kept up his criticism of NBC News on Thursday night, tweeting, "People are just now starting to find out how dishonest and disgusting (FakeNews) @NBCNews is. Viewers beware. May be worse than even @CNN!" | | By Julia Waldow:
-- Disney/ABC Television Group began laying off TV employees Thursday... About 200 people are expected to lose their jobs... (THR)
-- Here's a sneak peek at forthcoming research into newsrooms' use of push alerts... The report found that "additional context" alerts were most common for iOS, and CNN MoneyStream took the lead in both number of alerts from iOS apps, and emoji usage... (How's that for a 👍?) (Nieman Lab)
-- Brian Steinberg reports that the price of a 30-second ad on "SNL" increased nearly 100% since 2015, when considering this season's average cost... (Variety)
-- The entire "Futurama" library will be available for streaming on Hulu, starting next Monday... (Variety) | | Axios's Mike Allen interviewed Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg Thursday morning. There's a lot about Russian ads she wouldn't answer, as Dylan Byers writes here.
-- Also: Sandberg again stated that Facebook is not a media company. Once again, that statement drew widespread criticism...
-- "At our heart we're a tech company," she said, adding, "we don't hire journalists." Watch the whole exchange here, paired with key excerpts from Sandberg... | | CNN's latest: Russian hackers were both proactive and reactive | | Donie O'Sullivan and Dylan Byers' latest scoop: "Even Pokémon Go used by extensive Russian-linked meddling effort."
O'Sullivan emails: The attempt to leverage Pokémon Go points to how pervasive the Russian campaign was. They were proactive. They reached out to journalists -- they even did an interview with a student reporter by email. (We found some Cyrillic in the metadata of a file they emailed that reporter!) They were reactive. They attempted to organize events -- setting up an event in Minnesota the day after Philando Castile was killed by police in July 2016. That made local activists suspicious. And another thing: YouTube and Tumblr didn't have a lot to say when we asked for comment. The group's YouTube channel was live as of Thursday afternoon. Tumblr, now owned by Verizon, wouldn't say if they are doing anything about potential use of their platform by Russian-linked groups like this... | | "When it comes to this latest action by ESPN, I am a bit perplexed..." | | ...That's ESPN public editor Jim Brady reacting to the suspension of Jemele Hill. The case has "raised questions about how journalists and commentators should conduct themselves on social media," Frank Pallotta writes...
-- Semi-related: At a Times Talk event on Thursday evening, Dean Baquet said the NYT will be instituting tougher social media rules for employees... | | | For the record, part three | | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- NYU's Journalism Institute has launched "First Amendment Watch," a website covering threats to freedom of speech and press... (NYU)
-- After Tow Center's Jonathan Albright used CrowdTangle data to quantify how many times Russian ads on the platform were shared, Facebook "fixed the bug" that allowed Albright to gather the data. That's tech speech for scrubbing the internet of public interest data... (WashPost) | | Three weeks since Hurricane Maria... | | | Via Twitter, the president told "the 3.5 million American citizens who live on Puerto Rico -- just three weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated that island -- that FEMA and first-responders will not be there forever. That left many to wonder why, with the death toll continuing to rise in Puerto Rico, the president would announce such a thing. He made no such warning to hurricane victims in Texas or in Florida," Jake Tapper said on "The Lead." He went to CNN's Leyla Santiago, who shared these "facts on the ground" about day-to-day survival... | | Congressman suggests the death toll is being covered up | | | Mediaite's Joe DePaolo writes: "Appearing on 'S.E. Cupp Unfiltered' Thursday, Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL) gave his reasoning for why he believes the death toll is much higher than the public knows. 'We've heard stories of people having to bury their loved ones in the backyard and not being reported,' Soto said. 'People dying in hospitals of all sorts of diseases.' And then he lobbed a serious accusation at the White House. 'I think they're really holding back on this to try to keep the news out of the media.' Cupp pressed Soto on this..." | | Pitbull's contributions and criticism | | | Melissah Yang and Maria Santana report: Pitbull is championing for Puerto Rico relief while also claiming to see Trump's "true colors." The rapper's criticism came just before Trump caught heat for tweeting that federal aid to Puerto Rico won't last "forever..." | | Lowry says this is a "good weekend for grownups at the movies..." | | | Brian Lowry emails: It's a good weekend for grownups at the movies. Not one or two, but three historical early-to-mid-20th-century dramas open Friday, and all of them are well worth seeing: "Marshall," starring Chadwick Boseman as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and a key trial during the early part of his career working for the NAACP; "Goodbye Christopher Robin," a fascinating look at Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne and the toll that took on his young son; and "Professor Marston & the Wonder Women," about the unconventional lifestyle of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston... | | | Email brian.stelter@turner.com... I appreciate every message. The feedback helps us craft the next day's newsletter! | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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