NBC News Head Noah Oppenheim’s College Columns Attacked Sexual Assault Victims, Insisted Women Enjoy Being ‘Preyed Upon’
NBC News President Noah Oppenheim is facing new scrutiny connected to his attempts to diminish sexual assault claims against disgraced former Today Show host Matt Lauer, as the Peacock Network executive’s old college columns defending sexual deviants were recently unearthed.
According to a Daily Beast report on Friday, Oppenheim’s articles from when he was a student writer at Harvard’s Crimson have been circulating around the NBC newsroom — particularly one column from the late ’90s in which Oppenheim stated that he was “saddened” by NBC’s decision to fire sportscaster Marv Albert after he plead guilty to misdemeanor sexual assault charges. Oppenheim’s other greatest hits at the Crimson include columns where he belittled feminism and made sexualized remarks about women.
In his 1997 piece defending Albert, whose departure from NBC lasted less than two years, Oppenheim wrote that he was “saddened by the fate of [the] broadcasting great.”
“The trial was a sham and that the network’s action was an injustice,” Oppenheim continued, before complaining that Albert’s accuser was “permitted to remain shielded in anonymity while the intimate details of Marv’s personal life were plastered across the headlines.”
“Considering the obvious uncertainty of Marv’s actual criminal guilt, Dartboard considers NBC’s action to be highly inappropriate. All that we know for sure is that Marv liked his sex a little kinky,” Oppenheim concluded.
In another disturbing column, Oppenheim wrote dimished sexual assault concerns at club and party settings, stating in a 1998 Crimson item that “women enjoy being confined, pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon. They feel desired, not demeaned.”
Oppenheim’s throwback writings have gained a new life in the NBC News offices and staffers who anonymously spoke to the Daily Beast expressed disgust toward their boss.
One current NBC News employee expressed a desire to leave the network and added, “Our boss thinks women enjoy being ‘confined, pumped with alcohol and preyed upon’—those are his own words—and now he runs one of the largest news divisions in America. I can’t believe I work for him. How can this person be president of a network news division?”
Another staffer told the news site that “Noah has always run a boys club” at NBC.
New questions related to Oppenheim’s leadership at NBC were raised amid the release of journalist Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill. In the work, Farrow, who previously worked for NBC News before the network attempted to kill his 2017 bombshell report on Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein, explains how a number of powerful executives and producers tried to cover for Weinstein and dissuade him from pursuing the story that helped break open the #MeToo movement. Farrow specifically calls out Oppenheim’s role in that effort, writing that the top NBC News executive shrugged off allegations against Weinstein as just “a movie producer grabbing a lady.”
