Andrew Lack, who heads NBC News, reportedly aggressively pursued women who worked for him, according to Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill.
In an excerpt from the book obtained by Page Six, Farrow reports that the then-married Lack was “almost unrelenting” in asking out CBS anchor Jane Wallace, the network at which he formerly worked, offering to take her to dinner “every day for almost a month.”
“If your boss does that, what are you gonna say?” Wallace told Farrow. “You know if you say ‘I don’t want to celebrate with you,’ you’re asking for trouble.”
She said their sexual relationship was “ultimately consensual, but I didn’t just get flirted with. I got worked over.”
Wallace said that once the relationship went south, Lack bullied her out of her job.
“As she left the show, she recalled him yelling, ‘You will never get credit,’” Farrow wrote. “Then the network deployed a tactic that the public was barely conscious of at the time: it offered her a substantial payout to sign a binding nondisclosure agreement.”
Wallace reluctantly accepted, but realized how messed up the arrangement was.
“It wasn’t till I really got out of there that I felt the full force of it. Of how disgusted I was,” she told Farrow. “The truth is, if he hadn’t been like that, I would have kept that job. I loved that job.”
The book also reveals another “relationship” Lack had with an associate producer named Jennifer Laird, which turned similarly nasty.
“When Laird asked to be reassigned, Lack wouldn’t allow it,” Farrow wrote. “He compelled her to work longer hours, and on weekends, and proposed she cancel vacations.”
Farrow has been instrumental in uncovering several abuse allegations connected to Harvey Weinstein as well as Les Moonves and Eric Schneiderman. Catch and Kill is due out October 15.