On Monday morning, NBC News finally terminated the contract of political analyst Mark Halperin five days after allegations surfaced thanks to CNN’s Oliver Darcy that Halperin had been alleged to have engaged in disturbing sexual misconduct while serving as ABC News political director.
The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi noted that Halperin’s termination also meant that he will no longer be appearing on MSNBC, where he was a frequent guest on Morning Joe and used to have a show called With All Due Respect.
Farhi added that “a dozen women have accused Halperin of unwanted contact, including assault, while he was working at ABC News over a period stretching from 1994 to 2004.”
NBC was the last of several employers to cut ties with him, behind HBO (who wanted to develop his 2016 election book into a miniseries), Penguin Press (for a book deal), and Showtime (where he co-hosted The Circus).
Further, this story was significant because it marked yet another questionable decision by the network that, was recently confronted with stories that they tried to kill contributor Ronan Farrow’s bombshell Harvey Weinstein story.
Deadline.com’s Lisa de Moraes provided a thorough breakdown of how much this Halperin story had snowballed. Here’s part of it:
News comes days after CNN first reported claims of five women, who spoke on condition of anonymity, that veteran journalist Halperin had sexually harassed them when he was working for ABC News. He had been suspended from NBC News since that late Wednesday report.
Late Friday, Halperin had issued a last-ditch apology, in which he acknowledged his “aggressive and crude” behavior towards women while at ABC. But, insisted Halperin, who joined MSNBC as senior political analyst in 2010 after working for Time and Bloomberg, he has had a “very different reputation than I had at ABC News because I conducted myself in a very different manner.” He said that was the result of “several years” of “weekly counseling sessions to work on understanding the personal issues and attitudes that caused me to behave in such an inappropriate manner.”
De Moraes pointed out that more people have come forward since the original CNN story to either say they had their own Halperin story or to state that they had heard rumors about his behavior over the years.
