Matt Lauer Lashes Out at Ronan Farrow for Rape Allegation Reporting

Matt Lauer is firing off at Ronan Farrow following a recent New York Times story questioning the 32-year-old journalist’s reporting integrity, called “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?”

The 62-year-old former TV news anchor, whose rape allegation was part of Ronan‘s book Catch & Kill, spoke out in a media column on Mediaite on Tuesday (May 19), called “Why Ronan Farrow Is Indeed Too Good to Be True.”

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“I was shaken, but not surprised, that few in the media were willing to thoroughly challenge the accusations against me, or the person making them,” he wrote.

“I had originally intended to release [Tuesday’s rebuttal] in November of 2019, but personal considerations at that time, and later news events impacting us all, delayed those plans…this week The New York Times published a piece that was highly critical of Ronan Farrow’s journalistic methods and standards,” he went on to write.

“The rush to judgment was swift,” Matt said of the allegation against him.

“In fact, on the morning I was falsely accused of rape, and before I could even issue a statement, some journalists were already calling my accuser ‘brave’ and ‘courageous’…I was also disappointed, but not surprised, that Ronan Farrow’s overall reporting faced so little scrutiny. Until this week’s critical reporting by The New York Times, many in the media perceived his work as inherently beyond basic questioning. However, [Farrow] was hardly an unbiased journalist when it came to anything to do with NBC, and he was rarely challenged as he dropped salacious stories in a daily marketing effort designed to create media attention for his book,” Matt wrote.

“This is not just about accusations against the former host of the Today show. It’s about whether changing social attitudes can be allowed to change the most fundamental rules of journalism…it’s about whether, as journalists, we have a responsibility to check facts and vet sources,” he continued. Click here to read the full piece.

“All I’ll say on this is that Matt Lauer is just wrong. Catch and Kill was thoroughly reported and fact-checked, including with Matt Lauer himself,” Ronan later wrote on Twitter.

Ronan Farrow recently called out his book publisher for this reason.