MSNBC President Phil Griffin once showed off a revealing photo of a woman — who a source says is TV personality Maria Menounos — at a staff meeting, smirking and saying, “Not bad, not bad,” according to reports on a new book.
In an excerpt of Ronan Farrow‘s “Catch and Kill” that journalist Yashar Ali says he obtained — and which was described in a recent report by New York Magazine — the author alleges that Griffin waved around a zoomed-in photo of the partially exposed woman.
Ali says the woman was the “Access Hollywood” host in a bikini who was suffering a wardrobe malfunction at the time.
“Would you look at that?” Griffin allegedly remarked to colleagues at the staff meeting before repeating, “Not bad.”
Farrow also claimed that co-workers described Griffin as a crude boss and that while he was still a senior producer at “Nightly News” in the 1990s, he once pressured female colleagues to go to a peep show in Times Square, New York Magazine said.
Griffin did not respond to a request for comment, while MSNBC declined comment.
The accusations come amid a series of explosive claims leveled by Farrow against MSNBC and its parent network, NBC News, about execs’ handling of his probe into Harvey Weinstein.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist wrote that he was reporting about Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct for the Peacock Network until higher-ups squashed the story, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Farrow claimed that NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack and other honchos submitted to Weinstein, who allegedly threatened to retaliate by publicizing allegations against the network’s “Today” host, Matt Lauer, through his allies at the National Enquirer if they continued to report on him.
Lack has fired back at Farrow, calling his claims a “fundamentally untrue picture.”
NBC News also denied those allegations in a statement to The Post.
“NBC News was never contacted by AMI, or made aware in any way of any threats from them, or from anyone else, for that matter,” the statement said. “And the idea of NBC News taking a threat seriously from a tabloid company about Matt Lauer is especially preposterous, since they already covered him with great regularity.”