Political analyst Halperin faces sex harassment claims
Dianna Goldberg was a young researcher at ABC News in 1994 when she asked a colleague, Mark Halperin, for some information about a story. He readily agreed to help her and asked her to come to his office.
Close the door, he said when she arrived. Come over here, he said, seated at his desk. Sit down and I’ll give you the information, he said. He motioned to his lap.
“What?” she remembers thinking. “I don’t want to sit on your lap.” But Halperin was the political director of the network, a rising star who was highly regarded by ABC’s management, including World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings. Goldberg, who now goes by her married name, May, thought that refusing him could injure her career.
She reluctantly agreed and sat down briefly. Halperin, she recalled on Wednesday, had an erection.
The same routine happened on three or four other occasions, she said. Each instance left her confused, shaken and ashamed.
“I didn’t know what to do,” said May, now a lawyer. “He was important. He wasn’t my superior but he was certainly in a superior position to mine. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know how to at the time. I knew it was wrong.
“It was gross,” she said. “He’s gross. He’s gross.”
Halperin, 52, went on to become one of the most prominent political journalists of his generation. After leaving ABC News, he worked for Bloomberg Politics and NBC, and co-wrote the best-selling chronicle of the 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change, which was made into an HBO movie. He also cohosted a discussion program on Bloomberg TV called With All Due Respect and starred with Game Change co-author John Heilemann in a Showtime series about the 2016 campaign, The Circus. Until Thursday, he was a regular panelist on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show.
Throughout the years, he also gained a reputation among female campaign reporters and “embeds” — the young journalists who are assigned to follow a candidate full time — for unsavory behavior. Anonymous allegations against Halperin were first reported Wednesday night by CNN.com.
Halperin, in a brief interview Thursday, denied some of the specific accusations against him. He also sent The Washington Post the same statement he sent to CNN: “During this period, I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me. I now understand from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain. For that, I am deeply sorry and I apologize. Under the circumstances, I’m going to take a step back from my day-to-day work while I properly deal with this situation.”
In the three weeks since dozens of women came forward with sexual assault and misconduct allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the cultural landscape has been altered, with claims brought against figures across other industries.
The fallout from the CNN story has been swift. HBO said Thursday it has canceled a miniseries based on an upcoming book about the 2016 presidential election. And by Thursday evening, his publisher, Penguin Press, said it had canceled plans for the book entirely. MSNBC said Halperin “is leaving his role as a contributor until the questions around his past conduct are fully understood.”
The Washington Post spoke with nine women, including May, who said they were aware of, or had directly experienced, unwanted contact by Halperin over a period dating back to the mid-1990s. All except May spoke on the condition that their names not be used in order to describe their encounters, or colleagues’ encounters they said they were told about.
The alleged conduct ranged from unwelcome touching — grabbing and holding women’s hands, for example — to inappropriate late-night phone calls and aggressive and repeated sexual propositioning. Several recounted episodes in which he rubbed his erect penis against them — a claim specifically denied by Halperin in an interview. One woman said he appeared wearing only an open robe when a young campaign operative was summoned to deliver some information to his hotel room.