NBC tiptoes around misconduct allegations
Superstar snowboarder White settled lawsuit in 2016 over explicit text messages
WASHINGTON — Before Shaun White won his third Olympic gold medal in halfpipe snowboarding Tuesday — before he even travelled to Pyeongchang for the Winter Games — the 31-year-old sat down with NBC’s Lester Holt to talk about how he has matured.
“You had the bad-boy image for a while,” Holt said.
“I don’t want to say I was a bad boy,” White replied, “but I was — I did some — wait, you ask the question.”
White wasn’t going to volunteer anything unflattering unless pressed.
He wasn’t pressed, so he settled on a vague reflection: “I always felt like I danced on the line of things.”
At the Olympics, NBC has danced along in its coverage of White and of sexual misconduct in general. What Holt did not specify is that for
White, being a “bad boy” included sending sexually explicit text messages to a female employee, Lena Zawaideh, who sued White in 2016. At the time, White admitted to sending the texts, but called the suit, in
which the employee alleged other forms of harassment, “bogus.” White and Zawaideh reached an undisclosed settlement.
Beyond the Holt interview, NBC’s Olympic telecasts ignored the accusations against White until Wednesday after a journalist from another TV network raised them in a post-competition news conference and drew this response from the snowboarder: “You know, honestly, here to talk about the Olympics, not gossip.”
Interviewing White on the Today show, Savannah Guthrie indicated she didn’t want to bring up harassment, but felt compelled.
“I take no pleasure in asking,” she said to White.
Guthrie pushed slightly harder than Holt did. White initially talked around the central issue by apologizing for his use of the word “gossip” to “describe such a sensitive subject in the world today.” Guthrie followed up by returning to White’s behaviour, which allegedly included groping Zawaideh.
“Is there anything you want to say?” Guthrie asked. “Do you feel that you learned something from that? Are you acknowledging?”
“Yeah, you know, I’ve grown as a person over the years,” White answered. “And it’s amazing — I mean, you’ve known me for a long time now — it’s amazing how life works and twists and turns and lessons learned. So every experience in my life, I feel like it’s taught me a lesson and I definitely feel like I’m a much more changed person than I was when I was younger.”
More broadly, NBC seems to have decided the Olympics are neither the time nor the place for a hard look at sexual misconduct in general, even as the U.S. Olympic Committee faces congressional inquiries into the failures that for years allowed USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar to sexually abuse teenage girls.
NBC has devoted little time to the Nassar scandal in its prime-time telecasts of the Games, keeping the focus on more uplifting Olympic themes such as perseverance and patriotism.