The past of $8.7 million a year New York Times chief Mark Thompson – including the allegation that he attacked a colleague without provocation and bit his arm – has returned to haunt him.
Updated legal papers seen by Heat Street which relate to the ongoing civil law suit launched against Thompson by two New York Times employees go into significant detail about various colourful alleged episodes from his career at the BBC, which he ran between 2004 and 2012.
The papers do not make for pretty reading.
As is known, the claimants, Ernestine Grant and her colleague Marjorie Walker, who work in the Times’ advertising department, have accused their employer of “engaging in deplorable discrimination that has remained largely off the record.”
Papers submitted on their behalf by New York law firm Wigdor LLP explain: “Beginning with the appointment of Defendant Mark Thompson to Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”) in 2012, the workplace at the Times has become an environment rife with discrimination based on age, race, and gender.”
First, they say Thompson’s apppointment as New York Times CEO was “riddled with controversy, given the numerous humiliations and indignities he presided over during his tumultuous tenure as the Director General of the BBC.”
They go on:
“Thompson was involved in a highly publicized BBC scandal regarding a decision to bury an exposé of child sex abuse allegedly committed by one the BBC’s most well-known personalities, Jimmy Savile. Not only was Mr. Thompson seemingly involved in attempting to conceal this important piece of journalism from the public, but he also later lied about his role in the affair, which was demonstrated through an irrefutable recording.”
This recording is cited as a taped interview made in October 2012 by reporter Ben Webster of the London Times.
The recording, which Heat Street has heard, was broadcast on UK website Guido Fawkes in March 2013 and circulated widely.
The papers go on:
“Thompson initially denied any awareness of the underlying allegations or of the “Newsnight” cancelation while he was at the BBC. Later, however, reports indicated that he was aware of the “Newsnight” investigation, well before the cancelation. As a result, Mr. Thompson changed his story, acknowledging that he was told about an investigation, but maintained his lack of awareness of any details involving sexual abuse. However, this version of events was then undone by the surfacing of [The London Times’s] audio recording in which he admitted awareness that the investigation involved “sexual abuse of some kind.”
Interestingly, an interview which Thompson gave to the BBC as recently as September 11, 2016 – three weeks after the court papers were filed – dredged up this issue again.
Presenter Andrew Marr asked Thompson about his knowledge of the Savile scandal. And Thompson did not deny – as has been alleged many times, including to a committee of MPs – that he was told informally about the existence of the Savile investigation in 2011 by his BBC colleague Helen Boaden.
This is what he told Marr:
Thompson also discussed this issue at greater length in 2013, as Heat Street has previously noted.
The legal papers then go on to deal with the extraordinary biting episode, which dates from Thompson’s time at the BBC in the 1980s.
They state:
“Mr. Thompson was publicly reported to engage in utterly bizarre and highly unprofessional behavior, such as when he bit the arm of a subordinate employee. Mr. Thompson admitted to the incident, and claimed it was merely “horseplay,” but the victim explained it as completely unprovoked and unusual.”
They go on:
“In addition to his reputation for questionable ethics, Mr. Thompson was nothing short of an abusive supervisor. When Mr. Thompson was the newly appointed editor of the Nine O’Clock News, he supervised Anthony Massey, who once approached Mr. Thompson to discuss a pending story. It was reported that before Mr. Massey could say a word, Mr. Thompson “suddenly turned, snarled, and sank his teeth into [Mr. Massey’s] left upper arm (leaving marks through the shirt, but not drawing blood). Mr. Massey reported: ‘I pulled my arm out of his jaws, like a stick out of the jaws of a labrador. The key thing is, we didn’t have a row first, or even speak, and I had never had any dispute with him.’ When Mr. Massey relayed this incident to a colleague, the colleague responded: “The bloke [referring to Mr. Thompson] is quite clearly insane.”
Heat Street contacted Thompson by email seeking comment but he did not reply. In a formal response to the papers, he has denied the allegations.