Mark Halperin was fired by NBC and MSNBC today. This follows on the bad news from last week.
Political analyst Mark Halperin has lost a book deal and an HBO project based on it in the wake of sexual-harassment allegations by at least five women.
Late Thursday, Penguin Press announced it would cancel a book by Halperin and longtime collaborator John Heilemann about the 2016 presidential election.
“In light of the recent news regarding Mark Halperin, the Penguin Press has decided to cancel our plans to publish a book he was co-authoring on the 2016 election,” the publisher said in a statement.
HBO said it was ““no longer proceeding with the project tied to the untitled book. HBO has no tolerance for sexual harassment within the company or its productions.”
That project was going to be the upcoming season of the highly-rated Game Change program. You don’t want to know the details of why this has happened to Halperin, but I’ll provide some anyway:
CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported Wednesday night that women described Halperin as having a “dark side” that ranged from “propositioning employees for sex to kissing and grabbing one’s breasts against her will.” Three of the women described “Halperin as, without consent, pressing an erection against their bodies while he was clothed,” Darcy wrote. Halperin denied “grabbing a woman’s breasts and pressing his genitals against the three women,” according to the report.
If I were to write an epitaph of Halperin’s career, or carve something on his gravestone, I’d definitely mention that Dana Milbank said that his political analysis was “soulless” and “amoral.”
His treatment of women, unfortunately, has been even worse.
I know that Donald Trump only hires “the best people,” so I suppose there’s a chance that Halperin could fall up into the White House. Ordinarily, I’d predict that he’d land at the Fox News land of misfit toys with other spectacular washouts like Oliver North, Mark Fuhrman, Howard Kurtz, and Geraldo Rivera. But Fox News probably doesn’t need one more sexual harassment rehabilitation project at the moment, so maybe a better bet is that Halperin will follow Larry King and Michael Flynn to the Kremlin’s RT network. I doubt his father is proud.
