NBC News chief Andrew Lack — once accused of mishandling sexual harassment complaints at the Peacock Network — preyed on female underlings and pursued sexual relationships with them, according to one of his alleged victims.
Lack’s alleged behavior is detailed in Ronan Farrow’s upcoming book, “Catch and Kill” — an excerpt of which was obtained Wednesday by The Post.
In it, Jane Wallace, an anchor on CBS’s “West 57th” news show when Lack was an executive producer in the late 1980s, discussed her affair with the then-married newsman.
Lack, 72, a close friend of ousted “Today” show anchor Matt Lauer who oversaw his 2017 termination, was “almost unrelenting” in asking Wallace out to dinner “every day for almost a month,” saying he wanted to celebrate her contract, according to the book.
“If your boss does that, what are you gonna say?” Wallace told Farrow. “You know if you say ‘I don’t want to celebrate with you,’ you’re asking for trouble.”
She said their sexual relationship was “ultimately consensual, but I didn’t just get flirted with. I got worked over.”
Eventually, Wallace claimed Lack bullied her out of the job she loved — and lorded his power over her — when their relationship soured.
“As she left the show, she recalled him yelling, ‘You will never get credit,’” Farrow wrote. “Then the network deployed a tactic that the public was barely conscious of at the time: it offered her a substantial payout to sign a binding nondisclosure agreement.”
It was an offer Wallace accepted — reluctantly.
“It wasn’t till I really got out of there that I felt the full force of it. Of how disgusted I was,” she told Farrow. “The truth is, if he hadn’t been like that, I would have kept that job. I loved that job.”
“This is dead wrong and the charges of retaliation are just not true,” a source close to Lack told The Post.
Lack also allegedly had a “relationship” with a young associate producer, Jennifer Laird, and turned “hostile” toward her when things ended, according to the book.
“When Laird asked to be reassigned, Lack wouldn’t allow it,” Farrow wrote. “He compelled her to work longer hours, and on weekends, and proposed she cancel vacations.”
Laird confirmed the relationship to Farrow, telling the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, “There’s clearly a reason you don’t get involved with your boss.”
In the book, a rep denied Lack ever took retaliatory action against Laird.
Lack, whose first stint at NBC began in 1993, was brought back to helm NBC News in 2015 following the Brian Williams crisis.
But his return to the newsroom received pushback from some, Farrow wrote.
“‘Why would you do that?’ one executive recalled asking [NBCUniversal CEO] Steve Burke upon learning of his decision to reinstate Lack,” the book said. “‘The reason you have those cultural problems down there — he created that!’”
Lack was criticized last year over his handling of sexual misconduct allegations at NBC, as well as when he was chairman and CEO of Sony BMG Music Entertainment in 2004, the Daily Beast reported.
He and wife Betsy Kenny separated in June, Page Six exclusively reported at the time.
NBC declined to comment on Lack’s behalf, and Lack could not be reached.
Additional reporting by Lia Eustachewich