Maureen Dowd visited Ken and his wife, Amanda Urban, for this featured profile and interview about his new book, "Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Complicity."
Mr. Auletta’s friends say it’s striking that The New Yorker writer, known to them as one of the nicest people on the planet, longtime captain of the writers’ team at the annual Writers and Artists charity softball game in the Hamptons, wanted to do a deep dive on one of the nastiest people on the planet….
Mr. Auletta protested, “I’m not nice when I’m writing,” adding that journalists have to be “ruthless.” (He didn’t look that ruthless in his beige Bermuda shorts and flip-flops.) He noted that as a teenager growing up in Coney Island, “I was not quite a juvenile delinquent but I walked around with my sleeves rolled up.” And he had a turn as a political operative and worked for Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, but turned to journalism after Kennedy was assassinated.
“Ken moves so easily among the titans of media and business that it’s easy for them to forget that he’s a guy from Coney Island,” said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, “but you can be sure that he never forgets.”
