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Opiod Crisis; Nondisclousre Agreements in Sexual Harassment Cases. Aired 2-2:30p Et

Aired October 25, 2017 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Tonight, a feeling to conscience and patriotism another republican senator turns on President Trump. We'll ask

former Bush speech writer David Frum whether this is a tipping point. Also ahead, he took on the tobacco industry 20 years ago and now he's going

after big pharma companies that got America hooked on opioids.

Former Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore joins me live as Trump prepares to declare a national emergency. Plus, buying the victims

silence, how nondisclosure agreements created a culture of impunity around sexual predators. I speak to one of the New York Times reporters who

exposed allegations of persistent abuse at Fox News.

Good evening, everyone. And, welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour in London. Why does this man look so happy? Well, perhaps

becaseu he's been liberated from the restraints of reelection. Republican Senator Jeff Flake has come out guns blazing in a firing indictment of

Donald Trump and what he's doing to the Republican Party and to America.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

JEFF FLAKE, REP. SENATOR: We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never

meekly accept the daily sundering of our country. The personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institution, the flagrant

disregard for truth and decency.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

AMANPOUR: Flake is just the latest senior republican to say that he will no longer be quote, "complacent", while Corker who's also retiring and John

McCain who's battling a brain tumor have both stood up to be counted against Trump. It's an unprecedented civil war but will it change a party

that remains loyal to their disrupter in chief?

David Frum served as speech writer to George W. Bush and he told me that these feuds could, in fact, cost the republicans in next years elections.

David Frum, welcome to the program. Firstly, your reaction to what appears to be an unprecedented, kind of, civil war as we describe it within the

party.

DAVID FRUM, FORMER SPEECH WRITER: What you have with the political support behind President Trump is a big iceberg that has been slowly melting. And,

what has happened this week is another sheet of ice has dropped off the face. President Trump support will not vanish all at once but every week

that goes by, things get worse for him.

AMANPOUR: So, you potentially think that it's a tipping point growing as does Senator Flake. Let us just play what he said to that to CNN today.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

JEFF FLAKE, U.S. SENATOR: Well, I think it's a cumulative effect. You know, we're nine months into the administration. Those who are hoping to

see a pivot, I think, have realized that's not going to come. And, this has potential to do real damage. Particularly on the foreign stage with

regard to the agreements that we have, trade arraignments that will affect our economy and geopolitics, as well. These things have lasting meaning.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

AMANPOUR: So, is he right that this is a tipping point, plus it's creating serious juices around the world, Trumpism?

FRUM: Well, the jitters are absolutely for real. You know, we just went through this extraordinary unity crisis in Spain, at least I hope we've

gone through it. Where was the United States? That's something on which an American government would normally have a view.

There's a war going on in Northern Iraq between Kurds and Iraqis. Where is the United States? What has happened is because of the weakness at the

center of the American system, the cold war between the president and the secretary of state, the now hot war between the president and the chairman

of his own party Senate Foreign Relations Committee the United States is just absent.

Trump is so focused on his own self enrichment and protecting his own power, he's not discharging the international responsibilities of the

private sector.

AMANPOUR: So, the obvious question is where did this where does this lead? Obviously President Trump in a familiar tweet said, "They would say that

anyway", these people who can't get reelected are now coming out against his but he's doing perfectly fine he says.

FRUM: President Trump is a vision of how politics work in the United States is that in 2018 an election year with his support at about 35

percent he will get rid of the republicans who don't like him and replace them with republicans who do. But Senator Flake won that seat in Arizona

back in 2012 with 49 percent of the vote.

Arizona is not a conservative state as everybody assumes thinking of very gold water. It's very likely that these seats, that the Republican feuding

will cost these seats all together to the Republican Party and although the map in 2018 favors Republicans in the Senate, it is not impossible that

President Trump could face a much more hostile Congress.

AMANPOUR: So let's just sort of dig down because President Trump and that base exists on Fox News, it exists on conservative radio and this is one of

his only interlocutors right now in the media is Sean Hannity of Fox News. This is what he said about this -- about this disruption inside the party.

(BEGIN VIDEO)

HANNITY: For all you never Trumper Senators that are headed for the exits, people like Corker and Flake, you know what, guess what, you guys you know,

take your other colleagues with you. Mitch McConnell, good-bye; Ben Sasse, good-bye; John Cornyn, good-bye; Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins.

(END VIDEO)

AMANPOUR: OK a list of good riddance to you and it's not going to hurt us. What do you think from your knowledge of inside Washington and inside the

party, the Corker, McCain, Flake, these people have really made incredible speeches now, what can they do over the next year or so?

FRUM: Look every night Sean Hannity speaks to an audience that is about one-tenth the size of Walter Cronkite's audience and makes ten times as

much money so in modern television, you can make more and more out of less and less, but politics in a two-party system is not a niche marketing gain.

All those Senators to whom Sean Hannity wants to say good-bye, they were standing between President Trump and maybe impeachment. You start shedding

Senators and pretty soon you have a Democratic Senate. Now Sean Hannity would like that because that would be good for Fox's ratings.

Here's one last point about this vaunted base, in 1932 the (Nader) of the Great Depression, when Americans were actually hungry, President Herbert

Hoover still got about 39 percent of the vote. You don't lose elections because your base deserts, you lose elections because everybody fades the

way.

AMANPOUR: Do you think that is what's going to happen to Pres - everybody is trying to read the tea leaves; will he be impeached, will they enact the

25th Amendment to the Constitution and declare him whatever it is, incompetent?

FRUM: Look President Trump has one -- I mean he has some skills and one of his great skills is his ability to see weakness, not only in others, but in

institutions. New York City law enforcement, he was able to break a lot of rules and get away with it by putting his fingers in the right places.

And he's found the weaknesses in the American political system, the extreme partisanship of some of the Republican Party has allowed President Trump to

get away with things and that is his plan for the future, to continue to inflame, enrage, create cultural debates, set groups against one another

and then to walk through the middle. But he will be doing this probably in a much less permissive environment after November of 2018.

AMANPOUR: And as you know, the rest of the world knows the name Steve Bannon, he's already claiming scalps so these are just more of his scalps

that he's going to put his people in power during the 2018 elections.

FRUM: Well Steve Bannon is a master of the old Ralph Nader trick, which is when you find the government is about to issue a regulation, you call a

press conference and you demand that regulation. He puts himself at the head of parades that are already marching, he is no wonder man. And in

fact none of the people around Trump are geniuses, but they do have a sense of where the weaknesses in American society are.

But they're not building anything; they are wrecking things, including America's global leadership.

AMANPOUR: David Frum, thank you very much indeed.

FRUM: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: So President Trump will change the subject tomorrow when he plans to declare the Opioid crisis a national emergency.

(BEGIN VIDEO)

TRUMP: We're going to be doing a very, very important meeting sometime in the very short -- very near future on Opioids. In terms of declaring a

national emergency, which gives us power to do things that you can't do right now.

(END VIDEO)

AMANPOUR: Well we think that's going to be tomorrow. The CDC estimates that more than 64,000 people died from drug overdoses last year, which is

more deaths than the Aids crisis at its peak or more the number of U.S. military killed in Vietnam. Opioids are today's big killers, the former

Mississippi Attorney General, Mike Moore, who took on the tobacco industry is now setting his sights on bid pharma producers and distributors and he's

joining me now from Orlando in Florida. Mike Moore, welcome to the program. I guess first and foremost is declaring a national emergency the

way to go?

MOORE: I think it's a good first step, I mean we've had a national emergency for a very long time now and I'm glad the president's at least

talking about it and maybe he and Congress will do something about it. The one thing they could do immediately is make billions of dollars available

to treat people all over this country and maybe prevent a lot of the overdose deaths that we're seeing. I'd love to see that happen

immediately.

AMANPOUR: Can I just ask you to personalize this because I know that you've come to this in part because you were faced head-on in your own

family with one of these tragic overdoses?

MOORE: There's no question that there are thousands and thousands of young people and young adults that get a addicted under a doctors care taking

these opioids. They get addicted to it and then they turn to the street and go to fentanyl and sometimes die of heroin overdoses.

So yes, I've seen it firsthand. I've watched it in the emergency room. I've watched people brought back to life. I've watched people, you know,

overdose on the side of the -- side of the streets and in hotel rooms. It's a very, very, very bad thing.

And I know a lot of people who have lost their sons and daughters to it. And it's time that it stop. And that's why we brought these actions, we

and the Attorneys General of this country have brought these actions.

AMANPOUR: OK. What are the specific actions? What are you specifically trying to do in terms of, you know, of big class action.

MOORE: Well just like in the tobacco cases, we're trying to get the industry to tell the truth about these drugs. I mean, everyone should have

known that these were addicted drugs. But doctors were duped. They told that there was less than 1 percent chance of getting addicted as long as

you're under a doctor's care and so they prescribed these for lots and lots of people.

We also had distributers of the drug like Cardinal (ph) and McKesson and AmerisourceBergen who delivered millions and millions of pills to small

little communities that have eight or 900 people. And they set up pill mills and they were handing this stuff out like candy and doctors were

charging $100, $200 per prescription.

But they could have prevented that if they just would have put their, you know, their question for money out of hand and done the right thing. This

is a story about greed unfortunately Christiane. A big story about greed.

AMANPOUR: Are you a alleging in the same way as you did about the tobacco industry that they knew that this was addictive and yet they refused or

they kept all that evidence secret. Are you alleging that many of the doctors, the scientists, the people who peddled the use of these opioids

knew the addicted qualities of them, even under a doctor's prescription?

MOORE: No, question about it, they knew that these were very addicted. They hid those addictive dangers from the American public. They many times

minimized the addicted nature of these drugs and told doctors, it's OK, these are slow release. They're controlled release so these folks won't

get addicted. They knew that was a big lie.

They also knew that the drugs that they were handing out that the delayed absorption really didn't work to stop addiction. They also knew that

putting these drugs out in a big way, it should have been a market, maybe $300 or $400 million a year and they wanted to grow it to a $5 or $6

billion a year. So it's pretty much, you know, money over people's lives.

And that's how we got there. So it's advertising and marketing case. It's also a fraud case. And it's almost a criminal case to tell you the truth

because so many people are dying.

AMANPOUR: Do you think that in much the same way as tobacco kind of became venninized (ph), the cigarette companies, and as we know, smoking is

practically, you know, impossible to do in most countries. Do you think -- do you -- do you envision that happening to these specific big pharma

companies?

MOORE: I sure hope so. You know, when we started the tobacco cases, youth smoking in this country was about 38 percent. We've driven it now over the

last 20 years down to about 5 percent. What I hope is that we can reduce the number of opioid addicts from the, you know, 8 or 10 million that there

are in this country right now, down to a minimal amount.

But it's going to take treatment programs on one side, prevention education programs on the other side. And that's why we need funding for these

things. And we hope these companies will step up and fund at least part of it. And then maybe President Trump and the Congress can fund the rest of

it.

You know, it's going to take everybody working together to solve this problem. But it's time to quit talking about it. That's all we do in this

country is talk about something. Let's quit talking about it and let's step up to the plate and do something about it and save some lives.

AMANPOUR: So when you -- I don't know whether you've already engaged with these companies. But what is their defense? I mean, clearly they don't

admit that they're busy peddling these highly addictive killer drugs on people.

MOORE: You know, it's funny. I've been dealing with Purdue Pharma for example for the last 10 or 12 years. And they always want to blame the

user. But they call the user the abuser. It's only bad people that get addicted to these drugs. They're criminals.

They abuse the drug. They shoot it up, they snort it. That's just not true. Seventy five to 80 percent of all the people who get addicted, get

addicted under a doctor's care. They take the medicine just the doctor had prescribed. There's no real reason for using these drugs for long term

chronic pain in the first place. They're for end of life or for severe cancer pain.

And so, basically what we'd like to see these companies do is begin to tell the truth about it. Admit that you -- you probably over sold these things

in a big way. And you need to clean up the mess. It's just -- it's almost the same as if somebody a -- like BP oil spill.

They dumped a big mess out in the ocean, they need to clean it up. These guys need to clean up the mess that they caused. And we're going to force

them do this before this is over.

AMANPOUR: Well good luck to you. And many families will thank you. 64,000 opioid deaths in America last year alone. Mike Moore, thanks for

joining me.

MOORE: Thank you very much.

AMANPOUR: And still to come - still to come on tonight's program, the journalist who helped topple one of the most powerful man in the American

media landscape. The New York Time's Emily Steel on Bill O'Reilly's sexual abuse and buying silence.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program. Tonight we lift the lid on the secretive world on non disclosure agreements or NDAs. They're legal

documents that effectively silence victims of sexual harassment and abuse preventing victims form speaking out and naming their aggressors.

NDAs are coming under intense scrutiny like never before having allegedly been used by Harvey Weinstein and Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes of FOX News

to fight off sexual assault accusations against them. Most recently the New York Times reveled that Bill O'Reilly had paid $32 million to a FOX

News colleague who threatened to sue him for alleged sexual misconduct.

The journalist who uncovered the story is Emily Steel and she joins be now from New York. Emily welcome, you and your colleague Michael Schmidt have

been spear heading this investigation into FOX News and earlier this week, you actually had an interview with Bill O'Reilly months and months after

this whole story started to surface. Why do you think he wanted to meet with you?

EMILY STEEL, JOURNALIST, NEW YORK TIMES: SO we had contacted Billy O'Reilly and his team before our story published to give them a chance to

comment on the information that we had unearthed and some of the reporting that we had found and Bill O'Reilly met with us basically to say he had

never mistreated anyone during his 10 year (ph) and that he denied all of the allegations against him.

AMANPOUR: And in fact, I know from what I've read and what I've listened to, the end of that interview which was recorded, he did know that you were

still recording and he said the following to you. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

BILL O'REILLY, JOURNATIST: Why don't you be human beings for once? This is horrible - it's horrible what I went through. Horrible what my family

went through. This is crap, and you know it. It's politically and financially motivated and we can prove it with shocking information.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

AMANPOUR: I mean that's a very different sounding Bill O'Reilly than during the - what he thought was on the record portion of it. What was - I

mean, he was obviously trying to intimidate you.

STEEL: Yes, he was trying to intimidate us and he was trying to keep us form writing this story. His tone was very different at the end of the

interview than it was at the beginning. We had come to an agreement with Mr. O'Reilly and his lawyers that that entire conversation would be on the

record.

What was interesting about that segment, that speak that he gave at the end of the interview was that he really - he was yelling, his tone and his

projection was so loud that you could feel the vibrations in your chest and he really was trying to kind of appeal to our humanity say that -- that --

be a human, be the allegations against him are very serious and that this whole campaign against him has been a political and a financial hit job.

AMANPOUR: And just quickly, are you following up what he said? That we will -- that we have shocking information to give you that shows that it's

a hit job? Is there any reporting truth to that at all?

STEEL: So during the interview with Mr. O'Reilly, we asked him about -- about the evidence that he has said that he has had about whether this has

been a political and a financial hit job. In previous, he'd said that this was a left wing conspiracy to try to bring him down.

Since the story has published, he said that this was an attempt to try to take him out of the marketplace. We asked him specifically about what

information he wanted to get out to the American people, what information he thought should become public and he did not answer that question.

AMANPOUR: Let us drill down a little on these NDAs because that seems to be the current wave of this story. One of the reasons why so little of

this has been made public in the past that could perhaps have helped women who were facing it, you know, is that they were forced to sign these non

disclosure agreements.

Describe what you know about the sort of (inaudible) of lawyers, the way people like the Fox News Ailes and O'Reilly, like Weinstein in Hollywood

use their lawyers to buy silence.

STEEL: So, I've been reporting on this topic for more than a year now and what's really emerged is that there is this conspiracy of silence that has

-- that has kept women who have made these allegations silent. What's very interesting about sexual harassment is that it's very rare for women to

report these cases at all.

They fear H.R. departments, they fear retaliation, they fear that they'll put their jobs into jeopardy, they fear that they won't be believed. So

even more rare is when these women hire a lawyer. And what typically happens with those cases is that they are settled out of court.

And those settlements, they can range from thousands of dollars -- tens of thousands of dollars to what we found with the O'Reilly cases and the Fox

News cases, to millions of dollars.

And what those settlements typically involve is number one, the women will receive money in exchange for their silence but also their agreement not to

sue. And the effect of this has been pretty dramatic. Number one, a lot of these women are never able to talk about their allegations again.

So if there's someone who's a serial predator, people don't know about it. And number two, what we've learned is that there's been this public

exposure that has led to change. And it's really only after they -- the allegations against these men have been made public that companies have

done anything about the situation.

AMANPOUR: So -- so -- so let me ask you -- because obviously companies have been, you know, involved in all of this. There's a woman who worked

for Harvey Weinstein who says that she had to sign one, who was paid off and who's now broken her silence. It was reported in today's Financial

Times.

Do you believe that this story has reached a tipping point, at least in the area of non disclosure agreements? Do you think women can now stand up and

say no, we will not be silenced and because of all this that's been made public, we will -- we will go an take our complaints where we have to?

STEEL: So I'm not sure if it is a tipping point. What we know is that there have been a number of women over the years who have reached

settlements and have signed NDAs. But it's not clear how these issues will be resolved.

Part of the reason why these issues are settled out of court is to keep these controversies from becoming public, from exposing the women and

exposing the person that they're making allegations against to the public scrutiny of this issue.

One thing that has started to happen in the wake of our reporting on Fox News and the Times's reporting on Harvey Weinstein is that a number of

women have found their voice and have started to come forward to talk about these allegations and that's really creating the change.

But those NDAs, those -- those agreements for silence, those are still binding. And it's not clear whether those women will be -- will be

scrutinized for.

AMANPOUR: It's huge. It's huge. Yes.

STEEL: .talking and breaking those agreements.

AMANPOUR: Indeed. Emily Steele, thank you very much. And just as a postscript, you -- you kept your voice up, even when Bill O'Reilly said

that I'm coming after you with everything that I have, you can take it as a threat. Thank you for your reporting, Emily and thanks for joining us.

And when we come back, impressive alchemy from a master physicist. Imagine Albert Einstein tipping a messenger 90 years ago, a tip that today is worth

far more than it's weight in gold. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, imagine a world where a tip turns into a fortune. In 1920's Tokyo, fresh off winning a Nobel Prize, Albert Einstein

was on a lecture tour when he offered a Japanese messenger a hand scribbled note in place of a tip. He's reported to have said then maybe if you're

lucky, these notes will become much more valuable than just a regular tip.

Well today, Einstein's theory of happiness sole for $1.8 million at auction. Ironically, the high-priced note reads a calm and humble life

will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it. And it exceeded sales predictions by

31,000 percent.

Who knows? Right now, someone famous could be offered scrawled lines just like Einstein. They might seem like a paltry excuse for a tip, but

consider this, it is all relative. And that's it for our program tonight. Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

END