What Ben Affleck didn’t want you to know

Ben Affleck’s great-great-great grandfather Benjamin Cole owned 25 slaves, according to a deleted segment of the PBS show Finding Your Roots that Affleck himself requested be squashed. Cole, a wealthy Savannah, Georgia, land-owner, was also sheriff of Chatham County.

Emails from the Sony hack, published by Wikileaks, revealed that Affleck asked Henry Louis Gates, the academic and host of Finding Your Roots, to refrain from including the portion of the show that talked about his slave-owning ancestor. Gates emailed Sony chief executive Michael Lynton to ask for advice on how to proceed.

In the segment, Affleck reveals that he has a house in Savannah, but Gates doesn’t press him about whether it, or the land where it sits, was inherited or whether Affleck bought it.

Affleck, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that he had “no idea” he had Southern roots.

PBS and WNET, the New York public television station that produces inding Your Roots in conjunction with Gates’s Inkwell production company, are conducting an internal investigation into the removal of the information about Cole and how it came about.

“During our many years of producing genealogy programs on PBS, we have always tried to function under the most rigorous scholarly and production values,” Gates said in a statement to Richard Prince, who writes the “Journal-isms” column for the Maynard Institute. “We regret not sharing Mr. Affleck’s request that we avoid mention of one of his ancestors with our co-production partner, WNET, and our broadcast partner, PBS. We apologize for putting PBS and its member stations in the position of having to defend the integrity of their programming. Moving forward, we are committed to an increased level of transparency with our co-producing partners. We respect PBS guidelines and understand our obligation to maintain editorial integrity at all times.”

PBS ombudman Michael Getler slammed PBS and Gates in his Tuesday column, accusing PBS of being “asleep at the switch”:

“On the broader points, it seems to me that any serious program about genealogy, especially dealing with celebrities, cannot leave out a slave-owning ancestor. It also seems clear from the emails that Gates knew the stakes involved in terms of PBS credibility yet went with the advice from the Sony executive to squelch the factoid about a slave-owning ancestor and try to keep it quiet.”