Nora Ephron - Ephron and Deep Throat

Ephron and Deep Throat

For many years, Ephron was among only a handful of people in the world claiming to know the identity of Deep Throat, the source for news articles written by her husband Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. Ephron said she guessed the identity of Deep Throat after reading Bernstein's notes, which referred to the unnamed person as "MF." Bernstein claimed "MF" was short for "My Friend", but Ephron believed correctly that the initials stood for Mark Felt, whom some suspected to be Bernstein's source.

Ephron's marriage with Bernstein ended acrimoniously, and after the breakup Ephron was loose-lipped about the identity of Deep Throat. She told her son Jacob, and anyone else who asked: "I would give speeches to 500 people and someone would say, ‘Do you know who Deep Throat is?’ And I would say, ‘It’s Mark Felt.’” Classmates of Jacob Bernstein at the Dalton School and Vassar College recall Jacob revealing to numerous people that Felt was Deep Throat. Curiously, the claims did not garner attention from the media during the many years that the identity of Deep Throat was a mystery. Ephron later conceded, “No one, apart from my sons, believed me.” Ephron was invited by Arianna Huffington to write about the experience in the Huffington Post on which she was a regular blogger.