Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

by Ronan Farrow

few movie executives had been as dominant, or as domineering, as the one to whom McGowan was referring. Harvey Weinstein cofounded the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, helping to reinvent the model for independent films with movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Pulp Fiction; and Shakespeare in Love. His movies had earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and at the annual awards ceremonies he had been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, ranking just below Steven Spielberg and several places above God. At times, even this seemed a fine distinction: Meryl Streep had once jokingly referred to Weinstein as God.

All year, he’d been part of the brain trust around Hillary Clinton. “I’m probably telling you what you know already, but that needs to be silenced,” he emailed Clinton’s staff, about messaging from Bernie Sanders’s competing campaign to Latino and African American voters. “This article gives you everything I discussed with you yesterday,” he said in another message, sending a column critical of Sanders and pressing for negative campaigning. “About to forward some creative. Took your idea and ran,” Clinton’s campaign manager responded. By the end of the year, Weinstein had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton.

In the first week of November 2016, just before the election, Dylan Howard, editor in chief of the National Enquirer, issued an unusual order to a member of his staff. “I need to get everything out of the safe,” he said. “And then we need to get a shredder down there.”

Later that day, one employee said, a disposal crew collected and carried away a larger than customary volume of refuse. A Trump-related document from the safe, along with others in the Enquirer’s possession, had been shredded.

In June 2016, Howard had compiled a list of the dirt about Trump accumulated in AMI’s archives, dating back decades. After the election, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen requested all the tabloid empire’s materials about the new president. There was an internal debate: some were starting to realize that surrendering it all would create a legally problematic paper trail, and resisted. Nevertheless, Howard and senior staff ordered the reporting material that wasn’t already in the small safe exhumed from storage bins in Florida and sent to AMI headquarters. When the reporting material arrived, it was placed first in the little safe and then, as the political temperature around the magazine’s relationship with the president turned white-hot, in a bigger one in the office of human resources head Daniel Rotstein.

It was only later, when one of the employees who had been skeptical started getting jumpy and went to check, that they found something amiss: the list of Trump dirt didn’t match up with the physical files. Some of the material had gone missing. Howard began swearing to colleagues that nothing had ever been destroyed, an assertion he maintains to this day.

AMI routinely engaged in what employee after employee called “blackmail”—withholding the publication of damaging information in exchange for tips or exclusives. And the employees whispered about an even darker side of AMI’s operations, including a network of subcontractors who were sometimes paid through creative channels to avoid scrutiny, and who sometimes relied on tactics that were hands-on and intrusive.

The fruit of the relationship, for Trump, was more consequential. Another former editor, Jerry George, estimated that Pecker killed perhaps ten fully reported stories about Trump, and nixed many more potential leads during George’s twenty-eight years at the Enquirer.

During the campaign, Trump associates, including Michael Cohen, called Pecker and Howard. A series of covers about Trump’s competitor in the Republican primary, Ted Cruz, which chronicled a wild conspiracy theory about Cruz’s father being linked to the assassination of JFK, were planted by another Trump associate, the political consultant Roger Stone.

In 2015, AMI had struck a production deal with Harvey Weinstein. Nominally, the deal empowered AMI, amid declining circulation numbers, to spin off its Radar Online website into a television show. But the relationship had another dimension. That year, Howard and Weinstein drew close. When a model went to the police with a claim that Weinstein had groped her, Howard told his staff to stop reporting on the matter—and then, later, explored buying the rights to the model’s story, in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement. When the actress Ashley Judd claimed a studio head had sexually harassed her, almost but not quite identifying Weinstein, AMI reporters were asked to pursue negative items about her going to rehab. After McGowan’s claim surfaced, one colleague of Howard’s remembered him saying, “I want dirt on that bitch.”

As I reached the door, he said wryly, “Don’t let us down. I’ll be watching.” “You want this closed?” I asked. “I’ve got it,” he said. He pushed a button on his desk. The door swung shut.

Harvey Weinstein was inescapable in that conversation, too: he had essentially invented the modern Oscar campaign. Weinstein ran his campaigns like guerrilla wars. A Miramax publicist once ghostwrote an op-ed praising the company’s movie Gangs of New York and passed it off as the work of Robert Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, who was, at the time, eighty-eight. Weinstein orchestrated an elaborate smear campaign against rival film A Beautiful Mind, planting press items claiming the protagonist, mathematician John Nash, was gay (and, when that didn’t work, that he was anti-Semitic).

She caught a cab to her agent’s office and cried there, too. Then she and the agent went to the nearest police station. She remembered arriving, and telling the officers Weinstein’s name, and one saying, “Again?”

Weinstein copped to groping her the previous day: a full, dramatic confession, caught on tape. She kept pleading, and he finally relented, and they went downstairs. Officers, no longer concealing their identities, approached Weinstein and said the police wanted to speak to him. Had he been charged, Weinstein could have faced a count of sexual abuse in the third degree, a misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail. “We had so much proof of everything,” Gutierrez told me. “Everyone was telling me, ‘Congratulations, we stopped a monster.’” But then the tabloids began to publish their stories about Gutierrez’s supposed past as a prostitute.

Law enforcement officials began to whisper that the DA’s office had behaved strangely. Vance’s staff had been receiving new information about Gutierrez’s past on a regular basis, and hadn’t been disclosing where it was coming from. It was, one official told me, as if Weinstein had infiltrated Vance’s office personally.

On the morning of April 20, 2015, Gutierrez sat in a law firm office in Midtown Manhattan with a voluminous legal agreement and a pen in front of her. In exchange for a million-dollar payment, she would agree to never again talk publicly about Weinstein or the effort to charge him.

I had tried Jonathan a few times over the course of the afternoon but only got through as I ducked out of Rockefeller Plaza at sunset. “Six calls!” he said. “I thought it was an emergency!” He was stepping out of a meeting. “Five!” I countered. We’d met shortly after he left his job as a presidential speechwriter. In the years we’d been together, he’d drifted, creating a short-lived sitcom and tweeting a lot. A couple of months earlier, he and his friends had started a media company focused on podcasts on the West Coast. It had taken off faster than anyone predicted. His trips to New York had become shorter and less frequent. “I’m checking,” he was saying. “Do it,” I replied. I waited thirty seconds. “Jonathan!” “Sorry! Forgot you were there.” This happened more than you’d think. These days, our relationship consisted almost exclusively of endless calls. Occasionally, he’d try to pause me, forgetting I wasn’t a podcast.

“He mentioned he’s retained some lawyers, ” Greenberg said. He flipped through some notes in front of him. “David Boies?” I asked. “He mentioned Boies, but there was someone else as well. Here it is, Charles Harder.” Harder was the pitbull attorney who, in an invasion of privacy case bankrolled by the billionaire Peter Thiel, had recently prevailed in shutting down the gossip news site Gawker.

The email was sent by Sara Ness, a private investigator at a firm called PSOPS. Jack Palladino and Sandra Sutherland, a husband-and-wife team, operated the firm. A rare profile of the two in People magazine compared them to Nick and Nora Charles, the detective couple from The Thin Man, minus the glamour. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton hired Palladino to “discredit stories about women claiming to have had relationships with the Arkansas governor,” per the Washington Post. By the late nineties, Palladino had earned the nickname “the President’s Dick.” He said he never broke the law. But, he proudly noted, “I go right to the boundaries of the envelope.”

Masters was invariably described as a veteran media journalist, which she joked was a euphemistic way to call her old. She’d worked as a staff writer for the Washington Post and a contributor for Vanity Fair, Time, and Esquire. She told me she’d heard the rumors about Weinstein “forever.” Once, years earlier, she’d even confronted him about them. “Why are you writing this shit about me?” he’d roared at her at a lunch at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills. “Why do you say that I’m a bully?” “Well, Harvey,” Masters recalled telling him. “I hear you rape women.” “Sometimes you have sex with a woman who’s not your wife, and there’s a disagreement about what’s happened, and you just have to write a check to make it go away,” Weinstein replied calmly. Hiltzik, the public relations operative, was also there that day. Masters recalled him looking shocked. He’d later deny that he heard her mention rape.

“fuck it, let him sue”

The letter was printed on embossed stationery in a curly art deco font, like a New Yorker headline or a piece of set-dressing from BioShock. It was very lovely, and not the sort of thing that wins Wisconsin.

He set me up with an iPod Touch with only an encrypted messaging app installed, connected to the internet through an anonymous Wi-Fi hot spot purchased with cash. Its number was registered to a pseudonym. Mine was “Candy.” “Oh, come on,” I said, incredulous. “I don’t pick the names,” Tye said, all serious. “I sound like a nice Midwestern girl who should not have moved to LA.” “I don’t pick the names.”

And there was something else: the names Doyle Chambers and Lubell compiled and called were being added to a larger master list. The list was light on insiders from the glory days, and heavy on women Weinstein had worked with, and troublesome reporters. It was color coded: some names highlighted in red, indicating urgency, especially among the women. As Doyle Chambers and Lubell updated the list based on their calls, they weren’t told that their work was being sent to Black Cube’s offices in Tel Aviv and London, then onward to operatives around the world, to serve as a basis for their increasingly involved work on Weinstein’s behalf.

Later, several people in that room would reach for the same adjectives to describe me: sad, desperate, trying to preempt pushback at every turn. It was, one said, like I was defending a dissertation. I thought of the meeting weeks before, when Oppenheim had first killed the story. I studied the faces across from me, trying to decide how to convey the stakes. Wickenden, a veteran of decades in the magazine business, said gently, “You’ve been working on this a long time, haven’t you?”

In 1997, she was invited to what she understood to be a party thrown by Miramax at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riviera. The invitation came from Fabrizio Lombardo, the head of Miramax Italy—though several executives and assistants told me that his title was a thin cover for his actual role, as Weinstein’s “pimp” in Europe. Lombardo denied it then and has since.

Farther downtown, I took a seat at a vacant desk at The New Yorker and called the Weinstein Company for comment. Sounding nervous, the front desk assistant I reached said he’d check if Weinstein was available. And then there was Weinstein’s husky baritone. “Wow!” he said with mock excitement. “What do I owe this occasion to?” The writing about the man before and after seldom lingered on this quality: he was pretty funny. But this was easy to forget as he veered swiftly toward fury. Weinstein hung up on me several times that fall, including on that first day. I told him I wanted to be fair, to include anything he had to say, then asked if he was comfortable with my recording. He seemed to panic, and was gone with a click. The pattern repeated that afternoon. But when I got him to talk for a sustained time, he abandoned his initial caution, didn’t put the conversation off the record, just got sharply combative.

At NBC News, there were more signs of anxiety about Weinstein. Soon after Twohey published her story about the amfAR scandal, McHugh was set to publish what he considered a significant follow-up based on his own reporting. At the last minute, management spiked it. Greenberg, who had for days expressed enthusiasm about McHugh’s reporting, changed his posture, saying it didn’t sufficiently advance the story. It was only after Janice Min, the former Hollywood Reporter editor, tweeted that more Weinstein-related news was languishing at NBC that Greenberg came back to McHugh and asked if he could revive his work quickly.

The night after the Times story ran, CBS News and ABC News prominently covered the deepening scandal on their evening programs. Both networks did so again the following morning, airing detailed segments with original interviews. Only NBC didn’t mention the news that first evening, and only NBC offered no original reporting the next morning. Instead, Craig Melvin, filling in for Lauer, read a script that ran less than a minute and was dominated by Weinstein’s rebuttals to the allegations. That weekend, the pattern repeated: Saturday Night Live, which had eagerly riffed on similar stories about Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump, didn’t mention Weinstein once.

“After that is when he assaulted me,” Evans said. “He forced me to perform oral sex on him.” As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. “I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t,’” she recalled. “I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “he’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” She added, “I just sort of gave up. That’s the most horrible part of it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it’s their fault.” She told me that the entire sequence of events had a routine quality. “It feels like a very streamlined process,” she said. “Female casting director, Harvey wants to meet. Everything was designed to make me feel comfortable before it happened. And then the shame in what happened was also designed to keep me quiet.”

Weinstein had added to his team the public relations firm Sitrick and Company, which handed the assignment to an even-tempered former Los Angeles Times reporter named Sallie Hofmeister.

As voters went to the polls on Election Day in 2016, Howard and AMI’s general counsel were on the phone with McDougal and a law firm representing her, promising to boost McDougal’s career and offering to employ a publicist to help her handle interviews. That publicist was Matthew Hiltzik, flack to Ivanka Trump, who had called me on Weinstein’s behalf—although his services ultimately were not used. AMI responded quickly when journalists tried to interview McDougal. In May 2017, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, who was writing a profile of David Pecker, asked McDougal for comment about her relationships with AMI and Trump. Howard, working with a different publicist, forwarded McDougal a draft response with the subject line “SEND THIS.” In August 2017, Pecker flew McDougal to New York and the two had lunch, during which he thanked her for her loyalty.

‘We’re gonna put a tail on Ronan’s boyfriend,’” one of the employees recalled. And later: “I’ve got someone following him, we’re gonna find out where he’s going.” Howard said the employees’ assertions were false. In the end, the employees said, Jonathan’s routine had been so boring the subcontractor surveilling him had given up. “I’m interesting!” Jonathan said, when I told him. “I am a very interesting person! I went to an escape room!”

The caller ID read “Axiom.” A moment later, I got a text. “I am trying to reach you directly and privately. It’s regarding a Fry Pan that’s Scratch Resistant. Sometimes I cook and the black coating scares me.” I’d recently posted a social media picture of a frying pan marketed under the label “Black Cube.” “Scratch resistant. May use false identities and shell companies to extract information,” I’d written.

Several had expertise in aggressive new solutions for hacking and monitoring cell phones—like the Pegasus software made by the Israeli cyber intelligence firm NSO Group,

John Scott-Railton, a researcher for the watchdog group Citizen Lab.

In May 2018, after the meeting in which Oppenheim and Harris tried to explain the internal investigation of Lauer to a skeptical investigative unit, William Arkin, one respected member of that unit, called me, troubled. He said that two sources, one connected to Lauer, the other within NBC, had told him that Weinstein had made it known to the network that he was aware of Lauer’s behavior and capable of revealing it. Two sources at AMI later told me they’d heard the same thing. NBC denied any threat was communicated.

“This is one of the most blatant and naked exercises of hard corporate spin that I have encountered in WP and I have encountered a lot,” one veteran Wikipedia editor complained.

Jonathan already got a dedication and he’s quoted throughout these pages. How much more attention does he need?