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

by Ronan Farrow

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.