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

by Ronan Farrow

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.