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

by Ronan Farrow

After attending a meeting related to the merger of Radcliffe, Harvard’s former women’s college, with the main undergraduate school, young Noah Oppenheim wrote: “Why are women’s meetings any more deserving of protected space than anyone else’s?” In a column defending the good old days of same-sex clubs at Harvard, he argued, “To the angry feminists: There is nothing wrong with single-sex institutions. Men, just like women, need to themselves. We need a place to let our baser instincts have free reign, to let go of whatever exterior polish we affect to appease female sensibilities.” He added that “women who fell threatened by the clubs’ environments should seek tamer pastures. However apparently women enjoy being confined, pumped full of alcohol and

preyed upon. They feel desired, not demeaned.”

“It’s not just the checking,” Oppenheim said. “My view is that the tape and Harvey Weinstein grabbing a lady’s breasts a couple of years ago, that’s not national news.” I started to talk and he held up a hand. “It’s news somewhere. Do it for the Hollywood Reporter, great, it’s news there. For the Today show, a movie producer grabbing a lady is not news.”

Sciorra and Hannah both talked about the forces that keep women quiet. Hannah said she’d told anyone who would listen from the get-go. “And it didn’t matter,” she told me. “I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”

Lauer told her to sit on his couch and began to make small talk. He joked about how much he disliked work cocktail parties like the one they’d just attended. Then, she told the colleagues, he unzipped his pants and exposed his erect penis. Lonner was separated from her husband but still married. Born in the slums of Bangkok, she’d worked hard to reach her professional role at the time. She remembered reeling in response to Lauer’s advance, laughing nervously, trying to extricate herself by cracking a joke about not wanting to be intimate in an office where “everyone else has done it.” Lonner recalled Lauer saying that he knew she wanted it, and, in response to the joke about his office dalliances, that he figured she liked it dirty, and that the encounter would “be a first for you.” Then, by her account, he became angry, saying, “Melissa, you’re a fucking tease. This is not good. You led me on.”

Soon after Harvey Weinstein was sentenced and taken into custody, a doctor arrived to perform a medical exam. “I’m too sick to be here,” Weinstein said, as the exam got underway. “That’s not really true,” replied the doctor. Weinstein was thinner, older, more hunched than before. He’d graduated from a walker he’d relied on during his trial to a wheelchair. He continued to suffer cardiac issues. But he looked the doctor in the eye and said, with a little of his old bravado, “It’s okay. I’m gonna get out of here with my appeal. I had very good lawyers. But now? Now I have the best lawyers.”