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

by Ronan Farrow

The show got some bad reviews at the start, good reviews at the end, and few viewers throughout. Its cancellation was little-noticed; for years after, chipper acquaintances would bound up at parties and tell me that they loved the show and still watched it every day. “That’s so nice of you to say,” I’d tell them.

A favorite subplot was Clinton’s impending death. (She miraculously defied the tabloid’s prognoses and kept right on almost-dying all the way through the election.)

“People are pretty freaked out about reprisals.” Oppenheim wrote back: “I can imagine.”

“My question is,” she texted, “would Today run something like this? Seems kind of heavy for them.” “Noah, the new head of the show,” I wrote back, “he’ll champion it.”

“I am pretty, pretty, pretty into this announcement. Congrats, my friend!” I texted Oppenheim, sucking up a little but also sincerely meaning it. “Hah—thanks,” he wrote back.

And she remembered her costar in Phantoms, Ben Affleck, seeing her visibly distraught immediately after the incident, and hearing where she’d just come from, and replying, “God damn it, I told him to stop doing this.”

As long as we were using the time to strengthen the reporting, I didn’t mind a delay.

It was, one official told me, as if Weinstein had infiltrated Vance’s office personally.

this, for Abramowitz and many other lawyers, was a cottage industry.

They came from an account with no profile photo. They read, over and over, “I’m watching you, I’m watching you, I’m watching you.”

“It was the nineties, Andy,” Weinstein repeated. This seemed, for Weinstein, an important point of exculpation. And then, with a note of menace: “We all did that.” There was a pause before Andy Lack said, “Harvey, say no more. We’ll look into it.”

I thanked her. She was not optimistic. “Nothing’s stopping Harvey,” she told me. “He will squash this story.”

“The Twitter thing” was that I’d called a comment of hers racist. A tendon stood out on Kelly’s neck. “I made a lot of mistakes when I was at your point in my career, too,” she said, smiling tightly. “You’re kind of a rookie reporter.”

“That’s Noah,” I whispered to my mother. “Tell him you liked Jackie.” “But I didn’t like Jackie,” she said. I shot her a withering look.

They could still solve the problem. They just had to get more aggressive.

When we told Greenberg, he seemed happy, too, but for different reasons. “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s best to let someone else go first.”

I felt neither hella good nor hella bad.

“Do you think I have an agenda, Noah?”

“Oppenheim,” I confirmed. “And he’s a screenwriter, you say?” “He wrote Jackie,” I replied. “That,” Remnick said gravely, “was a bad movie.”

“Unfortunately,” he replied, “We can’t move forward with anything for NBC until the review is complete.” Within twenty-four hours, Oppenheim would meet with Corvo and the producers working under him and halt the review.

Shortly thereafter, Weinstein’s staff received a message in the usual format keeping them apprised of mailed gifts: “UPDATE,” it read. “Noah Oppenheim received a bottle of Grey Goose.”

NBC has informed us, in writing, that it is no longer working on any story about or relating to TWC (including its employees and executives), and all such activities have been terminated.

He was increasingly busy with work, and I was increasingly needy and annoying.

“Oh my God. We are going to talk about this, but first you are going to tip that driver really well.”

Bourdain said Weinstein’s predation was sickening, that “everyone” had known about it for too long. “I am not a religious man,” he wrote. “But I pray you have the strength to run this story.”

Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.

With painful frequency, stories of abuse by powerful people are also stories of a failure of board culture.

“There have been three things that I know of personally.” “The Access tape,” I said. “This…” “And something else. Involving talent here.”

(Some of the investigators’ observations were more mundane. On Twitter, one document noted, “Kantor is NOT following Ronan Farrow.” You can’t have everything.)

One after another, the AMI employees used the same phrase to describe this practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it. It was an old term in the tabloid industry: “catch and kill.”

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!”

Nothing is certain, it turns out, except death and taxes and investigation by the Southern District of New York.

“Well, if the press would stop covering it, it will go away,” Harris said. There was a pause, then still another investigative journalist said, “But we are the press.”

“I do not think you will be getting a beer with Noah Oppenheim in a few months,” Jonathan deadpanned later.

Later, when I decided some of that reporting would make its way into a book, I’d send him a draft, and put in a question, right on this page: “Marriage?” On the moon or even here on earth. He read the draft, and found the proposal here, and said, “Sure.”

In the end, the courage of women can’t be stamped out. And stories—the big ones, the true ones—can be caught but never killed.

“You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.”