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

by Ronan Farrow

This was the complex reality of sexual assault for so many survivors: these were often crimes perpetrated by bosses, family members, people you can’t avoid afterward.

But this idea found little purchase in an environment where victims were expected to be saints and otherwise were disregarded as sinners.

A correspondent texted, “As a survivor of sexual abuse, I feel like we are working for a media cabal akin to the Vatican, willing to cover up sex crimes.”

What did it say about the gulf between the powerful and the powerless that wealthy individuals could intimidate, surveil, and conceal on such a vast scale?

Over the years, the company had reached deals to shelve reporting around Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Tiger Woods, Mark Wahlberg, and too many others to count. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” George said. 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 courage of women can’t be stamped out. And stories—the big ones, the true ones—can be caught but never killed.