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

by Ronan Farrow

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.”

“Sometimes you have sex with a woman who’s not your wife, and there’s a disagreement about what’s happened, and you just have to write a check to make it go away,” Weinstein replied calmly.

🤮

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!”

Weinstein’s cast of lawyers kept shifting. Brafman resigned and was succeeded by Donna Rotunno, a hard-charging Chicago-based attorney who during the case boasted that she’d never been sexually assaulted “because I would never put myself in that position.”

Fuck that! How icky!

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.”