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

by Ronan Farrow

“There was money available in the event that there was an indiscretion that needed to be taken care of,” he said of his time at Miramax. “What kinds of indiscretions?” I asked. “Bullying, physical abuse, sexual harassment.”

Weinstein particularly exploited his bond with Pecker and Howard at the National Enquirer.

“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. Hiltzik, the public relations operative, was also there that day. Masters recalled him looking shocked. He’d later deny that he heard her mention rape.

The word doubleplusungood wandered through my mind.

No one on these calls wants to own any of this, because it’s so obviously bad! It’s like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone wants it dead, nobody wants to stab it!”

But in the moment, you don’t know how important a story is going to be. You don’t know if you’re fighting because you’re right, or because of your ego, and your desire to win, and to avoid confirming what everyone thought—that you were young, and inexperienced, and in over your head.

My early experiences at The New Yorker felt like those videos where lab animals walk on grass for the first time.

“Here’s the thing,” Bertoni said. “It’s easy for people to make scary legal threats. It’s another thing entirely to act on them.”

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.”

In the end, she said, “he’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” She added, “I just sort of gave up. That’s the most horrible part of it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it’s their fault.”

Weinstein suggested repeatedly that an interaction wasn’t rape if the woman in question came back to him later. That this was at odds with the reality of sexual assault as it so often transpires within inescapable workplace or family relationships—that it was at odds with the law—seemed to escape him.

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.”

On August 5, 2016, McDougal signed a limited life-story rights agreement granting AMI exclusive ownership of her account of any relationship she’d had with any “then-married man.” Her retainer with Davidson made explicit that the man in question was Donald Trump. In exchange, AMI agreed to pay her $150,000. The three men involved in the deal—Davidson, Crawford, and Grdina—took 45 percent of the payment as fees, leaving McDougal with a total of $82,500. The day she signed the contract, McDougal emailed Davidson to express confusion over what she was signing up for, and how she’d have to respond to questions from reporters. “If you deny, you are safe,” Davidson wrote. “We really do need to get this signed and wrapped up…” “I’m the one who took it, so it’s my fault, too,” McDougal told me. “But I didn’t understand the full parameters of it.”

The relationship between AMI and Trump was an extreme example of the media’s potential to slip from

independent oversight to cocktail party alliances with reporting subjects. But, for AMI, it was also familiar territory. 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.”

“We went back and looked, and, as we said in the statement, there has not been an allegation made internally in twenty years” in “any place where there would be a record of such a thing.” The qualifying language was significant: that there would be no formal HR records about a figure of Lauer’s importance was practically an assumption. Weinstein had also been adamant that there were no “formal” records of sexual misconduct allegations in his file, either. So had Bill O’Reilly at Fox News. But that wasn’t the question. McHugh hadn’t asked about formal records—he’d asked whether NBC had been “aware.” And on this, Oppenheim was less clear. “We all read the New York Post and walk past supermarket checkout stands and see the National Enquirer,” he said. “There’s not a lot you can do with that, especially when the parties involved are saying this is National Enquirer nonsense.”

Nevils had wanted to be a journalist since she was thirteen and learned that Hemingway wrote for the Kansas City Star. “You go into journalism because you believe in the truth. That people’s stories matter.” She frowned. Rain drummed at the windows. “I believed we were the good guys.”

“This is the thing I blame myself most for,” she said. “It was completely transactional. It was not a relationship.” Nevils told friends at the time that she felt trapped. Lauer’s position of authority—over both her and her boyfriend, whose brother worked for Lauer—made her feel unable to say no. She said that, in the first weeks after the alleged assault, she attempted to convey that she was comfortable and even enthusiastic about the encounters. She even tried to convince herself of the same. She readily admitted that her communications with Lauer might have appeared friendly and obliging.

That November, she volunteered to put together a goodbye video for her ex-boyfriend, who was leaving a job at the network. Such videos were a common gesture for departing employees, and usually featured well-wishes from talent. When she asked Lauer for his, he told her to come to his office to record it herself. When she arrived, she said, he told her to go down on him. “I was really upset. I felt terrible,” she told me. “I was trying to do this nice thing, and I had to give Matt a blow job to get him to film a goodbye video. I just felt sick.” She recalled asking, “Why do you do this?” and Lauer replying, “Because it’s fun.”

And there it was, at the end of his arguments: an unwillingness not just to take responsibility but to admit that responsibility might, in some place, in someone’s hands, exist. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that stopped the reporting. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that bowed to lawyers and threats; that hemmed and hawed and parsed and shrugged; that sat on multiple credible allegations of sexual misconduct and disregarded a recorded admission of guilt. That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld so much silence in so many places. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that protected Harvey Weinstein and men like him; that yawned and gaped and enveloped law firms and PR shops and executive suites and industries; that swallowed women whole.

“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.”