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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ronan Farrow
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September 5 - September 8, 2021
On the other end of the line, Rich McHugh, my producer at NBC News, was talking over what sounded like the bombing of Dresden but was in fact the natural soundscape of a household with two sets of young twins.
Trump’s interlocutor had been Billy Bush, the host of Access Hollywood. Bush was a small man with good hair. You could place him near any celebrity and he would produce a steady stream of forgettable but occasionally weird red-carpet banter. “How do you feel about your butt?” he once asked Jennifer Lopez. And when she, visibly uncomfortable, replied, “Are you kidding me? You did not just ask me that,” he said brightly, “I did!”
“A (female) criminal attorney said because I’d done a sex scene in a film I would never win against the studio head,” the actress Rose McGowan tweeted.
at the annual awards ceremonies he had been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, ranking just below Steven Spielberg and several places above God.
In one sense, destroying documents would be consistent with a baseline of malfeasance that had, for years, defined the Enquirer and its parent company. “We are always at the edge of what’s legally permissible,” a senior AMI staffer told me. “It’s very exciting.”
Deborah Turness, who preceded Oppenheim, was described in lightly sexist profiles as having “rock-chick swagger,” which as far as I could tell just meant she sometimes chose to wear pants.
“You don’t understand. I’m saying be ready, in case. I’m saying get a gun.” I laughed. He didn’t.
“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”
“Well, Harvey,” Masters recalled telling him. “I hear you rape women.” “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.
It’s like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone wants it dead, nobody wants to stab it!”
The same afternoon, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Harvey Weinstein, for his “contributions to public discourse and the cultural enlightenment of society,” would be receiving the LA Press Club’s inaugural Truthteller Award.
Oppenheim’s pieces had titles like “Reading ‘Clit Notes’” and “Transgender Absurd,” which accurately reflected their content. “There is no question that my most impassioned adversaries have been the members of organized feminist groups,” he wrote. “The vitriol of their rhetoric has gone unmatched. Of course, so has their hypocrisy. Apparently, it is easy to blame the patriarchy for all of your woes, and to silence your opponents with accusations of misogyny, but it is more difficult to actually deny oneself the pleasures of cavorting with said patriarchy’s handsome sons. I will never forget
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Opp sure is a POS
“Bottom line, it’s trouble that the president of NBC News is talking directly with Harvey and lying to us about it.”
When she told Weinstein that her new boyfriend was on his way, he seemed dejected and left. Sorvino said that she felt afraid and intimidated; when she told a female employee at Miramax about the harassment, the woman’s reaction “was shock and horror that I had mentioned it.” Sorvino recalled “the look on her face, like I was suddenly radioactive.”
Any psychologist familiar with sex offenders will tell you, indeed, that they often are. But this idea found little purchase in an environment where victims were expected to be saints and otherwise were disregarded as sinners.
“I know that everybody—I mean everybody—in Hollywood knows that it’s happening,” de Caunes told me. “He’s not even really hiding. I mean, the way he does it, so many people are involved and see what’s happening. But everyone’s too scared to say anything.”
Still others appeared to report back to Weinstein. When I reached the director Brett Ratner, I implored him to keep the conversation in strict confidence. I told him there were vulnerable women who might get blowback if Weinstein became agitated. “Do you feel comfortable not repeating anything I mention, for their sake?” I asked. Ratner promised he wouldn’t. He said he knew of a woman who might have a story about Weinstein. But he sounded jittery. Months later, six women would accuse Ratner of sexual harassment in a Los Angeles Times report—though he denied several of their claims. He informed
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As I left work that evening, Remnick called to say that Asia Argento’s partner, Anthony Bourdain, had contacted him. Bourdain had been supportive of Argento speaking before, but even so, my heart sank: over and over, women who had withdrawn from the story had done so after an intervention from a husband, a boyfriend, a father. Outreach from significant others was seldom good news. But there are exceptions to every rule: 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
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“I’m happy to talk to you, or whomever you want on your team,” I said. 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. Weinstein told me to send all my questions to Lisa Bloom. By the end of the calls, he was charming again, politely thanking me.
After declaring his relief at the Times story and its timing, Weinstein issued what was supposed to be a galvanizing message to the staff. “Roll up your sleeves,” he announced. “We’re going to war.” One assistant responded, “I’m done, Harvey,” and left. Weinstein said to stop, offered to write a glowing recommendation. “I looked at him like are you fucking kidding me?” the assistant recalled.
“I don’t personally get put off by all these Hollywoodisms,” Roberts said of Weinstein’s personality. “I look and see a guy who is doing great things and built a company.” Roberts called Weinstein a good father, a good person. “I think,” Roberts added, “he’s like a teddy bear.”
Burke had groaned and said Weinstein was calling incessantly. “I keep having to have these conversations with him promising we’re not doing the story,” Burke said. When asked if the story might be true, Burke looked baffled by the question. “We can’t run it,” he said. “I’ll be getting these calls from Harvey for the next year. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
The night after the Times story ran, CBS News and ABC News prominently covered the deepening scandal on their evening programs. Both networks did so again the following morning, airing detailed segments with original interviews. Only NBC didn’t mention the news that first evening, and only NBC offered no original reporting the next morning.
“I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” 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.”
Later, as the advisors joined the fray, the response that we ultimately included in the story came to the fore: a blanket denial of all “non-consensual sex,” with little engagement on the specific allegations. This seemed to reflect Weinstein’s sincere view: he seldom suggested events hadn’t transpired, instead insisting that the interactions had been consensual and were being recast years later in a spirit of opportunism.
“Yeah, that’s good lawyering right there,” Bertoni added, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s what he’s paying them the big bucks for, to fucking hang up the phone.”
“New accusations are rippling through Hollywood as a recording emerges of an encounter between Weinstein and one of his accusers during a police sting,” Lester Holt intoned on air that evening. “Here’s NBC’s Anne Thompson.” And this, too, was strange: “a recording emerges.” Who could say where it had been before? Not in Noah Oppenheim’s office for five months, surely.
“Noah’s a sick fuck, and Andy’s a sick fuck, and they both need to go.”
Friends and colleagues of Dylan Howard contacted me to say that Howard had boasted that he had evidence that Trump may have fathered a child with his former housekeeper in the late 1980s. Howard “would sometimes say things when drunk or high. Including telling me they would pay for stories and not publish, to protect people,” one of the friends told me. “You don’t forget when someone says, ‘Oh, by the way. The maybe-future president has a love child.’”
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.”
Howard would “come in and be like, ‘We’re gonna put a tail on Ronan’s boyfriend,’” one of the employees recalled. And later: “I’ve got someone following him, we’re gonna find out where he’s going.” Howard said the employees’ assertions were false. 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 attorneys pled for leniency, itemizing his charitable activities and arguing he’d already suffered. In a letter to the judge, they wrote, “Since the New Yorker article was published in October 2017, Mr. Weinstein’s life has been destroyed.
Boo fucking hoo
“If the Weinstein accusers hadn’t talked to you, I never would have said a word,” Nevils told me. “I saw myself in those stories. And when you see the worst part of your life in the pages of The New Yorker, it changes your life.”
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.
