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

by Ronan Farrow

I didn’t love talking about my family background, but most people were familiar with it: my mother, Mia Farrow, was an actress; my father, Woody Allen, a director. My childhood had been plastered across the tabloids after he was accused of sexual assault by my seven-year-old sister, Dylan, and began a sexual relationship with another one of my sisters, Soon-Yi, eventually marrying her. There had been a few headlines again when I started college at an unusually young age and when I headed off to Afghanistan and Pakistan as a junior State Department official.

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.

I’d moved over to the network to work as an investigative correspondent. As far as Rich McHugh was concerned, I was a young lightweight with a famous name, looking for something to do because my contract lasted longer than my TV show. This is where I should say the skepticism was mutual, but I just want everyone to like me.

I looked at the cable headlines on one of the newsroom’s televisions, then texted him: “They’re scared of sexual assault?” The story we were being asked to reschedule was about colleges botching sexual assault investigations on campus. We’d talked to both victims and alleged perpetrators, who were sometimes in tears, and sometimes had their faces obscured in shadow. It was the sort of report that, in the 8:00 a.m. time slot for which it was destined, would require Matt Lauer to furrow his brow, express earnest concern, and then transition to a segment about celebrity skin care. McHugh wrote back: “Yes. All Trump and then sex assault.”

Access Hollywood was an NBCUniversal property. After the Washington Post broke the story that Friday, NBC platforms raced their own versions on air. When Access broadcast the tape, it excised some of Bush’s more piquant remarks. Some critics asked when NBC executives became aware of the tape and whether they deliberately sat on it. Leaked accounts presented differing timelines. On “background” calls to reporters, some NBC executives said the story just hadn’t been ready, that it had required further legal review. (Of one such call, a Washington Post writer observed tartly: “The executive was unaware of any specific legal issue raised by airing an eleven-year-old recording of a presidential candidate who was apparently aware at the time that he was being recorded by a TV program.”)

A hashtag, popularized by the commentator Liz Plank, solicited explanations of why #WomenDontReport. “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. “Because it’s been an open secret in Hollywood/Media & they shamed me while adulating my rapist,” she added. “It is time for some goddamned honesty in this world.”

When he was eighteen, he and a friend named Corky Burger produced a column for the student newspaper, the Spectrum, featuring a character they called “Denny the Hustler,” who menaced women into submission. “‘Denny the Hustler’ did not take no for an answer,” the column read. “His whole approach employs a psychology of command, or in layman’s terms—‘Look, baby, I’m probably the best-looking and most exciting person you’ll ever want to meet—and if you refuse to dance with me, I’ll probably crack this bottle of Schmidt’s over your skull.’”

A few days after McGowan’s tweets that October, Weinstein was at the St. James Theatre in New York City for a lavish fund-raiser he’d co-produced for Clinton, which put a further $2 million in her campaign’s coffers. The musician Sara Bareilles sat bathed in purple light and sang: “your history of silence won’t do you any good / Did you think it would? / Let your words be anything but empty / Why don’t you tell them the truth?”—which seems too on the nose to be true, but that’s what happened.

Screaming covers about Hillary Clinton’s supposed treachery and flagging health became a mainstay. “‘SOCIOPATH’ HILLARY CLINTON’S SECRET PSYCH FILES EXPOSED!” they howled, and “HILLARY: CORRUPT! RACIST! CRIMINAL!” The exclamation points made the headlines look like budget musical titles. 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.)

The truth is, I’d spent most of my life avoiding my sister’s allegation—and not just publicly. I did not want to be defined by my parents, or by the worst years of my mother’s life, of my sister’s life, of my childhood. Mia Farrow is one of the great actors of her generation, and a wonderful mom who sacrificed greatly for her kids. And yet so much of her talent and reputation was consumed by the men in her life, and I took from that a desire to stand on my own, to be known best for my work, whatever it might be. That left what happened in my childhood home frozen in amber, in ancient tabloid coverage and permanent doubt—unresolved, unresolvable.

I made no claim to be an impartial arbiter of my sister’s story—I cared about her and supported her. But I argued that her claim fell into a category of credible sexual abuse allegations that were too often ignored by both the Hollywood trade outlets and the wider news media. “That kind of silence isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous,” I wrote. “It sends a message to victims that it’s not worth the anguish of coming forward. It sends a message about who we are as a society, what we’ll overlook, who we’ll ignore, who matters and who doesn’t.” I hoped it would be my one and only statement on the matter. “I was asked to say something. I did,” I told McGowan, trying to get off the subject. “That’s the end of it.” She laughed bitterly. “There’s no end to it.”

I’d liked Weinstein the one time I’d met him, at an event hosted by the CBS News anchor Charlie Rose.

I was surprised she’d picked up. She usually didn’t keep her cell on her. In frank moments, she’d confessed that ringing phones made her heart race. Men’s voices on the other end of the line, especially, were a challenge. She’d never held a job that involved lots of phone calls. Dylan was a talented writer and visual artist. Her work was rooted in worlds as far from this one as she could manage. As kids, we’d invented an elaborate fantasy kingdom, populated with pewter figurines of dragons and fairies. Fantasy remained her escape. She wrote hundreds of pages of minutely described fiction and painted faraway landscapes. These sat in drawers. When I suggested that she build a portfolio or submit a manuscript, she’d freeze, get defensive. I didn’t understand, she’d say.

“It all happens very fast and very slow. I think any survivor can tell you that… all of a sudden, your life is like ninety degrees in the other direction. It’s—it’s a shock to the system. And your brain is trying to keep up with what’s going on.

“They looked down, these men. They wouldn’t look at me in the eyes.” 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.”

“Have the lawyers watch this,” she said. “Oh, they will be,” I said, with a grim laugh. “Watch it,” she said, looking into the camera, tears in her eyes. “Not just read it. And I hope they’re brave, too. Because I tell you what, it’s happened to their daughter, their mother, their sister.”

Harvey Weinstein was inescapable in that conversation, too: he had essentially invented the modern Oscar campaign. Weinstein ran his campaigns like guerrilla wars. A Miramax publicist once ghostwrote an op-ed praising the company’s movie Gangs of New York and passed it off as the work of Robert Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, who was, at the time, eighty-eight. Weinstein orchestrated an elaborate smear campaign against rival film A Beautiful Mind, planting press items claiming the protagonist, mathematician John Nash, was gay (and, when that didn’t work, that he was anti-Semitic). When Pulp Fiction lost a Best Picture Oscar to Forrest Gump, he’d publicly threatened to arrive on director Robert Zemeckis’s lawn and “get medieval.”

“Watch your back. This guy, the people protecting him. They’ve got a lot at stake.” “I’m being careful.” “You don’t understand. I’m saying be ready, in case. I’m saying get a gun.” I laughed. He didn’t.

the department’s Special Victims Division launched an internal review of the last ten criminal complaints in Manhattan stemming from similar allegations of groping or forcible touching. “They didn’t have a quarter of the evidence we had,” still another law enforcement source said of the other cases. “There were no controlled meets, and only rarely controlled calls.” Yet, that source said, “all of them resulted in arrests.” The public had never learned of the damning evidence Vance possessed.

At the time of the Gutierrez incident, Weinstein’s legal team was stacked with political influence. Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was closely involved. “Rudy was always in the office after the Ambra thing,” one Weinstein Company employee recalled. “He still had his mind then.” Giuliani worked so many hours on the Gutierrez matter that a spat arose afterward over billing. These fights over invoices were a leitmotif in Weinstein’s business dealings.

One attorney, Elkan Abramowitz, was a partner at the firm that formerly employed Vance, and had contributed $26,450 to Vance’s campaigns since 2008. I recognized Abramowitz’s name. When my sister reiterated her claim that Woody Allen sexually assaulted her, Allen dispatched Abramowitz to the morning shows to smile affably and deny the allegations. That history made my feelings about Abramowitz less personal, not more. This wasn’t about any one victim; this, for Abramowitz and many other lawyers, was a cottage industry.

As Weinstein leaned on his tabloid contacts to drum up items portraying Gutierrez as a hustler, she felt like history was repeating. She believed that the stories from Italy about her having worked as a prostitute were a product of her having testified in the corruption case against Berlusconi. She told me Berlusconi had used his power to smear her. “They said that I was a Bunga Bunga girl, that I was having affairs with sugar daddies,” she said. “Anyone who knows me knows those things are completely fake.” Slut shaming, it seemed, was a universal language.

“Sorry! Forgot you were there.” This happened more than you’d think. These days, our relationship consisted almost exclusively of endless calls. Occasionally, he’d try to pause me, forgetting I wasn’t a podcast.

I looked down to see a string of twenty or thirty Instagram message alerts. 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.” I swiped them away. Strange messages were an occupational hazard of being on television.

“Before the order to give all my phone, my computer,” she said, as she delved deeper into her hard drive, “I sent recording to myself, to all my emails.” She’d agreed to give Kroll the passwords to all those accounts, and knew they’d find any she didn’t disclose. But, in order to buy herself a brief window of opportunity, she’d told them she couldn’t recall one password. Then, as Kroll wiped the other accounts, one by one, she’d logged into the one for which she was supposedly recovering the password, forwarded the audio to a temporary “burner” email, then cleared her sent mail. Finally, she downloaded the files to this old laptop, which she stuffed in the back of a closet. “I was not sure it works,” she said. “It was like—” She made a gasping noise and held her breath, as if bracing for the worst. But Kroll didn’t come knocking, and the laptop collected dust, uncharged, for two years.

“This is the most important story I’ve ever been on,” I texted her. “If I am late it’s because I have absolutely no choice.” After journalism, drama and being late were my great passions.

“Andy, it was the nineties. You know? Did I go out with an assistant or two that I shouldn’t have, did I sleep with one or two of them, sure.” Lack said nothing to this. “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.”

“I told him there’s smoke but I don’t know that there’s fire. We don’t really have a smoking gun. I said, ‘Noah, if you ask me right now, you know, I don’t think we have it.’” I reminded him that I’d heard audio of Weinstein admitting to an assault and seen his signature on a million-dollar nondisclosure agreement. I pressed on whether we could schedule that meeting between Gutierrez and our lawyers. “It’s not in the news. I don’t think there’s any rush here,” Greenberg said. “I think where we stand now is, we give it a rest.” “What does ‘give it a rest’ mean?” I asked. “You know, just—just keep it on the back burner,” Greenberg said. That phrase again, I thought. “Ronan, you have so many promising things going on. You’ve got a lot of stories in progress, the series is doing well. You know, you don’t have to necessarily focus on this.” A few minutes later, I was on the phone with McHugh. He was as puzzled as I was. “This feels like somebody called them,” he said. “You hear from Hiltzik and Harvey, then this? It doesn’t feel like a coincidence.”

At The New Yorker, Ken Auletta, a writer known for his thorough appraisals of business and media executives, had profiled Weinstein in 2002. Entitled “Beauty and the Beast,” the piece made no explicit mention of sexual predation, but dwelled on Weinstein’s brutality. He was, Auletta wrote, “spectacularly coarse, and even threatening.” And there was a curious, overheated passage that hinted that there was more to the story. Auletta noted that Weinstein’s business partners “feel ‘raped’—a word often invoked by those dealing with him.”

Back in 2002, Auletta had pursued the claims that Weinstein was preying on women, and even asked about the allegations in an on-the-record interview. The two had been sitting in Weinstein’s Tribeca offices. Weinstein stood up, face red, and shouted at Auletta, “Are you trying to get my fucking wife to divorce me?” Auletta stood, too, “fully prepared to beat the shit out of him.” But then Weinstein crumpled, sitting back down and beginning to sob. “He basically said to me, ‘Look I don’t always behave well, but I love my wife.’” Weinstein hadn’t denied the allegations.

The email was sent by Sara Ness, a private investigator at a firm called PSOPS. Jack Palladino and Sandra Sutherland, a husband-and-wife team, operated the firm. A rare profile of the two in People magazine compared them to Nick and Nora Charles, the detective couple from The Thin Man, minus the glamour. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton hired Palladino to “discredit stories about women claiming to have had relationships with the Arkansas governor,” per the Washington Post. By the late nineties, Palladino had earned the nickname “the President’s Dick.” He said he never broke the law. But, he proudly noted, “I go right to the boundaries of the envelope.”

We agreed to shore up our reporting. We’d return with a bulletproof body of evidence, and ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Celebrities hurried out of SUVs, bowed their heads into heavy rain, and filed into Time magazine’s annual gala dinner celebrating its “100 most influential people” list. I was not on the list. I was, however, soaked. “I’m an aquarium,” I said, walking into the Time Warner Center. “I’m the plot of Chinatown.”

I reached for a personal connection. My brother had recently purchased Lack’s home in Bronxville, New York. “Apparently you left behind a giant safe they still haven’t drilled open,” I said. Lack laughed. “That’s true. There is an old safe.” He said the safe had preceded him, and he hadn’t opened it, either. He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better to leave things be.”

It was Jonathan who, the night before, had suggested another feint toward plausible deniability. “What if you record her recording. Literally hold a microphone to a speaker. You make something new. She never transfers anything.” “What does that do?” “It just feels like a step removed, no files ever change hands. Forget it. It’s dumb.” “Wait, it might be good.” “It’s so good.” I laughed.

“Who’s it about, by the way?” he said finally. I hesitated for a moment then told him it was Weinstein. The warmth drained out of the room. “I see,” he said. “Well, I have to disclose, Ronan, that Harvey Weinstein is a friend.” The two had connected when Brokaw was soliciting advice on a documentary about veterans, he said. Weinstein had been good to him. Shit, I thought. Is anyone not friends with this guy?

I saw I’d missed another volley of Instagram messages from the same mysterious handle. This time, the final message was a photograph of a pistol. One of the messages read, “Sometimes you have to hurt the things you love.” I took a handful of screenshots and made a note to myself to find out whom to talk to at NBC about security.

She recalled Weinstein remarking, “Oh, the girls always say no. You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman. “Textbook sexual harassment” was how Nestor described Weinstein’s behavior. She recalled refusing his advances at least a dozen times. “‘No’ did not mean ‘no’ to him,” she said.

Later, employee after employee would tell me the human resources office at the company was a sham, a place where complaints went to die.

“Is this the way the world works?” she wondered. “That men get away with this?”

She said that when she refused to join the meetings with women, Weinstein would sometimes fly into a terrifying rage. Once, they’d been in a limo, and he’d opened the door and slammed it shut again and again, face contorted and beet-red, shouting, “Fuck you! You were my cover!”

She took out an iPhone and navigated to a sentence she’d jotted down in her Notes app a few years earlier. It was something Weinstein whispered—to himself, as far as she could tell—after one of his many shouting sprees. It so unnerved her that she pulled out her phone and tapped it into a memo, word for word: “There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.”

I told McGowan about what we had. I said I’d encountered others with stories about Weinstein—not just rumor or innuendo—and that they’d agreed to speak, partly because they knew she’d come forward. At this, her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve felt alone for such a long time,” she said.

As one of hers called “Lonely House” played, she shut her eyes and listened to herself sing: I stand for mind For women who can’t And men too scared To beat that beast To watch him drown

I left the note of a person who was tired and genuinely unsure what was paranoid and what was practical anymore but, anyway, here it is: If you’re reading this, it’s because I can’t make this information public myself. This is the blueprint to assembling a story that could bring a serial predator to justice. Multiple reporters who have attempted to break this story have faced intimidation and threats. I have already received threatening calls from intermediaries. Noah Oppenheim at NBC News should be able to access the associated video footage. Should anything happen to me, please make sure this information is released.

“Can I hear the tape?” I slid my phone onto the desk in front of him and hit Play, and we listened as Weinstein said, again, that he was used to that. As Greenberg listened, a determined smile spread across his lips. “Fuck it, let him sue,” he said, when the audio was done. “If this airs, he’s toast.”

Weinstein’s associates began calling her “quite ferociously,” after twenty years of radio silence. “It’s very unsettling,” she told me. “He is on your tail.” But, paradoxically, the calls had made her want to help. “I didn’t want to talk,” she said. “But then, hearing from him, it made me angry. Angry that he still thinks he can silence people.”

Weinstein, he said, was “predatory,” and “above the law that applies to most of us and should apply to all of us.”

“Money and power enabled, and the legal system has enabled,” she eventually told me. “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.”

Auletta hadn’t captured all of the details of the story, but he’d gotten the bones of it right. I looked at his meticulously organized notes and felt, for a moment, emotional about the dusty boxes and the old secrets they held. I wanted badly to believe that news didn’t die, even when it was beaten back for so many years.