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

by Ronan Farrow

When I arrived that afternoon to record the Nightly News segment, colleagues approached, ashen-faced. A producer who often worked the police beat, trembling with something like grief, said that he would have loved the chance to help and that he couldn’t understand what had happened. 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.” These were some of the best journalists I knew, the people who had made me proud to be associated with NBC News. They were fiercely committed to the network’s ideals of truth and transparency. “People who cared about journalism in the building were very discomforted by all this,” a different member of the investigative unit later told me. “It’s taken a long time for things to heal here.”