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

by Ronan Farrow

“Why are you writing this shit about me?” he’d roared at her at a lunch at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills. “Why do you say that I’m a bully?” “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.

“We thought you should hear the audio,” Greenberg said. He seemed to be caught off guard by Oppenheim’s lack of enthusiasm. “It’s pretty powerful.” Oppenheim nodded. He was still looking at the pages, not making eye contact. Greenberg nodded at me. I hit Play and held my phone out. “No,” Ambra Gutierrez said, her voice shot through with fear. “I’m not comfortable.” “I’m used to that,” Harvey Weinstein said again. Oppenheim slouched deeper into the chair, like he was shrinking into himself. There was a yawning silence after the tape finished playing. Apparently realizing that we were waiting for him to say something, Oppenheim produced a sound somewhere between a weary sigh and an apathetic “eh” and made a shrugging gesture. “I mean…,” he said, drawing out the word. “I don’t know what that proves.” “He admits to groping her,” I said. “He’s trying to get rid of her. People say a lot of things when they’re trying to get rid of a girl like that.” I stared at him. Greenberg and Weiner stared at him. “Look,” he said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “I’m not saying it’s not gross, but I’m still not sure it’s news.”

I tried to think how to underline the stakes while conveying that I was a team player. “My sense is this is gonna come out,” I said, “and the question is whether it comes out with or without us sitting on the evidence we have.” A long silence. “You’d better be careful,” he said at last. “’Cause I know you’re not threatening, but people could think you’re threatening to go public.” I knew what he meant, but the choice of words struck me as odd. Weren’t we in the business of going public?

“We’re just hitting pause while we wrap our arms around this,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.” On some level, I knew these euphemisms—the “pauses,” the wrapping of arms—to be absurd. Canceling an interview was canceling an interview. The word doubleplusungood wandered through my mind.

Jonathan, on the phone from Los Angeles, was working up a lather. He thought I should flout Greenberg’s orders and call Kim Harris. He was incredulous at the legal arguments Oppenheim had raised. For any layperson with a dim recollection of the term, “tortious interference” was probably best known as the specious rationale used by CBS News’s parent company to shut down that network’s tobacco reporting. That day McHugh and Jonathan both made the same comparison: “Hasn’t anyone in this company seen The Insider?” Jonathan asked, exasperated.

Harris was the deadliest kind of lawyer, one sophisticated enough that you didn’t see her doing the work at all.

Hillary Clinton, who’d known about the book since I described it to her during my time working for her at the State Department, had agreed early and with enthusiasm. “Thank you, my friend, for your message; it is great hearing from you and I am delighted to know that you are close to completing your book project,” she wrote that July. The letter was printed on embossed stationery in a curly art deco font, like a New Yorker headline or a piece of set-dressing from BioShock. It was very lovely, and not the sort of thing that wins Wisconsin.

When I turned the conversation back to the interview with Clinton, he said that she was “really busy with the book tour.” I pointed out that this was why we’d scheduled the interview for before the book tour. “Like I said,” he reiterated, as if he hadn’t heard this, “really busy.” Over the ensuing weeks, every attempt to lock a date for the interview yielded another terse note that she’d become suddenly unavailable. She’d injured her foot. She was too tired. Clinton, meanwhile, was becoming one of the most easily available interviews in all of politics.

“What guys?” I asked. “Eh, two guys. In car. Smoking by car. All the time.” I looked up and down the block. The street was mostly empty. “Why do you think they were here for me?” He rolled his eyes. “Ronan. Is always you. You move in, address print everywhere, now I have no peace.”

You look like a damn fool, I thought to myself. But I was starting to take precautions. I was memorializing sensitive information in longhand form. I was moving new documents into the safe-deposit box. Eventually, I’d consult John Tye, a former whistle-blower on government surveillance practices who founded a nonprofit law office called Whistleblower Aid. He set me up with an iPod Touch with only an encrypted messaging app installed, connected to the internet through an anonymous Wi-Fi hot spot purchased with cash. Its number was registered to a pseudonym. Mine was “Candy.” “Oh, come on,” I said, incredulous.

There was a heaviness to these conversations now, a strange sense that we were not just speaking to each other but also turning out, just a bit, to the crowd that might someday scrutinize our decisions. I felt this, and then felt it might be self-aggrandizing. But it gave me a strange kind of authority to push them to say what they hoped to leave between the lines.

Look at what’s happening! 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!”

While I was on the flight, HuffPost ran a story about claims that the Fox News host Eric Bolling had sent lewd texts to coworkers. The story had used entirely anonymous sourcing—something that had never been the case in any draft of ours. 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.

During that same visit to the set of Marco Polo, Weinstein went into the dressing room of one actress for fifteen minutes, “and then she was a ghost of herself for a week afterwards.”

Griffin looked at the women with what one described as “a flicker of shame.” He told the stripper no thanks. The window closed, and the group headed out to exchange awkward goodbyes. For the women, the incident had been gross, but unremarkable: they’d all come up in the business with this kind of behavior from men.

Pretty soon I was in Griffin’s office with him and another member of his team. “What the fuck?” he asked, exasperated. I looked at the proposed script in front of me. “Phil, I’m not gonna edit sound bites to change their meaning.” “Why not?!” he said, like this was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. “It’s not ethical?” I offered, less as a statement and more as a kind of reminder, hoping Griffin’s question had been rhetorical and he’d finish the thought. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and directed a “Lord give me strength” look at his colleague. She tried a gentler tone. “We all know you care a lot about the”—she hesitated here, seeming to genuinely struggle to find a nice way to put it—“ journalism with a capital J, but this is not some sensitive political story.”

Picking the right fights was a lesson I could be slow to learn. In the end, I sat at the anchor desk and aired a five-minute clip of small talk with No Doubt. I felt neither hella good nor hella bad.

I saw something, or thought I did, and froze. There, in profile, seated on my side at the opposite end of the car, was a bald head that I swore I’d seen in the Nissan. I could make out the same pale face and snub nose. I couldn’t be sure. My most rational self thought, You’re seeing things. But as the train stopped, I felt uncomfortable enough to slip out before my station. I pushed onto the crowded platform, looking over my shoulder.

I chewed my lip for a second, then dialed my sister. “So how’s the story?” she asked. “I don’t know how it is, honestly.” “Don’t you have, like, literally a recording of him admitting to it?” “Yeah,” I said. “So—” “I’ve been pushing. I don’t know how much more I can push.” “So you’re going to drop it.” “It’s not that simple. I might have to prioritize other things while I figure this out.” “I know what it’s like to have people stop fighting for you,” she said quietly. And there was a long silence before we said our goodbyes.

I’d sat with Oppenheim, a green juice in front of me. He’d leaned in, a little more gossipy than usual, and said that women at NBC News had reported harassment by a Trump campaign official on the trail. “That’s a huge story!” I said. “We can’t tell it,” Oppenheim replied, with a shrug. “They don’t want to, anyway.” “Well, surely there’s a way to document it without violating confidences—” “It’s just not gonna happen,” he told me, as if to say, “that’s life,” with the nonchalance and confidence I so admired at the time—so much so that I didn’t give it, or his wider views on sexual harassment, more thought.

During his years as a writer at the Harvard Crimson, Oppenheim had styled himself as a provocateur. He would pose as an earnest attendee at gatherings of feminist groups, then turn out fiery columns in the Crimson about how these groups were full of shit. While columnists don’t always write their own headlines, 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 the fateful evening when I encountered the leader of one prominent women’s organization emerging from the anteroom of the Porcellian,” an all-male social club. “It seems that political dogmatism comes easy, so long as it does not interfere with one’s plans for Saturday night.”

young Noah Oppenheim wrote: “Why are women’s meetings any more deserving of protected space than anyone else’s?” In a column defending the good old days of same-sex clubs at Harvard, he argued, “To the angry feminists: There is nothing wrong with single-sex institutions. Men, just like women, need to themselves. We need a place to let our baser instincts have free reign, to let go of whatever exterior polish we affect to appease female sensibilities.” He added that “women who fell threatened by the clubs’ environments should seek tamer pastures. However apparently women enjoy being confined, pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon. They feel desired, not demeaned.”

He smacked onto the desk a printed page, then leaned back. I picked it up. It was a Los Angeles Times article from the early 1990s, describing Weinstein agreeing to distribute Woody Allen’s movies. “Harvey says you’ve got a huge conflict of interest,” Oppenheim said. I looked up from the page. “Harvey says?”

“He worked with Woody Allen when he was a pariah!” He was raising his voice now. “A lot of distributors worked with him.” “It doesn’t matter. It’s not just about that, it’s—your sister was sexually assaulted. You wrote that Hollywood Reporter piece last year about sexual assault in Hollywood, it caused this splash.” “What are you arguing?” I asked. “That no one with a family member who’s been sexually assaulted can report on sexual assault issues?” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “This goes directly to the heart of your—your agenda!” “Do you think I have an agenda, Noah?” I had the same feeling I’d had in the conversation with Greenberg—that I had to ask direct questions, because it was the only way to expose the space between what he was willing to imply and what he was willing to say. “Of course not!” Oppenheim said. “But I know you. That’s not what this is about, this is about public narrative, and the public narrative is gonna be ‘I let Ronan Farrow, who just came out as this—this—sexual assault crusader, hating his father—’” “This wasn’t a crusade, it was an assignment. An assignment you gave me!” “I don’t remember that,” he said. “I don’t think I would have done that.” “Well, it’s true. I didn’t pitch this of my own initiative, and I didn’t report it alone, either. This is something your whole news organization worked on.” I slid the printout back across the desk to him. “We knew he was gonna try to smear me in some way,” I said. “If this is the best he’s got, hone...

What Oppenheim was describing was a journalist caring about a topic, not having a conflict with a specific person. Even so, I told him I’d be more than happy to put a disclosure on the story. An almost pleading look crossed Oppenheim’s face. “I’m not saying there isn’t a lot here. This is an incredible”—he searched for the end of the sentence—“an incredible New York magazine piece. And you know, you want to take it to New York magazine, go with God. Go with God.”

I thought of my sister. Five years earlier, she’d first told the family she wanted to revive her allegation of sexual assault against Woody Allen. We’d stood in the TV room at our home in Connecticut, with stacks of fading VHS tapes. “I don’t see why you can’t just move on,” I told her. “You had that choice!” she said. “I didn’t!” “We have all spent decades trying to put this thing behind us. I’m just now trying to launch something serious where people focus on the work. And you want to—want to reset the clock completely.” “This isn’t about you,” she said. “Don’t you see that?” “No, it’s about you. You’re smart, you’re talented, you have so many other things you can do,” I said. “But I can’t. Because it’s always there,” she said, and then she was crying. “You do not need to do this. And you are ruining your life if you do.” “Fuck you,” she said. “I support you. But you just—you have to stop.”

I wondered if I had it in me to say “Okay,” to turn to other things, to focus on the future. In hindsight, it’s clear. 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.

“Okay. So I’m close to it,” I said. “So I care. We have evidence, Noah. And if there’s a chance of exposing this before it happens to anyone again, then I can’t stop.”

Go with God,” Oppenheim had said. To New York magazine, of all places. (Only in Manhattan media circles did heaven mean a middlebrow biweekly.)

“Say,” he said, fumbling through a stack of AV paraphernalia and producing a silver rectangle, “you did have the interviews.” He slid across the desk a USB hard drive, with “Poison Valley” written in black Sharpie on one corner. “Rich…,” I said. He shrugged. “Backup.” I laughed. “They’re gonna fire you.” “Let’s be honest, neither of us is going to have a job after this.” I moved in like maybe I was gonna hug him and he waved me off. “Alright, alright. Just don’t let them bury this.”

Corvo had dealt with tough stories about sexual assault allegations before. In 1999, during Andy Lack’s previous tenure at NBC News, Corvo had overseen the network’s interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who had accused Bill Clinton of rape twenty-one years earlier. The network had reviewed the interview for a little more than a month after it was recorded, airing it only after Broaddrick, frustrated, had taken the story to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. “If Dorothy Rabinowitz hadn’t come to interview me, I don’t think NBC would ever have played it,” Broaddrick later said, referring to the Wall Street Journal reporter who ultimately broke the story. “I had absolutely given up.”

Remnick and Foley-Mendelssohn listened. Their reaction was the polar opposite of Oppenheim’s. There was a stunned quiet afterward. “It’s not just the admission,” Foley-Mendelssohn said finally. “It’s the tone, the not taking no for an answer.” “And NBC is letting you walk away with all this?” Remnick asked. “Who is this person at NBC? Oppenheim?” “Oppenheim,” I confirmed. “And he’s a screenwriter, you say?” “He wrote Jackie,” I replied. “That,” Remnick said gravely, “was a bad movie.”

The interview was devastating. “He creates the situation in which your silence will benefit you more than speaking out will,” Canosa said of Weinstein. “And for any news outlet grappling with the decision of whether this is an important story, whether your allegation is serious enough, credible enough,” I asked, “what would you say to them?” “If you don’t run with this, if you don’t move forward with this and expose him, you’re on the wrong side of history,” she said. “He’s going to be exposed. It benefits you to do it and not wait till he is and everyone knows you were sitting on information that could have prevented other women going through it, for potentially years to come.”

“Obviously we don’t want to publicly discuss your contract status, but we will be forced to do so if we receive any more complaints about this. Noah wants to make sure the word ‘NBC’ does not appear in any communications about this story.”

Oppenheim replied: “Thanks Harvey, appreciate the well-wishes!” Shortly thereafter, Weinstein’s staff received a message in the usual format keeping them apprised of mailed gifts: “UPDATE,” it read. “Noah Oppenheim received a bottle of Grey Goose.”

As Lourd told the story, Weinstein showed up at the agent’s office in Los Angeles and ranted for more than an hour. “He said he’s far from perfect and has been working on himself for a very long time now, and felt like he was being painted with an old brush, so to speak,” Lourd said. “Honestly, I kept thinking, I did not volunteer for this. Why is this happening right now.”

The last time I answered a call from Lisa Bloom that summer, I expressed astonishment. “Lisa, you swore, as an attorney and a friend, that you wouldn’t tell his people,” I said. “Ronan,” she replied. “I am his people.”

“Ronan, you need to come in. I can help. I can talk to David and Harvey. I can make this easier for you.” “Lisa, this is not appropriate,” I said. “I don’t know what women you’re talking to,” she said. “But I can give you information about them. If it’s Rose McGowan, we have files on her. I looked into her myself when this first came up. She’s crazy.” Collecting myself, I told her, “I welcome any information you think might be relevant for any story I might be working on.” Then I got off the phone.

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.”

Later, her suspicions would be borne out: the director Peter Jackson said that, when he was considering casting Sorvino and Ashley Judd in The Lord of the Rings, Weinstein had interceded. “I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs,” Jackson later told a reporter. “At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us. But in hindsight, I realize that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing.”

the fear in her voice never left. “When people go up against power brokers there is punishment,” she said. I realized her anxieties went beyond career considerations. She asked if I had security, if I’d thought about the risk of disappearing, of an “accident” befalling me. I said I was fine, that I was taking precautions, then wondered what precautions I was actually taking, other than glancing over my shoulder a lot. “You should be careful,” she said. “I’m afraid he has connections beyond just professional ones. Nefarious connections that could hurt people.”

Arquette shared Sorvino’s conviction that her career had suffered because she rejected Weinstein. “He made things very difficult for me for years,” she said. Her small role in Pulp Fiction did come afterward. But Arquette felt she only got the part because of its size and Weinstein’s deference to the director, Quentin Tarantino. This, too, was a leitmotif: Sorvino had suspected that her romantic relationship with Tarantino at the time had shielded her from retaliation, and that this protection had dissipated when the two split up. Later, Tarantino would say publicly that he could have, should have, done more.

“He asks me to give a massage. I was like, ‘Look, man, I am no fucking fool,’” Argento told me. “But, looking back, I am a fucking fool.”

“I was not willing,” she told me. “I said, ‘No, no, no.’… It’s twisted. A big, fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale.” Argento, who insisted that she wanted to tell her story in all its complexity, said that she didn’t physically fight him off, something that prompted years of guilt. “The thing with being a victim is I felt responsible,” she said. “Because if I were a strong woman, I would have kicked him in the balls and run away. But I didn’t. And so I felt responsible.”

This was the complex reality of sexual assault for so many survivors: these were often crimes perpetrated by bosses, family members, people you can’t avoid afterward. Argento told me that she knew the later contact would be used to attack the credibility of her allegation. She offered a variety of explanations for why she returned to Weinstein. She was intimidated, worn down by his stalking. The initial assault made her feel overpowered each time she encountered Weinstein, even years later. “When I see him, it makes me feel little and stupid and weak.” She broke down as she struggled to explain. “After the rape,” she said, “he won.”

Perpetrators of sexual abuse can also be survivors of it. 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. The women who spoke that summer were just people. Acknowledging that all did a courageous thing—Argento included—does not excuse any choices made in the years that followed.

In our calls that fall, Argento seemed aware that her reputation was too checkered, the environment in Italy too savage, for her to survive the process. “I don’t give a fuck about my reputation, I’ve already destroyed that myself over the years, as a result of many traumatic experiences, including this,” she told me. “It will definitely destroy my life, my career, everything.” I told her the choice was hers alone, but that I believed it would help the other women. As Argento grappled with the decision, her partner, the television personality and chef Anthony Bourdain, interceded repeatedly. He told her to keep going, that it was worth it, that it would make a difference. Argento decided to go on the record.

Like all of the allegations that made it into the story, Dix’s account was backed up by, among other things, people she had told, in detail, at the time. Dix’s friends and colleagues were sympathetic but did nothing. Colin Firth, like Tarantino, would later join the ranks of men in the industry who publicly apologized for hearing without really listening.

“I was very petrified,” de Caunes said. “But I didn’t want to show him that I was petrified, because I could feel that the more I was freaking out, the more he was excited.” She added, “It was like a hunter with a wild animal. The fear turns him on.” De Caunes told Weinstein that she was leaving. He panicked. “We haven’t done anything!” she remembered him saying. “It’s like being in a Walt Disney movie!” De Caunes told me, “I looked at him and I said—it took all my courage, but I said, ‘I’ve always hated Walt Disney movies.’ And then I left. I slammed the door.”

“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.”