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

by Ronan Farrow

“I am a 28 year old woman trying to make a living and a career,” O’Connor wrote in the memo. “Harvey Weinstein is a 64 year old, world famous man and this is his company. The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10.”

The actress Claire Forlani would later post an open letter on social media about her struggle over whether to describe to me her claim that Weinstein had harassed her. “I told some close men around me and they all advised me not to speak,” she wrote. “I had already told Ronan I would speak with him but from the advice around me, interestingly the male advice around me, I didn’t make the call.”

She hummed along, luminous and buoyant, asking who it was I was reporting on. I told her Harvey Weinstein. Streep gasped. “But he supports such good causes,” she said. Weinstein had always behaved around her. She’d watched and sometimes joined in his Democratic fund-raising and philanthropy. She knew him to be a bully in the edit room. But that was it. “I believe her,” I told Jonathan later. “But you would either way, right?” he replied, considering it a thought exercise. “Yeah, I get it.” “Because she’s Meryl—” “Because she’s Meryl Streep. I get it.”

Susan Sarandon, the kind of ethical futurist who had stubbornly refused to work with accused predators for years, gamely brainstormed leads. She let out a cackle when I told her what I was up to. “Oh, Ronan,” she said, going into a teasing, singsong delivery. Not mocking, just delighting at the impending drama about to befall me. “You’re gonna be in trouble.”

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 Weinstein of my inquiry almost immediately.

Weinstein was doing canvassing of his own. As September turned to October, he sought out the figure at the heart of his claims that I had a conflict of interest. Weinstein had his assistants place the call. On a movie set in Central Park, another assistant brought a phone to Woody Allen. Weinstein seemed to want a strategic playbook—for quashing sexual assault allegations, and for dealing with me. “How did you deal with this?” Weinstein asked at one point. He wanted to know if Allen would intercede on his behalf. Allen shut down the idea. But he did have knowledge that Weinstein would later put to use. That week, Weinstein’s credit card receipts show his purchase of a book of interviews with Allen, written by a die-hard fan of his, documenting all of the arguments Allen and his army of private investigators and publicists had come up with to smear the credibility of my sister, the district attorney, and a judge who had suggested she was telling the truth. “Jeez, I’m so sorry,” Allen told Weinstein on the call. “Good luck.”

I was sincerely glad the Times was there to draw some of the heat and ensure the story saw the light of day, whatever happened to my effort. But privately, I was also feeling competitive, with some self-pity mixed in. For six months, the only support I’d had was Noah Oppenheim scrunching his nose and holding journalism at arm’s length, afraid it might get on him. Now, finally, I had The New Yorker, but it might be too late.

Weinstein’s recent conversation with Woody Allen appeared to inform the letter. Harder devoted several pages to the argument that my sister’s sexual assault disqualified me from reporting on Weinstein. “Mr. Farrow is entitled to his private anger,” Harder wrote. “But no publisher should allow those personal feelings to create and pursue a baseless and defamatory story from his personal animus.” He went on to quote the book Weinstein had purchased by the Woody Allen biographer, and to echo Allen’s argument that I’d been brainwashed into finding my sister’s claim credible.

I was reminded of the op-eds and television appearances Bloom had devoted to defending my sister’s credibility and burnishing her own brand as an advocate for women. I was becoming inured to people contorting their bodies into the shapes of gears for Harvey Weinstein’s machine.

“It’s good it’s breaking,” I said. “It’s just—all these months. This whole year. And now I have no job.” I was losing it, actually starting to cry. “I swung too wide. I gambled too much. And maybe I won’t even have a story at the end of it. And I’m letting down all these women—” “Calm down!” Jonathan shouted, snapping me out of it. “All that’s happening right now is you haven’t slept or eaten in two weeks.” A horn sounded outside. “Are you in a cab?” he asked. “Uh-huh,” I sniffled. “Oh my God. We are going to talk about this, but first you are going to tip that driver really well.”

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 run this story.”

“I’m calling because I want to hear you out,” I said. “No. I know what you want. I know you’re scared, and alone, and your bosses abandoned you, and your father—” Remnick was outside at this point, tapping on the glass quietly. He shook his head, made a “wrap it up” gesture. “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 was just an “old dinosaur learning new ways,” she argued. By the next day’s morning programs, Bloom was working to frame the allegations in the Times piece as mild indiscretions. “You’re using the term sexual harassment, which is a legal term,” she said to George Stephanopoulos. “I’m using the term workplace misconduct. I don’t know if there’s a real significant difference, to most people, but sexual harassment is severe and pervasive.” She said that she’d counseled Weinstein sternly against talking in the office “the way you talk to your guy friends, you know, when you’re going out for a beer.” Weinstein, in his own statements, said that he “came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” and professed to be on a “journey” to “learn about myself,” with “Lisa Bloom to tutor me.” Weinstein pledged to devote himself to fighting the National Rifle Association. As far as Bloom and Weinstein were concerned, he would get therapy, start a foundation for female directors at USC, and that would be that.

With painful frequency, stories of abuse by powerful people are also stories of a failure of board culture. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, held two seats on the board, and the company’s charter allowed them to name a third. Over time, Weinstein was able to install loyalists in many of the remaining seats, too. By 2015, when Weinstein’s contract was due to be renewed, he essentially controlled six out of nine board seats, and used that influence to evade accountability.

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. Instead, Craig Melvin, filling in for Lauer, read a script that ran less than a minute and was dominated by Weinstein’s rebuttals to the allegations. That weekend, the pattern repeated: Saturday Night Live, which had eagerly riffed on similar stories about Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump, didn’t mention Weinstein once.

“Oppenheim says Ronan came to him several months ago and said he wanted to pursue sexual harassment, and after about two or three months, never secured any documentation and never persuaded any women to go on camera,” read a memorandum filed internally within an outlet Oppenheim and Kornblau spoke with. “This was a guy who really didn’t have anything,” Oppenheim said in one of the calls, “I understand this is very personal for him and he may be emotional about it.” Asked if he’d had any contact with Weinstein, Oppenheim laughed and said, “I don’t travel in those circles.”

“Should we be doing something on this?” one of the producers present asked. Oppenheim shook his head. “He’ll be fine,” he said of Weinstein. “He’ll be back in eighteen months. It’s Hollywood.”

“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.” She told me that the entire sequence of events had a routine quality. “It feels like a very streamlined process,” she said. “Female casting director, Harvey wants to meet. Everything was designed to make me feel comfortable before it happened. And then the shame in what happened was also designed to keep me quiet.”

Large portions of the conversations with Weinstein were placed off the record. But there were also, among the calls, exchanges for which no ground rules were set, or which Weinstein explicitly placed on the record. At times he sounded defeated. There could be an almost boyish charm in the small “Hi, Ronan,” at the top of each call. But more often, there were flashes of the old Harvey Weinstein, arrogant and raging. “Allow me to edify you,” he’d say. “I’m giving you insights.”

“There’s no retaliating in Hollywood,” he said, calling the concept of powerful men intimidating women in the industry a “myth.” And when I wondered how he figured this was the case, he said that people could simply call up a Ronan Farrow or a Jodi Kantor or a Kim Masters and the retaliation would go away. I marveled at this logic: helping to create a problem, then pointing to the response it had generated to claim the problem didn’t exist.

He spent an inordinate amount of time attacking the character of women in the story. “Harvey, I have a question,” Remnick interjected at one point, in all earnestness. “How does this relate to your behavior?” Weinstein seemed comparatively unconcerned with disputing specific facts. Sometimes, he simply couldn’t recall them. Once, he launched into a detailed discussion of an allegation not included in the story. He’d mixed up a name we’d given him and a similar-sounding one from his own memories.

Each time I brought up the audio from the police sting, Weinstein would bristle, outraged that a copy had survived. “You have a copy of a tape that was destroyed by the district attorney?” he asked, in disbelief. “The tape that was destroyed?” Later, spokespeople in Vance’s office would say they never agreed to destroy evidence. But Weinstein was convinced of it.

Once, when Hofmeister and the other handlers found themselves unable to stop Weinstein, they appeared to hang up. “We lost you,” Remnick said after the abrupt disconnection. “They didn’t want him to say that,” said Foley-Mendelssohn. “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.”

And by the end, even as his anger arced, Weinstein sounded resigned. Several times, he conceded that we’d been fair—and that he “deserved” a lot of it.

I wandered over to one of the office’s windows and looked out at the Hudson. There was a numb feeling; Peggy Lee droning, “Is that all there is to a fire?” I hoped the women would feel it was worth it; that they’d been able to protect others. I wondered what would become of me. I had no arrangement with The New Yorker beyond that first story, and no path forward in television. In the glass, I could make out the dark circles under my own eyes and, beyond that, the world clear to the glittering horizon. A news chopper hovered over the Hudson, watching.

“There are more Harveys in your midst.”

Soon, Tapper was on air reading a quote. “An NBC source told the Daily Beast, quote, ‘He brought NBC News early reporting on Weinstein that didn’t meet the standard to go forward with the story. It was nowhere close to what ultimately ran. At that time, he didn’t have one accuser willing to go on the record or identify themselves. The story he published is radically different than what he brought to NBC News.’” Then he furrowed his brow and said, “That seems like a real lie to me.”

When I mentioned not being able to lie if the matter arose on air, Oppenheim laughed nervously. “I mean, look, unless—unless you’re gonna, like—I mean, it doesn’t sound like you’re inclined to do it—unless you’re gonna bring up—” “No. No,” I replied. “My honest goal here, Noah, as it has been throughout this process, is to not have anything overshadow the stories of these women.”

A few hours later, my phone pinged: “Ronan, it’s Matt Lauer. Let me be the 567th person to say congratulations on an amazing piece!”

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.”

“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.

“I walked into the door at The New Yorker with an explosively reportable piece that should have been public earlier, and immediately, obviously, The New Yorker recognized that,” I said. “It is not accurate to say that it was not reportable. In fact, there were multiple determinations that it was reportable at NBC.” I could feel my promise of keeping the peace slipping away, and my future at the network with it. Maddow gave me a sympathetic look. “I know parts of this story, in terms of the reporting side of it, is not the easiest stuff to talk about and I know you don’t want to make yourself the center of this story,” she said. “That is important,” I said. “These women came forward with incredibly brave allegations. They tore their guts out talking about this and re-traumatized themselves because they believed they could protect other women going forward. So, this should not be about me, or the wonderful, important work that Jodi Kantor did… ultimately, we are there in service of women doing something really tough, and I hope people hear their voices and focus on that.” I walked off set and burst into tears.

At one point, my phone died, Oppenheim cut off mid-shout. I was still in the greenroom at MSNBC. I borrowed a charger and plugged in. As I waited, a prominent on-air personality who hadn’t yet left the office sat with me and remarked casually: “Noah’s a sick fuck, and Andy’s a sick fuck, and they both need to go.” “You mean beyond this?” I asked. “There have been three things that I know of personally.” “The Access tape,” I said. “This…” “And something else. Involving talent here.” My eyes widened. But the phone was alive again, and Oppenheim was calling back.

“I don’t understand what circumstance would exist as a journalistic organization where—even if they didn’t believe you had it at that moment—they didn’t say, ‘We’re gonna give you more resources, we’re gonna double down,’” said one veteran journalist there that day. “It didn’t ever pass the laugh test for me. And I don’t think it did to the rest of the group.”

Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers were calling us all through the seven months and never once did I say to anyone, ‘Don’t do it,’” Oppenheim said. “I was ordered to stop on the story,” McHugh said. “Ronan and I sensed that NBC was going down a direction where they were not gonna publish this story.” “I’m the one who launched the fucking story!” Oppenheim said, losing his cool, getting angry. “I’m now being accused widely,” he said, “of being somehow complicit in covering up for a rapist. Okay! As the only person here who gave Ronan a job after MSNBC canceled his show, as the person whose idea it was for the story—” “I’m not accusing you,” McHugh said calmly. But Oppenheim was injured now.

Woody Allen, who had expressed his sympathies to Weinstein on the phone the preceding month, expressed sympathies again in public. “No-one ever came to me or told me horror stories with any real seriousness,” he said. “And they wouldn’t, because you are not interested in it. You are interested in making your movie.” And then: “The whole Harvey Weinstein thing is very sad for everybody involved. Tragic for the poor women that were involved, sad for Harvey that [his] life is so messed up.” Later, in response to criticism about the comments, he said he’d meant Weinstein was “a sad, sick man.” In any case, he emphasized, the important thing was “to avoid ‘a witch hunt atmosphere’ where ‘every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.’”

A right-wing guerrilla artist posted around Los Angeles an image of Streep and Weinstein huddled together, with a slash of red paint over Streep’s eyes bearing the words “She knew.” Streep released a statement through her publicist. (Because Hollywood values economy of characters, this was also Woody Allen’s publicist, Leslee Dart, who had overseen his periodic efforts to discredit my sister.) “One thing can be clarified. Not everybody knew,” Streep’s statement said. “And if everybody knew, I don’t believe that all the investigative reporters in the entertainment and the hard news media would have neglected for decades to write about it.” I believed that Streep didn’t know. But her optimism was misplaced: the media had tried, but it had also known, and neglected, so much.

The women in the story were reacting too. Some were pained, others ecstatic. All described feeling a weight lifted. McGowan, after her months of ups and downs, thanked me. “You came in with a glorious flaming sword. So fucking well done,” she wrote. “You did a huge service to us all. And you were BRAVE.”

The renderings of these stories that were ultimately published in The New Yorker were precise and legalistic. They made no attempt at communicating the true, bleak ugliness of listening to a recollection of violent rape like Sciorra’s. Her voice caught. The memory erupted in ragged sobs. You heard Annabella Sciora struggle to tell her story once, and it stayed inside you forever.

Perez said that she urged Sciorra to speak by describing her own experience of going public about her assault. “I told her, ‘I used to tread water for years. It’s fucking exhausting, and maybe speaking out, that’s your lifeboat. Grab on and get out,’” Perez recalled. “I said, ‘Honey, the water never goes away. But, after I went public, it became a puddle and I built a bridge over it, and one day you’re gonna get there, too.’”

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.”

In 2013, he’d written a novel called Dead Cat Bounce, about a coked-out London-based Jewish finance guy who runs away to join the IDF and gets swept up in a world of espionage and crime, all under the guise of being a writer for the Guardian. Freedman wrote like a gangster in a Guy Ritchie movie talks: “The perfect mojito is a line of coke. See what I’m saying? Rum, lime, sugar, mint—yeah, yeah, yeah, but trust me, it’s the poor man’s Charlie. The scared man’s snow. The straight man’s chang.”

The invoices attached were eye-popping: fees that might have totaled up to $1.3 million. The contracts were signed by Dr. Avi Yanus, the Black Cube director, and by Boies Schiller. This was an astonishment. Boies’s law firm represented the New York Times. But here was the esteemed lawyer’s signature, in genteel blue-inked cursive, on a contract to kill the paper’s reporting and obtain McGowan’s book.

I asked the head of a competing Israeli private intelligence firm what to do if I suspected I was being followed, and he said, “Just start running.”

Realization prickled my skin. The men had promised a Black Cube document dump from a discreet account. What was the likelihood that another source would intercede with a conflicting and more devastating leak at the exact same time? But two distinct leaks seemed the only possibility. I’d stumbled into a civil war among spies.

We need to find out who he is,” Rohde, and just about everyone else at The New Yorker, pressed. We turned over the question. “Sleeper1973 is possibly a Woody Allen reference,” I wrote, referring to the film of the same name released that year. “Which is certainly cheeky.” Someone with a sense of humor, then.

About a decade before the Weinstein affair, when Pechanac was in her early twenties, she and her mother had gone back to Sarajevo to appear in a documentary about the war and their family’s flight from it. Her mother wept openly, walking the streets and recalling the bloodshed. Pechanac seemed a reluctant participant. She hovered at the margin of shots, chewing gum or smoking, casting petulant glances at the camera. Eventually, one of the filmmakers cornered the impassive young woman at the entrance to a crumbling building and asked what it was like to relive such painful memories. Another shrug. “It makes me mad that she had to go through this,” she said, referring to her mother. “But personally, I haven’t felt anything for a long time.”

What did it say about the gulf between the powerful and the powerless that wealthy individuals could intimidate, surveil, and conceal on such a vast scale?

“I’m an insider who is fed up with BC’s false and devious ways of obtaining material illegally,” Sleeper wrote. “Moreover, in this case, I truly believe HW is a sex offender and I’m ashamed as a woman for participating.” I paused, processing this, feeling another moment of hair-prickling realization. That, in the end, is what I can tell you about Sleeper, and the risks she took to uncover something vast. She was a woman and she’d had enough. “Lets just say that I will never ever give you something that I cant back you for 100%,” she wrote in one of her final messages to me. “I work in the information industry. World of espionage and endless action. Hope we can actually talk about it some day. The project I’m involved in…. out of this world, my dear.”

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.’”