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

by Ronan Farrow

“You know what people are going to say when they find out you’re reporting this?” he said, wonderingly. We both laughed. I knew my way around a paternity rumor.

in order to respect the wishes of the people involved in the rumor, I had to find out if they wanted to say anything. In mid-March, I knocked on Sajudin’s door in the woods in rural Pennsylvania. “I don’t talk for free,” he said, then slammed the door in my face. Emails and calls to the alleged love child—who was now, of course, no longer a child at all—got no response. Late that month, I searched California’s Bay Area, trying recently listed addresses. I found only one family member, who said, “I’m not supposed to talk to you.” I tried a work address, too. The rumored love child was employed at (seriously) a genetic testing company.

The Enquirer’s transaction had put the family in a difficult situation. “I don’t understand what they had to pay this guy for,” he said. “I’m the dad.” “Got it,” I said, and gave him a condoling look. I told him I was making sure they had the chance to respond if they wanted to. I said I understood how awful it could feel to have the press circling your family. He nodded. “I understand. You’re Farrow.” “Yeah.” “Oh I know.” And then he was the one with the pitying look.

Radar Online, an AMI website, put out a post acknowledging everything. “Ronan Farrow from The New Yorker,” it read, “is calling our staff, and seems to think this is another example of how The ENQUIRER, by supposedly… killing stories about President Trump is a threat to national security.”

There was truth in the general context: Epstein was close friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told a reporter in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Miami Herald writer Julie K. Brown later published powerful reporting on widespread allegations that Epstein sexually abused minors. In 2019, federal agents arrested him on sex trafficking charges, unraveling a plea deal that had shielded the investor. The lenient agreement had been brokered by Alexander Acosta, a secretary of labor in Trump’s cabinet, when he was a prosecutor. He later resigned over the matter. Soon after, Epstein was found dead in jail, hanged in an apparent suicide.

In late 2016, the anonymous woman with the rape allegation resurfaced with new legal representation. Her new attorney was a professed defender of women, whom Howard would later describe as a “long-time friend”: Lisa Bloom. After he learned that Bloom was working on the case, Howard contacted the attorney to warn her away from it. Eventually, Bloom announced a last-minute cancelation of a planned press conference with the plaintiff and withdrew the suit for the final time.

Some of the employees felt that the most significant reward was AMI’s steadily accumulating blackmail power over Trump. Howard bragged to friends that he was turning down television job offers because he felt his current position, and his ability to hold negative stories over people, gave him more power than any career in traditional journalism. “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship,” Maxine Page, the AMI veteran, told me, “but in fact Pecker has the power—he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.” The concern had run through the conversations with McDougal, too. “Someone in a high position that controls our country, if they can influence him,” she said of Trump, “it’s a big deal.”

for AMI, it was also familiar territory. Over the years, the company had reached deals to shelve reporting around Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Tiger Woods, Mark Wahlberg, and too many others to count. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” George said. 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.”

For a brief, shining moment, I was an all-caps, sans serif, recurring villain in the pages of the National Enquirer.

Howard and his colleagues reached out for comment about fabricated yarns, including one implicating me and another journalist, who’d worked on a prominent story critical of AMI, in some sort of Brazilian sex romp. (If only my life were so exciting.)

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!”

In response to my articles, they had denied everything, called the notion of catch and kill ridiculous, claimed to have had only journalistic intentions. Just a few months later, they cut a deal to avoid prosecution for a battery of potential crimes, including violations of campaign finance law, and admitted to everything. In the early days of Trump’s candidacy, they conceded, Pecker had met with Cohen and another member of the campaign. “Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided,” the nonprosecution agreement read. They’d caught, and they’d killed, and the intention had been to swing a presidential election.

Howard threw the full weight of the publication into chasing a story about Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, cheating on his wife. This time, Howard secured the dirty pictures he habitually sought. (Aside from Bezos’s wife and mistress, Dylan Howard appeared to have more interest in the man’s penis than any other person on the planet.)

In the months after the New York Times and New Yorker stories broke, dozens of additional women accused Weinstein of sexual harassment or violence. The number grew to thirty, then sixty, then eighty.

For the occasion of his surrender, Weinstein had been styled as a mild-mannered professor, in a black blazer and a powder-blue V-neck sweater. Under one arm, he carried a stack of books about Hollywood and Broadway. Weinstein disappeared into the building to be booked on charges of rape and a criminal sex act. When he was led out afterward, the books were gone, the hands in cuffs.

However far he had fallen, there was Harvey Weinstein, with his mercenaries, plotting, planning, and bracing for fights to come. For Weinstein and others like him, the army of spies was alive and well.

The caller ID read “Axiom.” A moment later, I got a text. “I am trying to reach you directly and privately. It’s regarding a Fry Pan that’s Scratch Resistant. Sometimes I cook and the black coating scares me.” I’d recently posted a social media picture of a frying pan marketed under the label “Black Cube.” “Scratch resistant. May use false identities and shell companies to extract information,” I’d written. (“Hahaha,” Ambra Gutierrez commented drily.)

I’d forgotten how much I’d withdrawn from my own life. Were it not for the aggressive surveillance efforts, I’d have had no social life at all.

Ostrovskiy and I would meet, too, at hole-in-the-wall restaurants we’d immediately depart in favor of jumpy conversations conducted while walking mazy routes through side streets. Once, we sat in a dim corner of a hotel lobby and spoke for half an hour before he abruptly excused himself, then came back worried, saying we had to move, fast. He suspected two men sitting nearby were following us. They looked like professionals. They’d been watching too closely. We took a cab, and then another cab. He had one taxi stop on the West Side Highway, pull over to the shoulder, and wait for any tails to go by or be exposed for slowing. A year before, I’d have thought the paranoia excessive.

“No,” Oppenheim said. “We went back and looked, and, as we said in the statement, there has not been an allegation made internally in twenty years” in “any place where there would be a record of such a thing.” The qualifying language was significant: that there would be no formal HR records about a figure of Lauer’s importance was practically an assumption. Weinstein had also been adamant that there were no “formal” records of sexual misconduct allegations in his file, either. So had Bill O’Reilly at Fox News. But that wasn’t the question. McHugh hadn’t asked about formal records—he’d asked whether NBC had been “aware.”

The assembled journalists erupted with skeptical questions. McHugh was again among them. “Has NBC ever paid an employee who presented information on Matt to sign a nondisclosure agreement?” he asked. Harris blinked. “Umm,” she said, “no.” Then he asked if there had been any settlements in the last “six or seven years” with any employees related to harassment in general. More hesitation. “Not that I’m aware of,” Harris said finally. At one point in the meeting, Harris appeared to grow impatient with the journalists’ calls for an independent review. “It feels like having an outside voice, whether they came to the same conclusions or not, would make it go away quicker,” said one woman in the room. “It’s so frustrating.” “Well, if the press would stop covering it, it will go away,” Harris said. There was a pause, then still another investigative journalist said, “But we are the press.”

Nevils had wanted to be a journalist since she was thirteen and learned that Hemingway wrote for the Kansas City Star. “You go into journalism because you believe in the truth. That people’s stories matter.” She frowned. Rain drummed at the windows. “I believed we were the good guys.”

She recalled asking, “Why do you do this?” and Lauer replying, “Because it’s fun.”

Nevils told “like a million people” about Lauer. She told her inner circle of friends. She told colleagues and superiors at NBC. As in so many of the stories I’d reported on, Nevils told some of them a partial story, skipping over some details. But she was never inconsistent, and she made the seriousness of what had happened clear. When she moved to a new job within the company, working as a producer for Peacock Productions, she reported it to one of her new bosses there. She felt they should know, in case it became public and she became a liability. This was no secret.

“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.”

“It’s Matt, isn’t it?” Vieira asked, at the outset of the conversation. “I was thinking about it and he was the only one who had enough power over you to do that.” Vieira was distraught. She blamed herself for not doing more to protect Nevils, and feared there were more victims. “Think of all the other women I’ve gotten jobs there,” Vieira said. Nevils just kept apologizing.

when Nevils learned that Lack and Oppenheim were emphasizing that the incident hadn’t been “criminal” or an “assault,” she left her desk, walked to the nearest bathroom, and threw up. Her distress deepened as articles to which NBC’s communications team contributed began labeling the incident an “affair.” Angry letters began flooding her attorney’s office. “Shame on you for throwing your cunt at a married man,” read one.

NBC management had turned her into a pariah. “You need to know that I was raped,” she told a friend. “And NBC lied about it.”

Sources familiar with the talks said that lawyers working with the network argued that Nevils’s distress flowed from her mother’s death and was unrelated to the alleged assault. In the end, her lawyer told her not to mention grief to her therapist, fearing NBC might subpoena her therapy records. The network would later deny that it made the threat or raised her mother’s death.

In the end, NBC wanted the problem gone. It offered Nevils a growing settlement sum—seven figures, finally, in exchange for her silence. The network proposed a script she would have to read, suggesting that she had left to pursue other endeavors, that she was treated well, and that NBC News was a positive example of how to handle sexual harassment.

Practically alone among the prominent figures of NBC News, Brokaw had objected to the killing of the Weinstein story. He’d told me how he’d protested to the network’s leadership. In one email to me, he called the killing of the story “NBC’s self inflicted wound.” But both things could be true. Tom Brokaw, a principled defender of a tough story, had also once been part of a network news culture that made women feel uncomfortable and unsafe, and left little room for accountability around its larger-than-life stars.

Some said that the problems had deepened under Andy Lack’s leadership. When Lack began his first tenure as president of NBC News, in the nineties, “it was a fundamental shift of, all of a sudden, a tolerance for abusive behavior, whether it was sexually harassing or it was just verbally abusive,” Linda Vester, who raised the first complaint about Brokaw, told me. “Degrading, humiliating talk, mainly to women. And that became the climate under Andy Lack. It was just—it was very stark.”

“It was really a call to try to intimidate me,” Curry said. “That was my impression.” Dismayed at what she took to be a focus on silencing her rather than addressing the sexual harassment problem at the network, she became direct. “You need to be taking care of these women,” Curry told Franco. “This is your job. You should be making sure these women are protected from this guy.” “I try to do that when they let me do it,” Franco said.

there was no doubt that the allegations against Lauer, and NBC’s wider use of nondisclosure agreements with women who experienced harassment, were under threat of exposure during our reporting. That precarious culture of secrecy made NBC more vulnerable to Harvey Weinstein’s intimidation and enticement, delivered through lawyers, and intermediaries, and calls to Lack and Griffin and Oppenheim and Roberts and Meyer that the network initially concealed. That pattern of nondisclosure agreements and ongoing threats to enforce them was playing out as the network acquiesced to Weinstein’s argument that his own similar pacts were ironclad and couldn’t be reported on.

“No one knows my name,” he told me, sitting at the corner diner near my place on the Upper West Side. “They can say whatever they want about me. They can keep me from getting a job.” “Do what’s best for your girls,” I said. McHugh shook his head. “I don’t know if I can.” Bringing up the family was no use—it was the man’s conscientiousness about the world his daughters were stepping into that had prompted these fits of principle in the first place.

On the network’s own air, Megyn Kelly questioned NBC’s self-reporting, joining the calls for independent oversight. Soon she’d be gone, too—fired after another conflagration over a racially insensitive remark. For the network, the firing had the added benefit of cutting off what several sources around Lack said were mounting tensions over Kelly’s focus on Weinstein and Lauer.

My sister called at the height of the evasive interviews. “You’re covering for them,” she said. “I’m not lying,” I replied. “No. You’re omitting. It’s dishonest.” The low points between us flickered back to me. I remembered the hard years, after I’d told her to shut up about her own allegation: walking into her room after she came back from the hospital; seeing her pull a long sleeve over the ladder of blood-red em-dashes on her forearm; saying I was sorry, and that I wished I could have done more.

On Fox News a few days earlier, Tucker Carlson had sat in front of a picture of Oppenheim and called for his resignation. “Let’s be clear. NBC is lying,” Carlson said. “Many powerful people knew what Harvey Weinstein was doing and not only ignored his crimes but actively took his side against his many victims. It’s a long list but at the very top of that list is NBC News.” He appeared to relish the chance to attack a mainstream outlet, Hollywood liberals, and a sexual predator all at once. “News executives are not allowed to tell lies,” he said, as if he’d never met one.

Oppenheim said, “You know, I just got a call this morning from NBC Global Security saying they need to send a police car to my house because of all the online death threats.” He sounded angry, not afraid. “I’ve got three young kids who are wondering why there are cops out front.” I said I was sorry to hear it. I meant it. “Even if you think that NBC was either cowardly or acted inappropriately or whatever, which you’re entitled to feel, I hope that you would realize the way this has become personalized and hung on me is not fair or accurate,” he added. “Even if you believe that there is a villain in this, that the villain is not me.”

“You keep saying you’re the one who takes the hit and it wasn’t you. So where does it come from?” I asked finally. “My boss! Okay? I have a boss. I don’t run NBC News exclusively,” he said, then seemed to catch himself. “You know, everyone was involved in this decision. You can speculate what Kim Harris’s motives are, you can speculate what Andy’s motives are, you can speculate what my motives are. All I can tell you is at the end of the day, they felt like, you know, there was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward.”