Catch and Kill Quotes

“In the end, the courage of women can't be stamped out. And stories - the big ones, the true ones - can be caught but never killed.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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!”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“All the women before feel I am their fault," she said. "And if there were women after me, I feel that is my fault.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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!”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“I’ll take care of you, baby,” he said. “I’ll keep you in finery and smoothies.” He hugged me around the middle like a kid hugging a stuffed animal. I laughed, put a hand on his. It had been a long year, for me and for us, but we hung in there. Later, when I decided some of that reporting would make its way into a book, I’d send him a draft, and put in a question, right on this page: “Marriage?” On the moon or even here on earth. He read the draft, and found the proposal here, and said, “Sure.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“In the end, the courage of women can’t be stamped out. And stories—the big ones, the true ones—can be caught but never killed.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“Deborah Turness, who preceded Oppenheim, was described in lightly sexist profiles as having “rock-chick swagger,” which as far as I could tell just meant she sometimes chose to wear pants.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.” McGowan believed she’d been “blacklisted” after the incident. “I barely worked in movies ever again.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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 the choices made in the years that followed.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“Trying to get ahold of Davis later on, i asked Jonathan, "Who would have Lanny Davis's number?" He replied, I don't know, Pol Pot?”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“She drew a deep breath and said, “I hope the other girls get justice.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“Saturday Night Live, which had eagerly riffed on similar stories about Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump, didn’t mention Weinstein once.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“Jonathan already got a dedication and he’s quoted throughout these pages. How much more attention does he need?”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“When did you realize—” Jonathan said theatrically when I walked in, late. “—I know, I know, that I hate you,” I said. We’d done this before.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“Weinstein’s legal argument, in order of ascending absurdity and descending seriousness, was that anything negative about him was defamatory; that reporting on any company that used NDAs was impermissible; that he had cut a deal with NBC; that my sister was sexually assaulted; and that there was a child molester in my extended family. (Jonathan howled with laughter at it. “This letter is adorable,” he said. “I love this letter.”)”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“Later, several people in that room would reach for the same adjectives to describe me: sad, desperate, trying to preempt pushback at every turn. It was, one said, like I was defending a dissertation.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“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.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators