Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Catch Predators is the story of how NBC reporter Ronan Farrow broke the story on mega-producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual assault and abuse. Chasing down leads and talking to women who bravely came forward to share their stories, Farrow exposed to the public how Weinstein used his power, wealth, and influence to intimidate and silence his victims, and how the media and legal systems allowed him to operate with impunity for decades.
Throughout his career, Weinstein had operated as a serial sexual predator. Since his rise as major power player in Hollywood in the late 1980s, he had only become more brazen in his crimes, and seemingly impervious to justice. As Farrow discovered through conversations with dozens of women who risked their careers, reputations, and even physical safety to come forward, Weinstein’s abuse was systematic, routine, and disturbingly similar from victim to victim.
The women, most of them aspiring actresses or producers, all recounted the same elements of their encounters with Weinstein—promises from him to advance their careers and make them into stars; a “meeting” scheduled; the time and location of the “meeting” changed at the last minute from daytime in a hotel lobby hotel to nighttime in a hotel suite or his private office; and the violent assault that would follow when they were alone with him. The common threads running through each of these stories lent credibility to all of them. It was a pattern of practiced, rehearsed predation.
But breaking this story proved far more difficult for Farrow than he could have possibly thought. Even in the earliest stages of his reporting, he quickly realized that his superiors at NBC were highly reluctant to run with his story: they treated the searing testimony from his sources with skepticism and gave Weinstein an extraordinary benefit of the doubt. To Farrow, it seemed like his own network was siding with Weinstein over one of its own reporters. As Farrow dug deeper into the story, he saw just how far Weinstein’s web of corruption and influence spread in the entertainment industry, the news media, and even the criminal justice system.
As a major Hollywood film producer and distributor, Weinstein had the power to make and break the careers of the actresses upon whom he preyed, and he used this economic clout in the entertainment industry to kill the careers of women who tried to come forward about his sexual abuse. With his influence over the news networks and the tabloid press, Weinstein had been able to successfully bury any stories that might have hinted at his history of predation—and ruthlessly smear and vilify any women who dared try and tell their stories. Through his team of high-powered attorneys and his political contributions, he managed to shield himself from the criminal justice system, even when prosecutors were presented with clear and incontrovertible evidence of his vast crimes.
One of Weinstein’s major sources of power was his alliances with the tabloid world, particularly American Media, Inc. (AMI), publishers of the National Enquirer. The magazine had a long and sordid history of protecting powerful men like Harvey Weinstein from negative press. They did this by blackmailing and threatening people (chiefly women) who accused such men of misconduct.
AMI would acquire the legal rights to the stories of former mistresses or employees who had accused such men of sexual impropriety or marital infidelity. They would then intimidate or bribe these accusers into signing away their rights to ever publicly discuss the accusations, in exchange for hush money, through a contract known as a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If the accusers were reluctant to sign, AMI would threaten to humiliate them in the pages of the National Enquirer by running negative stories about them. They would be threatened with financially punitive legal action if they ever breathed a word of their story to anyone or even acknowledged the existence of the agreement. AMI would then arrange to have the stories buried by refusing to publish them. In the journalistic world, the practice was known as “catch and kill.”
AMI had forged a close working relationship with Harvey Weinstein, a relationship that benefited both parties. Weinstein, of course, was able to use his connections with AMI to bury stories about his criminality and bully his accusers into silence. AMI, on the other hand, made a partner and ally out of one of the most powerful and well-connected people in Hollywood—and gained invaluable leverage over Weinstein, should the company ever need to use it.
When actress Rose McGowan claimed via Twitter that she had been raped by a Hollywood mogul in the 1990s (whom many in the film industry knew to be Weinstein), it prompted speculation among the general public about the identity of her rapist. AMI went into full attack mode as part of a preemptive defense of Weinstein, with the editor-in-chief of the Enquirer declaring to his staff, “I want dirt on that bitch.”
Weinstein’s career as a violent sexual predator was an open secret in the entertainment industry. Farrow spoke to former Weinstein Company producers, executives, and assistants, all of whom claimed that it was standard practice for a pool of hush money to be set aside to pay off women to prevent them from going public with their accusations. Others attested that they had personally witnessed Weinstein inappropriately touching women throughout their time at the company. This was standard behavior on Weinstein’s part (down to the specific tactics and ruses he used to lure women into his hotel rooms or office) and knowledge of it was widespread throughout the company and the broader film industry.
The Weinstein Company was fully complicit in the criminal behavior of its boss, with his pattern of predation well known. It even had people on the company payroll with nominal jobs, but whose real functions were to act as pimps for Weinstein, arranging liaisons between him and his unsuspecting victims, almost always with some sort of professional pretext used as a ruse. Many employees helped him procure victims and arrange his liaisons, knowing full well what their boss’ intentions were. The abuse was systematic and routine—trusted assistants were even made to keep track of all the women Weinstein had assaulted.
McGowan had told many people about what Weinstein had done to her, both at the time of the assault and in the years following. She had been met with skepticism, and with warnings not to make waves, lest she incur Weinstein’s retaliatory wrath. One attorney specializing in criminal law to whom she spoke even advised McGowan to drop the matter altogether, claiming that she wouldn’t be deemed a credible witness because she had appeared in sex scenes in some of her films.
The story of model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez and her encounter with Weinstein in New York reveals the extent of his power and influence, even within the supposedly impartial criminal justice system. In 2015, Gutierrez caught Weinstein on tape admitting to having groped her on a previous occasion, as well as having committed similar acts in the past. When she confronted him about this, the audio recording revealed a dismissive Weinstein declaring, “I’m used to that.” Gutierrez brought this recording to the police, who brought him in for questioning.
With this recording, it should have been an open-and-shut case for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. But it wasn’t. When Gutierrez was questioned by the Sex Crimes Unit of the DA’s office, they seemed more interested in her personal sexual history and career as a lingerie model than they were about the incident with Weinstein.
Two weeks later, the Manhattan DA (notably, a recipient of campaign money from Weinstein’s attorney) announced that he would not be bringing charges against Weinstein.
Perhaps most chillingly, Weinstein had in his employ a network of professional spies, private investigators, and double agents. These individuals, operating primarily through an Israeli private security firm called Black Cube, surveilled Weinstein’s victims and the journalists who tried to talk to them. These agents tapped Farrow’s phone and email (as well as those of his sources) and even adopted false identities as journalists, activists, or philanthropists, in an effort to uncover information, gather dirt, and derail the story.
This intelligence and surveillance operation was able to tell Weinstein which sources were talking to which reporters and which news organizations were working on stories about him. Through his network of attorneys, PR flacks, agents, producers, and hired spies, Weinstein had, for decades, successfully strangled all attempts to bring his misconduct to light.
Weinstein engaged the services of Black Cube, an Israeli private security firm, to follow Farrow, track his cell phone, and look for any possible dirt that could be used to blackmail him or discredit his story. Farrow also received cryptic death threats through text messages to his personal phone. It was all part of the Weinstein strategy of intimidation, blackmail, and deception.
Black Cube also used double agents to infiltrate Farrow’s sources, forging friendships with these Weinstein victims by posing as journalists, activists, or philanthropists who were ostensibly interested in their experiences as survivors of sexual assault. One spy, using the alias Diana Filip, claimed to be a representative from a financial services company called Reuben Capital Partners (which did not exist). In this capacity, she targeted Rose McGowan and befriended the actress, telling McGowan that her firm was interested in honoring her for her advocacy work. Through this “friendship,” McGowan unwittingly revealed crucial information about her sexual assault and Farrow’s story to a hired agent of Weinstein.
Weinstein was also able to exert significant pressure at NBC, through his connections with Noah Oppenheim, president of NBC News; Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC; and Andy Lack, chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, all of whom had the power to kill Farrow’s story.
NBC proved to be extremely pliant in Weinstein’s hands. Even when Farrow had secured, through one of his sources, an audio recording in which Weinstein admitted to groping this woman (and that he’d committed similar acts in the past), the network refused to run the story.
They demanded evidence well above and beyond the standard that would have typically been applied for such a news story, cast doubt on the credibility of Farrow’s sources, and argued that Weinstein’s misconduct was not even newsworthy. To Farrow, the network was applying a rigorous and unreasonable burden of proof for this story, while granting an extraordinary benefit of the doubt to Weinstein.
Farrow was ordered to halt the story several times at NBC, while it went for approval to the parent company, Comcast. This was highly unusual, especially for a story with as much solid evidence as Farrow’s. Unbeknownst to Farrow, Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, had personally promised Weinstein that the story would be killed. Farrow continued building the story, even without NBC’s sanction. Eventually, Weinstein’s machinations succeeded in getting Farrow fired from NBC.
Undeterred, Farrow took his Weinstein reporting to the print magazine The New Yorker. Too many women had risked too much to come forward, and Farrow was unwilling to let NBC’s cowardice and treachery bury a story that needed to be told. Unlike NBC, The New Yorker (and its editor, David Remnick) were fully supportive of Farrow’s work and urged him to continue reporting. Indeed, they were shocked at NBC’s refusal to run with what was obviously a bombshell piece. With the blessing of The New Yorker, Farrow continued to plug away at the story, interviewing key Weinstein victims like Mira Sorvino, Rosanna Arquette, and Asia Argento.
Shortly before the piece went to print, Farrow placed a call to the Weinstein Company for final comment. To his astonishment, he wound up speaking with Weinstein himself. The Hollywood kingpin was wildly emotional on the phone, combatively and furiously ranting at Farrow that there was nothing to any of the allegations, threatening to sue him and destroy his reputation, and mocking and sneering at him for having been fired by NBC. At one point, Weinstein expressed his belief that a sexual encounter couldn’t be rape if the woman had consensual sex with him on subsequent occasions—an assertion wildly at odds with the true nature of how sexual abuse works, especially when it happens in the context of a workplace and a boss/subordinate relationship.
On October 10, 2017, Ronan Farrow’s piece, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories,” appeared in The New Yorker. He had broken open the dam on an ugly aspect of American life that extended to the highest levels of power.
In the wake of that reporting, NBC’s refusal to air the story became more clear, as NBC had its own litany of problems with sexual abuse. Matt Lauer, co-host of the Today show and a major star for NBC, was revealed to have had a Weinstein-like record of sexual predation (and even violent rape) for years, despite dozens of complaints about him having been brought to the network over the years. Moreover, Weinstein had strongly hinted to the higher-ups at NBC that he knew about Lauer’s misconduct and was prepared to blackmail the network over it.
In response to allegations of misconduct against one of its stars, NBC had simply done what the Enquirer and Weinstein had done: bully women into silence and force them to sign NDAs. NBC refused to expose a predator like Weinstein, because they were compromised by Lauer and Weinstein’s leverage over them.
In the end, Farrow and the women who came forward to tell their stories prevailed over the intimidation, fear, and corruption to expose both Weinstein’s crimes and the enablers in the media and legal systems who had allowed him to evade justice for so long. Farrow’s bombshell reporting played a key role in starting the worldwide #MeToo movement, shining a light on sexual abuse and exploitation by the powerful against the powerless, especially in the worlds of media, business, and politics.
The story of Weinstein’s decades of abuse can tell us a lot. We can look at it as a negative and dispiriting story, one in which a handful of high-status men—Harvey Weinstein chief among them—used their power, wealth, and influence to commit sexual assaults with impunity over a period of decades. We can also see it as a tale about the corruption of key institutions of American society, like the free press and law enforcement, that are supposed to promote the public good. And indeed, men like Weinstein, Trump, and Lauer do not operate in a vacuum: they are predators because they operate within a system and a culture which enables their predation.
But we can also see it as an uplifting story, in which a handful of brave women staged an act of rebellion and defiance against a criminal patriarchy, with the help of a journalist, Ronan Farrow, who wanted to tell their stories. Catch and Kill is ultimately not a story of exploitation: it is one of courage.
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Catch Predators is primarily about journalist Ronan Farrow’s year-long journey to expose the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse. As such, it is part journalistic account, part spy thriller, part detective story.
But the book touches on other figures and storylines as well, such as:
While these details are rich and make for a compelling read, to create a concise and coherent summary, we focused our narrative on the main action of the book—the pursuit of the Weinstein story and the Hollywood mogul’s attempts to sabotage Farrow’s reporting. We’re confident that this summary will enjoy the benefits of a thorough exploration of the major themes, plot developments, and key figures.
This summary contains descriptions of violent acts of rape and sexual assault. Such material may be traumatic or upsetting for some readers.
On Sunday, October 9, 2016, NBC News reporter Ronan Farrow and his producer, Rich McHugh, were working on a story about campus sexual assault for the Today show. It was a hard-hitting, well-researched piece, which made it all the more surprising when word came down from the leadership of the network that the piece would not air—in its place, Today would show a segment about Adderall addiction.
Why the sudden turnabout? Why would NBCUniversal (the parent company of NBC News) decide to shelve a solid piece of reporting by one of the network’s rising stars? The answer had to do with another bombshell piece of news that had set off a media frenzy two days earlier, and NBC’s own complicity in it. The network’s reaction was a sign of things to come, as Farrow and McHugh would encounter the same pattern of stonewalling and hedging from their bosses as the duo worked to uncover one of the biggest scandals ever to rock the media and entertainment world.
On October 7, 2016, the Friday before Farrow and McHugh were told their campus sexual assault piece wouldn’t air, the Washington Post broke the story that Donald Trump, businessman, television star, and current Republican nominee for President of the United States, had been caught on video back in 2015 bragging about committing sexual assault. The audio captured Trump’s now-infamous boast about how he committed sexual offenses against women with impunity, “Grab[bing] them by the pussy” and claiming, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” The story dominated headlines and even prompted calls from some Republican Party officials for Trump to step off the ticket.
Yet NBC’s coverage of the incident was strangely muted. Why? Because Trump, at the time of the video recording, had been an NBC employee, as the host of the popular reality television contest show The Apprentice. To make matters worse, Billy Bush, a current NBC host, was seen on the video laughing at and encouraging Trump’s comments, piping in with, “Yes! The Donald has scored!” To make matters worse still, Billy Bush was being promoted as a new Today host in the fall of 2016. Questions immediately arose about NBC’s prior knowledge of the Trump video: how long had they known about it and did they deliberately cover it up?
This was why the network spiked Farrow’s reporting. NBC didn’t want a story about sexual assault airing during the same news cycle in which one of its hosts was apologizing for cheering on sexual violence with another former network star and now-presidential candidate. As Farrow would discover, however, covering up stories of sexual misconduct was part of NBC’s standard operating procedure.
The fallout from the Trump video sparked an immediate national conversation about sexual violence toward women in particular. How frequently was it happening? Why aren’t more assaults reported to the authorities? And how many women were survivors? One voice emerged the loudest from this conversation: actress and activist Rose McGowan. In a tweet, McGowan alleged that she had been raped by a Hollywood studio head and that it was an “open secret” in the film industry. Who was she referring to and why had this person been able to operate with impunity if so many people knew about his predatory behavior?
As the news broke later, McGowan’s rapist was Harvey Weinstein, a major Hollywood power broker. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, had founded Miramax, which distributed major films including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); Pulp Fiction (1994); The English Patient (1996); and The King’s Speech (2011). A leading figure of the indie movie scene of the 1990s and a producer of some of the biggest films of the 2000s and 2010s, Weinstein was a Hollywood titan and one of the most-thanked figures in the history of the Academy Awards—coming second only to God.
But there was a dark side to Harvey Weinstein. He was known for his abusive style as a boss, frequently subjecting subordinates to rage-filled tirades which featured him throwing objects against the walls and even at people. To work for Weinstein in any capacity was to be emotionally abused and even physically threatened on a near-daily basis. But people who aspired to succeed in the film industry nevertheless jumped at the opportunity to work for him, knowing that he wielded the power to make their careers—or end them if they dared cross him.
Around the time of McGowan’s cryptic tweet, rumors about sexual impropriety of some kind or another had also been swirling around Weinstein for years. Yet nothing ever seemed to come of them—there was never any big exposé or TV news story about Weinstein’s alleged pattern of behavior. Rumors would briefly fly, perhaps generate a few articles in minor publications, and then be quickly flushed out of the news cycle before any major media outlet looked deeper into them. Why was Weinstein so curiously immune from negative coverage?
Part of the answer lay in an alliance that Weinstein had forged with the publishers of the National Enquirer, a tabloid paper with dubious journalistic standards, best known for salacious, lurid, and borderline-slanderous cover stories involving Hollywood celebrities. But the magazine and its parent company, American Media, Inc. (AMI), were also known for protecting powerful men like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein from negative press. They did this by blackmailing and threatening people (chiefly women) who accused such men of misconduct.
For decades, AMI had been protecting Trump by acquiring the legal rights to the stories of former mistresses or employees who had accused him of sexual impropriety or marital infidelity. The media company got these women to sign away their rights to ever publicly discuss the accusations against Trump, in exchange for hush money.
Such agreements would be finalized in a contract known as a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Women who signed NDAs would be threatened with financially punitive legal action if they ever breathed a word of their story to anyone or even acknowledged the existence of the agreement. AMI would then bury the stories in their vaults. If the accusers were reluctant to sign, AMI would threaten to humiliate them in the pages of the National Enquirer by running negative stories about them. In the journalistic world, the practice was known as “catch and kill.”
Of course, AMI and its CEO, David Pecker, weren’t merely doing this out of personal loyalty to Trump (although Pecker and Trump did share a personal friendship). The “catch and kill” operations gave the company enormous leverage over a powerful figure like Trump, because there was always the implicit threat that AMI could run these stories if they wanted to. And this leverage became immeasurably more valuable to AMI on November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump was elected to the presidency. Pecker’s relationship with Trump provided real material benefits. In 2017, the Trump White House, using a French businessman as an intermediary, brokered a business meeting between Pecker and the Saudi crown prince.
But Donald Trump wasn’t the only figure on whose behalf AMI was working. AMI was performing the same services for Weinstein that it had for Trump, forging a close working relationship between the tabloid empire and the Hollywood mogul. When McGowan’s claim began to get some traction and prompted speculation about the identity of her rapist, AMI went into full attack mode as part of a preemptive defense of Weinstein, with the editor-in-chief of the Enquirer declaring to his staff, “I want dirt on that bitch.”
During 2016, Farrow had been working on a series of news segments called The Dark Side of Hollywood, which were meant to air on the Today show. This was meant to be a wide-ranging exploration of Hollywood scandals, covering everything from racial bias in casting decisions to rigged campaigns for the Academy Awards. It wasn’t intended to be specifically about sexual harassment. But in January 2017, Noah Oppenheim, producer for Today and soon to be the president of NBCNews (and, thus, Farrow’s boss) suggested that Farrow talk to Rose McGowan about her allegation, believing that there might be a potential bombshell story behind her tweet (Oppenheim did not know that Harvey Weinstein was McGowan’s rapist at this time).
Farrow was intrigued by the idea of doing investigative reporting into the widely alleged show business practice of the “casting couch,” wherein aspiring female stars perform sexual favors for producers and directors, in exchange for being cast in films and TV shows. The McGowan accusation seemed like a good angle to approach this story, so Farrow dove in.
But as Farrow began outreach to sources, he found that he was having trouble getting people to go on record about the things they’d seen, heard, and experienced—although Weinstein’s name kept popping up in these conversations. Farrow got the sense that potential sources were either being intimidated against speaking out or were choosing to keep silent out of fear for their careers or their reputations.
That changed when he made contact with McGowan in February 2017. In their phone call, the actress was direct, pointed, and specific in naming Harvey Weinstein as the man who had sexually assaulted her. In a subsequent meeting with Farrow, McGowan detailed exactly what transpired between her and Weinstein.
During the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, McGowan had a meeting with Weinstein that had initially been scheduled at a restaurant. In what Farrow would later learn was his modus operandi for committing sexual assault, the location of the meeting was abruptly changed from the restaurant to Weinstein’s hotel suite. It was at this meeting (which McGowan quickly realized was not a professional meeting at all) that Weinstein raped her.
Disturbingly, when McGowan shared her story with a criminal attorney, she was told that she was not a credible accuser because she had done sex scenes in her film work. McGowan was advised not to press charges. This attorney instead brokered a deal with Weinstein whereby the actress was paid $100,000 in exchange for signing an NDA which forbade her to talk about her ordeal and which prohibited her from ever suing him. If she were to speak about her experience and violate this NDA, McGowan would open herself up to a financially ruinous breach of contract lawsuit from Weinstein.
(Shortform note: In the wake of the Weinstein scandal and other #MeToo scandals in which abusers used NDAs to silence their victims, several jurisdictions are seeking to curtail the practice. As of 2019, in New York, NDAs are only legal if they come at the request of the victim; in September 2018, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that prohibits nondisclosure provisions in cases involving sexual assault.)
Like the ruse he used to lure McGowan into his hotel room, the under-the-table payment and gag order was a tried-and-true Weinstein tactic, a standard part of his decades of sexual predation.
After sharing her story with Farrow, however, McGowan was still unsure about going on camera to name him—she had tried to go public with this story before, she claimed, but the media had refused to take her claims seriously. She also knew that Weinstein had the power to retaliate. In fact, she believed that he already had retaliated against her, using his vast influence to derail her once-promising acting career and blackball her from mainstream Hollywood productions. Farrow also knew that NBC’s legal team would have to vet the story and give final approval before it went to air, as McGowan would be violating her NDA by naming Weinstein on camera.
But McGowan was willing to consider taking that chance. Why? Because she was talking to Ronan Farrow. And Ronan Farrow had his own unique history that made him someone whom McGowan felt she could finally trust with her story. He could report on a story about sexual assault because he had lived one.
Ronan Farrow is the son of famed Hollywood couple Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Woody Allen’s daughter (Ronan Farrow’s sister) Dylan had accused their father of molesting her in 1992, when she was seven years old. By the time he began speaking to McGowan, Ronan Farrow had long been estranged from Allen, largely out of solidarity with his sister, whose claims against their father he fully believed.
About a year before Farrow’s call with McGowan, the Hollywood Reporter had published a profile on his father, celebrating his career as a director and actor, while hardly mentioning the extremely troubling and highly credible accusations of sexual abuse levelled against him by his daughter. In response, Farrow employed his journalistic skills to bring the charges against his father fully into the light, combing through court records and any other documentation he could find. He had also interviewed Dylan herself about her experiences.
The final product of this work was a guest column published in the very same Hollywood Reporter in May 2016, in which Farrow characterized his sister’s accusation as the kind of credible allegation of sexual abuse that often goes unreported in major entertainment industry trade publications. He detailed the specific nature of Allen’s abuse of his sister, as well as the director’s attempts to disrupt the investigation in the early 1990s through the use of private investigators whom he hired to dig up dirt on law enforcement officers assigned to the case.
This was the world from which Ronan Farrow had come and the set of experiences he had lived. And it’s what made him a uniquely credible party to whom McGowan and other survivors of sexual assault could reveal their own stories.
Farrow’s investigative journalism wound on. He spoke to a man named David Rice, who had worked for Weinstein as vice president of marketing for Miramax in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rice told Farrow that the company had set aside a pool of hush money that was to be used to pay off women to prevent them from going public with their accusations against Weinstein. Rice also attested that he had personally witnessed Weinstein inappropriately touching women throughout his time at Miramax and knew that Weinstein had engaged in retaliatory actions against women he had abused. He said this was standard behavior on Weinstein’s part, and that knowledge of it was widespread throughout the company and the broader film industry.
A producer who had worked with Weinstein, named Dede Nickerson, admitted to Farrow that she had signed an NDA which forbade her from going public with what she had seen, but she labelled Weinstein as a serial predator who was unable to stop himself. Moreover, she claimed that the Weinstein Company had people on the company payroll with nominal jobs, but whose real functions were to act as pimps for their boss. Complicity in his abuse was deeply embedded in the corporate culture. Farrow uncovered more and more of these accounts as he spoke to more people who had worked with Weinstein or knew those who had.
After hearing from McGowan in February, Farrow was on a mission. He realized that the Weinstein story was explosive—a Hollywood mogul who operated openly as a sexual predator and whose crimes were widely known and sanctioned by seemingly everyone in the entertainment industry.
He was chasing leads, talking to people throughout the film world who knew Weinstein or had worked with him. The stories were always the same: Weinstein committing sexual assault against women and then using his money and power to bully them into silence. Yet almost no one was willing to go on record and use Weinstein’s name in a published piece of reporting. His stranglehold seemed unbreakable.
Several names kept popping up during the course of his conversations with sources, including actresses Rosanna Arquette and Annabella Sciorra. But Farrow was particularly interested in the only Weinstein assault survivor whose account had actually made it into the legal system: Ambra Battilana Gutierrez.
In 2015, Gutierrez had filed a report with the New York City Police Department against Weinstein, claiming that he had groped her at his Tribeca hotel. This had resulted in Weinstein being brought in for questioning by the detectives, but nothing ever came of the incident. He was never charged, and story, strangely, received almost no press coverage. Knowing that he would need testimony in addition to McGowan’s for the story, Farrow set out to talk to Gutierrez.
He met with her in New York, where she described what had happened between her and Weinstein. Gutierrez was an Italian model who had been invited to see the New York Spring Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, a show produced by Weinstein. At a reception after the show, Weinstein asked to meet with her, claiming that Gutierrez looked like actress Mila Kunis and that he wanted to discuss next steps in her career.
When she arrived at his Tribeca office the next morning, Weinstein leered at her body, asking if her breasts were real. He then proceeded to grope her breasts and tried to force his hand up her skirt—behavior which Gutierrez made abundantly clear to Weinstein was unwanted. After she protested, he backed off, but insisted that Gutierrez meet him at the bar at his hotel the next evening.
Traumatized by her experience at Weinstein’s office, Gutierrez went to the police and told them what Weinstein had attempted to do. Officers from the NYPD’s Special Victims Division came up with a plan for Gutierrez to meet with Weinstein that evening, wearing a recording device that she could use to extract a confession from him. She was frightened, but determined. She knew that going after Weinstein could mean the end of her career, but she was willing to take that risk if it meant stopping him from committing more sexual assaults.
When she met with Weinstein the next night at the hotel bar, he suddenly insisted that they go to his penthouse suite (another echo of his operating procedure with McGowan nearly two decades before). Although she was wearing a recording device and there were undercover agents posted at the hotel, she was terrified at the thought of going up to the suite alone with him.
On the elevator ride up, however, she extracted a confession from him. As she protested going up to the room, she demanded to know why he had groped her the day before. His response, caught on tape, was, “Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in. I’m used to that. Come on. Please.” With these few words, Weinstein had admitted that he’d assaulted Gutierrez the day before, and that it was part of a longstanding pattern of abuse of women—“I’m used to that.”
After this admission from Weinstein, Gutierrez managed to extricate herself from going up to his suite. When they arrived back in the lobby, the undercover officers (who had been listening to the whole exchange) insisted that Weinstein accompany them back to the police station for questioning, although he was not formally charged.
What he had admitted to on tape was punishable by up to three months in jail. With the audio recording, it seemed like an open-and-shut case for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. But it wasn’t. When Gutierrez was questioned by the Sex Crimes Unit of the DA’s office, they seemed more interested in her personal sexual history and career as a lingerie model than they were about the incident with Weinstein.
This was similar to the response McGowan had faced, when she was told that she would be unsuccessful bringing criminal charges against Weinstein because of work she had done in her acting career. Two weeks later, the Manhattan DA (notably, a recipient of campaign money from David Boies, a key member of Weinstein’s legal team) announced that he would not be bringing charges against Weinstein.
While the legal case evaporated, the tabloids began running with salacious and untrue stories about Gutierrez: that she had a promiscuous sex life (as if that were somehow relevant), that she had been the mistress of disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi, and even that she had once been a prostitute. These magazines—the Enquirer chief among them—were waging a full-on smear campaign against Gutierrez. Meanwhile, coverage of the Weinstein incident itself simply dried up. The much-feared Weinstein PR machine had gone into full gear.
Just a few weeks later, the seriously intimidated and frightened Gutierrez joined the ranks of women who signed NDAs following an assault at the hands of Weinstein. In exchange for a $1 million payment, she was prohibited from speaking about what happened to her as well as her attempt to bring him to justice. She was also ordered to hand over to Weinstein’s attorneys all copies of the audio recording from the attempted sting operation, who would then destroy them.
Luckily for Farrow, Gutierrez did not fully comply with the demand that she hand over all copies of the audio in which Weinstein admitted to groping her. She had wanted to preserve some record of her ordeal. Before handing over the audio to Weinstein’s legal team, she emailed the file to herself at a throwaway email account, then cleared her sent folder. She then downloaded the file onto an old laptop that the attorneys never found, before deactivating the throwaway email account as well. Through this resourceful maneuvering, she had kept the record of her story alive.
When she told Farrow about the existence of this audio, he was cautious. His bosses at NBC News warned him that he could land the network (and himself) in legal trouble if Gutierrez transferred the file to him, as he would be encouraging her to illegally violate the NDA she had signed.
But Gutierrez and Farrow found a way around this roadblock. She played him the recording from the old laptop, which he then recorded on his own phone. This technically did not violate the NDA, because no files were transferred. It wasn’t the same recording that Gutierrez had been ordered to destroy—it was a recording of that recording, which made it an entirely new piece of intellectual property, one that was not covered by the NDA. Farrow now had concrete and undeniable proof of Weinstein’s predatory behavior.
But Weinstein wouldn’t go down that easily. He had vast wealth, power, and influence that he could bring to bear to stop any attempt to expose his crimes. As Farrow would learn, Weinstein was fully prepared to fight back—by any means necessary.
Harvey Weinstein had vast connections throughout the world of media and entertainment that he could use to snuff out any negative story. He was often boastful about his ability to stamp out damaging press coverage and shape the news cycle with a few well-placed phone calls to his contacts. He had at his disposal a powerful and well-oiled intelligence-gathering operation that would tell him which sources were talking to which reporters and which news organizations were working on stories about him. Through his network of attorneys, PR officers, agents, producers, and even hired spies, Weinstein had, for decades, successfully strangled all attempts to bring his misconduct to light.
NBC News was hardly immune to this pressure campaign. Very early on in Farrow’s investigation, Weinstein’s contacts at the network had informed him that Farrow was working on a story and even identified his sources. In October 2016, he had engaged the services of Israeli private security firm Black Cube—founded and run by former agents of the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence service. Under contract for Weinstein, they would later be tasked with surveilling Farrow and tracking his cell phone. The purpose of this espionage was to find any possible dirt on the journalist that could be used to blackmail him and discredit his story. Farrow also received cryptic death threats through text messages to his personal phone. It was all part of the Weinstein strategy of intimidation, blackmail, and deception.
And, indeed, the deception was all-encompassing. Early in his process of investigating the story, for example, Farrow reached out to the attorney Lisa Bloom. Bloom was a powerful attorney who was well-known for defending survivors of sexual assault and, crucially, had been a vocal defender of Farrow’s sister Dylan when the latter accused her father of molestation. Bloom was, to Farrow, a close friend.
But even she could not be trusted—for Bloom, too, was on the Weinstein payroll. Bloom was advising the serial rapist on the best tactics to use to smear and discredit his accusers, while publicly presenting herself as a champion and defender of women. In a chilling display of treachery, she used her relationship with Farrow to try and get him to kill his own story, on behalf of her true client, Harvey Weinstein.
Black Cube also used double agents to infiltrate Farrow’s sources, forging friendships with these women by posing as journalists, activists, or philanthropists who were ostensibly interested in their experiences as survivors of sexual assault. One spy, using the alias Diana Filip, claimed to be a representative from a financial services company called Reuben Capital Partners (which did not exist). In this capacity, she targeted Rose McGowan and befriended the actress, telling McGowan that her firm was interested in honoring her for her advocacy work. Through this “friendship,” McGowan unwittingly revealed crucial information about her sexual assault and Farrow’s story to a hired agent of Weinstein.
Weinstein was also able to exert significant pressure at NBC, through his connections with Noah Oppenheim, president of NBC News; Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC; and Andy Lack, chairman of NBC News and MSNBC. These were the three most senior figures at NBC News and had the power to stop any story dead in its tracks, and Weinstein had easy and regular contact with all of them. In fact, Weinstein’s brusque demands to his assistants to, “Get me Phil, get me Andy, get me Noah” were so common that the assistants began to dub them “the triumvirate.”
After securing the Gutierrez audio, Farrow and his producer, Rich McHugh, thought they had the smoking gun on Weinstein. Backed by the interviews they had already done with dozens of Weinstein associates and McGowan’s story, the facts of Weinstein’s behavior over the years were beyond any reasonable doubt. It was a thoroughly corroborated, well-researched, bombshell story about a public figure. It easily met the standards of both credibility and newsworthiness.
But, from the outset, Farrow encountered a strange reluctance on the part of his bosses to explore the story. Although they hadn’t known that Weinstein was McGowan’s rapist when they suggested Farrow investigate her accusatory tweet, they had a very different attitude now that they did know. They demanded evidence well above and beyond the standard that would have typically been applied for such a news story. They cast doubt on the credibility of Farrow’s sources, particularly McGowan. Even when he played the audio of Weinstein admitting to a pattern of sexual assault, Oppenheim hedged and split hairs, asking, “What does this really prove?”
The president of NBC News also repeatedly questioned the newsworthiness of the story, even going so far as to argue (absurdly) that Weinstein was an obscure figure who most Today viewers had barely heard of. Oppenheim even argued that Farrow had a personal vendetta against Weinstein because the latter had worked with Farrow’s estranged father (a ridiculous claim, as Weinstein had worked with nearly everyone in Hollywood). He claimed that Farrow was acting more as a crusader against sexual abuse than an objective reporter.
Farrow and McHugh were ordered several times to halt their investigation, with the justifications for the order always changing, from fact-checking concerns, to a need to run the story by the NBC legal team. Approvals that would normally have come from within NBC News were suddenly being kicked upstairs to NBC corporate and even to the network’s parent company, Comcast. This was all highly unusual, especially for a story with as much solid evidence as Farrow’s. Unbeknownst to Farrow, Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, had already personally promised Weinstein that the story had been nixed.
Oppenheim also used dubious reasoning to question the legality of some of the reporting. He claimed that airing a news piece acknowledging the existence of the NDAs could put NBC in legal jeopardy. Farrow (who was also a lawyer) found this to be a weak argument: as a news organization, they aired stories from government and corporate whistleblowers all the time, sources who were almost certainly violating some sort of contract they had signed. By Oppenheim’s reasoning, most investigative journalism—most journalism, period—would be impossible.
As Farrow was assembling pieces of the story, he also knew that he needed Rose McGowan on video, describing her experiences and specifically naming Harvey Weinstein as her rapist. Although McGowan was reluctant to take the risk to go on camera, she agreed to book time to shoot the interview with Farrow in Los Angeles.
But before he set to fly out there, NBC ordered Farrow to put a “pause” on the story, while the news division sought approval from Comcast—NBC’s parent company. Weinstein had infiltrated the network through his contacts and was using his influence to get Farrow’s bosses to kill the story. The shoddy rationale they offered to Farrow was that shooting the McGowan interview would constitute tortious interference (encouraging McGowan to violate her NDA).
Again, this made no sense. If there was potential legal trouble for NBC with McGowan, the liability would be in airing her interview, not in merely shooting it. They could always decide to cut it before the package went to air. But NBC was insistent that the story come to a halt until these “issues” could be resolved.
To McGowan, the wavering, uncertainty, and delays on NBC’s part proved her fears correct: she wasn’t being taken seriously. Distraught, she cancelled the interview with Farrow and declared that she could not speak to him or appear in the segment. The damage had been done and NBC had killed a major part of its own story.
From Farrow’s point of view, the situation was absurd: he was sitting on a major story and his own news network was handicapping his efforts to bring it to light. He and McHugh decided to go against the wishes of their bosses, continuing to schedule further interviews with Weinstein’s accusers. Farrow was committed to the story and was willing to go rogue to see it through.
Think about how authority can turn to abuse.
Have you ever been in a professional setting where someone abused their authority over subordinates in some way? Describe the situation.
Why do you think this boss felt that they could get away with this?
In thinking about this situation, what do you think you would do in the future if you saw a boss abusing their authority this way?
While Farrow was fighting an uphill battle to get his story heard at his own network, he dutifully continued on, gathering more stories from women who had survived assaults from Weinstein. The stories had the same elements in common—promises from Weinstein to advance their careers and make them into stars; a “meeting” scheduled; the time and location of the “meeting” being changed at the last minute from a day meeting in a hotel lobby to a night meeting in a hotel suite; and the violent assault that would follow when he lured his victims into his private room. The common threads running through each of these stories lent credibility to all of them. It was clearly a pattern of practiced, rehearsed predation.
Weinstein was brazen in his conduct, with his predation an open secret. Many employees were complicit in Weinstein’s crimes, helping him procure victims and arranging his liaisons with them, knowing full well what their boss’ intentions were. The abuse was systematic and routine—trusted assistants were even made to keep track of all the women Weinstein had assaulted.
Farrow was getting valuable information from Ken Auletta, an older journalist who had come close to breaking the Weinstein sexual abuse story for The New Yorker in 2002. At the time, Auletta had uncovered some leads on Weinstein’s history as a sexual predator, but had never gotten enough people willing to go on record for him to be able to publish the story. But Auletta believed what he’d heard about Weinstein to be true and wanted Farrow to finish what he had started 15 years before. It was through Auletta that Farrow made contact with a British woman named Zelda Perkins, who had worked as an assistant for Weinstein in London in the late 1990s.
Perkins told Farrow that Weinstein’s problematic behavior was clear from the start. She said that Weinstein would often appear naked around her and would try to pull her into bed when he summoned her for meetings at his hotel. Perkins was also wracked with guilt over her own complicity in Weinstein’s crimes, claiming that she enabled his abuse of other women by acting as a “honeypot”—luring women into her boss’ private quarters for liaisons which she knew would result in non-consensual sexual contact.
In 1998, Perkins hired an assistant of her own. She warned the female applicants about Weinstein’s behavior and even rejected candidates that she deemed to be too attractive, in the hopes of minimizing the likelihood of abuse. She ultimately hired Rowena Chiu, a young graduate from the University of Oxford.
In September 1998, a tearful and shaken Chiu told Perkins that Weinstein had attempted to rape her in his hotel room at the Hotel Excelsior in Venice. Believing her employee, Perkins immediately confronted Weinstein, who furiously denied any wrongdoing. Outraged, Perkins and Chiu resigned from Miramax and notified their now-former employers that they would be pursuing legal action against Weinstein and the company.
The London-based attorneys hired by the two women, however, strongly advised their clients against bringing the matter to court and instead urged them to reach a settlement out of court. In the end, Perkins and Chiu agreed to accept a payment of £250,000, split between the two (“blood money,” as Perkins later characterized it) in exchange for signing an NDA which forbade the two from ever going public with their experiences.
Once again defying the orders of his bosses at NBC, Farrow flew out to Los Angeles in spring 2017 to interview Ally Canosa, a woman who had worked for Weinstein since 2010 and claimed that she had been repeatedly sexually abused by him since then.
While working as an event planner and aspiring to become a producer, she met Weinstein during an event she had planned for his distribution company. He handed her his business card and insisted they meet. Although she found him “creepy,” she eventually relented and agreed to meet at a hotel, ostensibly to discuss planning another event. As with other Weinstein assaults, the location of the meeting was suddenly changed to his hotel suite. He tried to initiate sex with her there, but she refused and left. Still unwilling to reject him outright (out of fear for her career) she met him for dinner shortly after. Outside the restaurant, Weinstein grabbed her by the arm, pressed her against the railing, and kissed her against her will.
He apologized and told her that he wanted to help her in her fledgling career as a producer. Still dazzled by the idea of making it in Hollywood, she agreed to come work for Weinstein. It would be a fateful decision. One night when she was in his hotel room (to which she had been frequently summoned) he advanced on her. When she initially rebuffed him, he became aggressive and menacing, telling her, “Don’t be a fucking idiot.” He then pushed her onto the bed and raped her.
The abuse became regular, with Weinstein reacting furiously if she ever denied his sexual demands. His assistants were fully knowledgeable and complicit in his abuse of her, frequently bombarding her with texts declaring, “Harvey wants to see you.”
Although intimidated and fearful of retaliation, Canosa was determined to see justice done and to stand, as she said, “on the right side of history,” someone who didn’t stay silent and helped to stop a serial predator. She agreed to go on camera for the interview. Another domino had fallen for Harvey Weinstein.
After Oppenheim had ordered Farrow and Rich McHugh to cease all contact with sources and potential sources, the story was effectively killed at NBC. But Farrow refused to let it die. So many women had risked so much to share their experiences. This had to come out. If NBC wasn’t going to run with it, Farrow needed to take it somewhere that would. In summer 2017, his mentor throughout the Weinstein story, journalist Ken Auletta (who had nearly cracked the Weinstein case himself back in 2002), brokered a meeting between Farrow and David Remnick of the print magazine The New Yorker.
Remnick was floored when he was presented with the mass of evidence Farrow had against Weinstein: allegations from five women about multiple acts of sexual harassment and abuse, the Gutierrez recording, and corroboration from 16 current and former executives and assistants.
He was even more astounded and outraged to learn that NBC was refusing to air the story or let Farrow speak to more sources. Remnick told Farrow that if NBC was unwilling to air the story, The New Yorker would. He told Farrow to continue his reporting and keep the magazine fully apprised of any new developments. When Farrow warned New Yorker senior editor Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn about the potential legal risks of the story, he received the affirmation that he never got from his bosses at NBC: “I don’t know the specific legal risks here. But I don’t think you should cancel things. And you never stop reporting.”
The team at the magazine subjected Farrow’s story to a thorough grilling and fact-checking. Unlike NBC, they believed in the story and wanted to run with it, but they needed to make sure the facts were in order before they faced the inevitable legal retaliation from Weinstein.
By this time, NBC was dismayed and angry at Farrow’s refusal to comply with the order to cease reporting. Little did Farrow know that members of Weinstein’s legal team had already been in touch with Susan Weiner, general counsel for NBCUniversal. Weiner had assured Weinstein’s team that the story was dead once and for all and that Farrow was no longer with NBC News. In September 2017, Farrow sat down for a meeting with Oppenheim, where his boss told him that there was no longer room in the budget for him. It was official: Farrow had been fired.
Even more distressingly, Weiner threatened that NBC would publicly disclose that Farrow’s contract had been terminated with the network. This, of course, would damage his credibility with past and future sources while he worked on the story for The New Yorker. Not only was NBC killing his story, they were trying to indirectly damage it at other news outlets as well. In their threats, NBC had taken a page directly out of the Harvey Weinstein playbook.
Meanwhile, Weinstein was ecstatic over the news. Employees later claimed that he paraded around his offices, jubilantly and triumphantly declaring that, “I got them to kill this fucking story!”
Although Weinstein was delighted by NBC’s utter capitulation, he was keenly aware that Farrow’s reporting still existed and could be dusted off and revived at any time by future reporters. He was determined to make sure that all evidence of the story was destroyed root-and-branch.
Accordingly, litigation counsel for the Weinstein Company sent a letter to CAA (the agency representing Farrow), making several extraordinary demands. Among other things, the letter demanded that Farrow hand over all his notes and recordings to NBC, that he surrender the names and contact information of any other news outlets he might be working with, and that he provide written assurance that the reporting had been terminated. The letter also threatened him with a multi-million dollar lawsuit should he publish anything about the Weinstein Company or its employees.
Legal counsel at The New Yorker thought the letter was ridiculous and its legal arguments thin, at best. They were blown away by the sheer audacity of many of the claims it made and urged Farrow to plow ahead with his reporting. So, with the magazine backing him up, he continued to plug away at the story.
In September, Farrow made contact with actress Mira Sorvino. Like McGowan, she had been a rising film star in the 1990s, only to see her career suddenly and curiously derailed. Her history with Weinstein explained why.
In 1995, while she was in Toronto promoting a film distributed by Weinstein, Sorvino found herself alone in a hotel room with Weinstein. He made a move on her, massaging her shoulders and chasing her around the room trying to kiss her. On another occasion a few weeks later, he suddenly showed up at her New York apartment in the middle of the night. He only backed off when Sorvino told him that her boyfriend was on his way. She knew that her career had paid a hefty price for rejecting him—her part in the smash hit Lord of the Rings trilogy was later snatched away after Miramax placed a call to the director, telling him that Sorvino was difficult to work with.
Shortly after contacting Sorvino, Farrow got in touch with the actress Rosanna Arquette. She told him that in the early 1990s, Weinstein had summoned her up to his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When she arrived, he was wearing nothing but a bathrobe and insisted that she give him a massage. When she refused, he violently grabbed her hand and placed it toward his exposed and erect penis. Terrified, she ran out of the room and told Weinstein, “I’ll never be that girl.” It fit the pattern of the other Weinstein assaults: an ostensible business meeting, a sudden change of venue to an upstairs hotel suite, request for a massage, and sexual assault.
Farrow then spoke to Italian actress Asia Argento. She shared that, in 1997, the head of Miramax Italy had brokered what she thought was going to be a professional meeting with Weinstein. She didn’t know that “head of Miramax Italy” really meant “pimp” in Weinstein’s world. The meeting was no meeting at all, but instead, a liaison with Weinstein at his hotel room.
When Argento got to the room, Weinstein demanded a massage from her, to which she reluctantly agreed. He then pulled her skirt up and forcibly performed oral sex on her while she told him to stop, with the assault only ending when she feigned orgasm. But the sexual abuse continued for years thereafter, as Weinstein exploited the power dynamic between himself (a powerful Hollywood producer) and Argento (an actress who relied on kingpins like Weinstein for acting jobs). She also agreed to go on the record with Farrow.
Argento pointed to yet another woman who had been assaulted by Weinstein, the French actress Emma de Caunes. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, Weinstein convinced de Caunes to accompany him to his hotel room to retrieve a book that he claimed to want to adapt into a film starring her. When they arrived, he went into the bathroom and left the door open while he took a shower. He then emerged, naked and erect. De Caunes fled, petrified and outraged.
One final source who came to Farrow was a marketing consultant named Lucia Evans, who had met Weinstein in 2004 at a Manhattan club. He lured her to his offices with promises of casting her on Project Runway, a show he helped produce. At the office, he sexually assaulted her, taking his penis out, pushing her head down, and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. Evans noted to Farrow that the whole ordeal had a routine and streamlined quality to it, as though he’d done it countless times before.
One former employee who’d documented Weinstein’s pattern of verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse put it succinctly, declaring, “I am a 28-year-old woman trying to make a living and a career. 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.”
By early fall 2017, Farrow had also become aware that the New York Times was also working on a story about Weinstein. After all the work he’d put in, there was now a real danger that his story would be scooped by another outlet. Two respected investigative reporters, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, were on the case for the Times and had been in contact with some of the same sources as Farrow.
Although Farrow was happy that the story now seemed certain to go public (and that the Times would draw some of the backlash from Weinstein), he did not want to see his own efforts go to waste. In late September, Farrow learned that Twohey and Kantor had filed their report and that it was set to go online. The race was now on at The New Yorker to finalize their story and get it out as soon as possible. The team at the magazine began fact-checking and drafting the piece at a furious pace, pulling gruelling hours as they checked and re-checked every source.
Weinstein’s legal team (including the “feminist” attorney and onetime Farrow confidante Lisa Bloom) now directed its threats at The New Yorker. In a letter to the magazine, the attorneys derided its reporting as “defamatory,” demanded that The New Yorker refrain from publishing the story, and further ordered that they hand over to the Weinstein Company all statements that Farrow had collected from the company’s employees. They were, essentially, demanding that The New Yorker betray its sources and open up employees at the Weinstein Company to retaliation.
The letter further went on to impugn Farrow himself, arguing that he harbored personal animus toward Weinstein over the latter’s relationship with Woody Allen (to whom Weinstein had placed a personal phone call, asking Allen to provide dirt on his own son). Even more ludicrously, the letter claimed that Farrow could not be trusted to report on matters of sexual abuse because Farrow’s maternal uncle had been convicted of sexually abusing two boys. They argued that, because Farrow had not publicly denounced this member of his family, he was not credible as a journalist.
The letter was making astounding claims: that any negative reporting on Weinstein constituted defamation and that any reporting that used NDAs as a source was illegal. The team at The New Yorker was aghast at the tone and over-the-top legal threats contained in this communication from Weinstein’s counsel. David Remnick told Farrow, “This is the most disgusting letter I’ve ever gotten about a story.” He further made it clear that the magazine would legally defend Farrow against any actions taken by Weinstein.
That very same afternoon, the rival Times piece, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades,” went live. Farrow and the team at The New Yorker were relieved. While the Times article went into detail about unwanted advances on Weinstein’s part towards women throughout his career (including an account from actress Ashley Judd in which she called out Weinstein by name) it was far short of what Farrow had uncovered. There were no allegations of rape or assault. The Times had let Weinstein off relatively easy.
(Shortform note: Kantor and Twohey have since released their own memoir of their experience in breaking the Weinstein story, called She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. Twohey, Kantor, and Farrow ultimately shared a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Weinstein.)
The story was weak enough that Lisa Bloom, now showing her true colors as a public and full-fledged Weinstein defender, was able to spin it away with a canned statement characterizing the allegations as, at worst, mild indiscretions. In her statement, Bloom wrote that Weinstein was an “old dinosaur learning new ways,” whose inappropriate actions stemmed more from his innocent misunderstanding of changing social and workplace norms than from any underlying predatory intent. According to Bloom, it was all an innocent misunderstanding.
Although the Times story was hardly as powerful as it might have been, it was enough to get CBS News and ABC News to cover the Weinstein scandal on their evening news programs that night. Among the major television networks, there was only one that didn’t cover Weinstein that first evening—NBC. Even NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which had eagerly done material on the abuse allegations against Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, had nothing to say about Weinstein.
But to Farrow, the point was clear. The Times had taken the first shot—and missed. It was all systems go for his story.
Think about why it’s so hard for victims to receive justice.
Have you ever not been believed about some wrongdoing that you either experienced or witnessed? Describe what happened.
Why do you think people were unwilling to believe your story?
What do you think we as a society can do to make it easier for people who have experienced abuse or discrimination to come forward?
As the draft took shape in late September and early October, there were ongoing disputes among members of the editorial staff at The New Yorker. Some argued that to use the word “rape” would be taking the description of Weinstein’s behavior too far, but in the end, the word stayed in—to do otherwise would have been to sanitize or whitewash the gravity of his crimes.
There was one final piece that was needed before the story could be finalized: a response statement from the Weinstein Company. On October 5, Farrow called them for comment. To his astonishment, the front desk assistant put Farrow through to Weinstein himself. Weinstein was wildly emotional on the phone, combatively and furiously ranting at Farrow that there was nothing to any of the allegations, and mocking and sneering at him for having been fired by NBC.
In subsequent, clarifying conversations with Farrow, Weinstein changed his tone. Although he would still threaten to sue Farrow and destroy his reputation, he would also be alternately charming, funny, even conciliatory. Farrow got the sense that Weinstein felt trapped, that he knew the battle was lost and was only trying to contain the damage. He also inadvertently let slip key information that Farrow hadn’t uncovered, like when he tried to explain away a sexual abuse allegation that the original reporting had missed. When these incidents happened, Weinstein’s handlers would desperately hang up the phone, claiming that they’d lost the connection.
At one point, Weinstein expressed his belief that a sexual encounter couldn’t be rape if the woman had consensual sex with him on subsequent occasions. This was wildly at odds with the true nature of how sexual abuse works, especially when it happens in the context of a workplace and a boss/subordinate relationship. The victim will often feel the need to submit to the abuse, or else face job termination or career sabotage.
In the end, Weinstein and his team went with a blanket denial of all “non-consensual sex.” He didn’t deny outright that he’d had sexual encounters with women who had worked for him, but he asserted instead that these liaisons had been fully consensual.
On October 10, 2017, Ronan Farrow’s piece, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories,” appeared in The New Yorker. It proved to be a bombshell: within hours of the story going live, Farrow had texts and emails from countless strangers, sharing their own stories of sexual abuse at the hands of figures in government, media, business, and law. Farrow had broken open the dam on an ugly aspect of American life that extended to the highest levels of power.
After the publication of the piece, the actress Anabella Sciorra reached out to Farrow to share her own story of abuse by Weinstein. She told him that, one night in the early 1990s, he had barged into her hotel room, shoved her onto the bed, pinned her down, and violently raped her. This pattern of abuse continued for years. Like McGowan and Sorvino, Sciorra was certain that Weinstein had worked behind the scenes to sabotage her once-prominent career in the years following the assault.
Overnight, Farrow went from being the guy who NBC unceremoniously tossed out to the journalist everyone wanted to book on their show—including his former employers at NBC. At the same time, the network was petrified at the idea of the public becoming aware of their own complicity in covering up the Weinstein story. After all, the publication of such a groundbreaking piece in The New Yorker by someone who had so recently been under contract with NBC raised the question, “Why didn’t NBC run with this?”
Pretty soon, media personalities like Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow were asking the same question. NBC’s public explanation was that, at the time Farrow was working on the story for them, it hadn’t been fully fleshed out and did not meet their journalistic standards to go live. This was, of course, patently absurd. Farrow had on-the-record statements from dozens of Weinstein employees as well as victims, not to mention the Gutierrez recording—all of which he had shown to Noah Oppenheim and Andy Lack.
On an appearance on Maddow’s show, Farrow revealed the truth: that the Weinstein story had been reportable by the time he brought it to NBC and that the network had buried it for other reasons. He had not only exposed the truth about Weinstein, he had exposed his own network’s lies in their efforts to cover it up.
After the Weinstein story broke, Farrow also became aware of just how deep and extensive the surveillance effort against him and his sources had been. He began receiving cryptic emails from a burner email account called “Sleeper1973” (a winking reference to the 1973 Woody Allen film Sleeper). This source was actually a female Black Cube operative who was morally outraged by the work her firm had done to help Weinstein smear his accusers.
She revealed to Farrow the terms of the contract Weinstein had signed with the Israeli private investigative firm. Black Cube had put its army of analysts, social media engineers, and double agents to work on behalf of Harvey Weinstein. The full range of Black Cube’s activities made it clear that the company flouted international privacy and data laws.
Sleeper1973 revealed the true identities of the double agents, like Diana Filip, who had targeted and infiltrated key Farrow sources, like Rose McGowan. Filip, who told McGowan she worked for a financial institution called Reuben Capital Partners, was actually a hired Black Cube double agent. Her real name was Stella Penn Pechanac, and she’d grown up in war-torn Bosnia during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. After failing to make it as an actress, Pechanac was drawn to the world of espionage because it allowed her to dress up and assume a fake identity—as close to her dream of acting as she was going to get.
Beyond Black Cube, Weinstein had, in fact, hired multiple private investigative and surveillance agencies to harass and collect information on his accusers. After the story broke, these firms began leaking to Farrow about each other’s espionage activities, in an attempt to deflect public outcry onto their competitors. The leaks showed the extent of information Weinstein had on his victims: photos of himself and his accusers together in public after the alleged assaults (which, he believed, would disprove the notion that he had assaulted them); psychological dossiers on the women, including McGowan; and files on the sexual histories of his victims. This was all material that Weinstein believed he could use to smear and blackmail his accusers.
The Black Cube exposé itself led to another New Yorker piece for Farrow, in which he detailed how enmeshed Weinstein was in the shadowy world of private surveillance. Never before had the public see the extent to which wealthy private individuals could intimidate and surveil journalists.
The Weinstein smear campaign extended beyond the world of international spies to include good old-fashioned muckraking tabloid journalism, courtesy of his allies at the National Enquirer (whose parent company, AMl, had been doing “catch and kill” operations for years on behalf of Weinstein and Donald Trump). After Farrow’s New Yorker piece came out, the editor-in-chief of the Enquirer publicly vowed to his staff that he would “get” Farrow.
For a brief period in late 2017 and early 2018, Farrow was the scandal rag’s public enemy #1, with the Enquirer running cover stories about the journalist’s estranged uncle who’d been convicted of sex crimes—which, while true, had nothing to do with Farrow (it was also one of the absurd “discrediting” claims made against Farrow in the infamous letter from Weinstein’s counsel to The New Yorker). The Enquirer even surveilled Farrow’s fiancee, the former Obama and Hillary Clinton speechwriter Jon Lovett, in an effort to find dirt on the couple, although the contractor hired by the Enquirer ultimately gave up the effort upon discovering that Farrow and Lovett’s personal life was too mundane to provide adequate fodder for scandal.
After the Farrow and New York Times stories came out in fall 2017, the board of the Weinstein Company fired Weinstein and the company slid into bankruptcy.
But worse was to come for Weinstein. Dozens of women who hadn’t been identified in the two journalistic investigations came forward with their own stories of abuse. Eventually the number grew to 80. He wasn’t merely a boss with a poor understanding of workplace boundaries, as Lisa Bloom’s PR statement had tried to portray him. The weight of the testimony suggested that Weinstein was, in fact, a serial predator and rapist.
Eventually, the NYPD Cold Case Squad contacted Lucia Evans, the marketing consultant who had been assaulted by Weinstein in 2004. They told her that if she filed a complaint, she could help initiate a criminal investigation into the now-disgraced Hollywood producer, one that might send him to prison. Although Evans was fully aware of how harrowing it would be to serve as a witness in a rape trial, she chose to file the complaint. On May 25, 2018, Weinstein was booked in New York on charges of rape and a criminal sex act, being led to the police precinct in handcuffs. In addition, authorities in Los Angeles and London started building cases and he was facing an avalanche of civil claims against him.
(Shortform note: On February 24, 2020, a New York jury found Weinstein guilty of criminal sexual assault in the first degree and rape in the third degree. He was, however, acquitted on the more serious charges of predatory sexual assault and rape in the first degree. On March 11, 2020, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison for his two felony convictions. In his statement to the court, Weinstein expressed remorse for his actions, but also portrayed himself as the victim, comparing his situation to that of blacklisted Hollywood celebrities during the McCarthyite Red Scare of the 1950s. He said, “Dealing with the thousands of men and women who are losing due process, I'm worried about this country.”))
The Weinstein story set off a cascade of new allegations of sexual misconduct all across the worlds of media, politics, and business. This was the beginning of the #MeToo movement, with survivors of sexual assault making public their stories of abuse at the hands of powerful men—and of coverups by the companies they ran. NBC would soon have its own reckoning with #MeToo, perhaps shining some light on why the network had been so reluctant to run with Farrow’s story about Weinstein.
In late November 2017, Matt Lauer was promptly and unceremoniously fired from NBC. As one of the co-hosts of Today (where Farrow had initially attempted to run the Weinstein piece) and a major public face of the network, the move was a shock. Why were they giving one of their biggest stars the axe?
The network admitted that an unnamed employee at NBC had accused Lauer of sexual misconduct. But beyond this admission, the network was furiously spinning its wheels to sanitize the story. According to the party line that NBC began pushing in press releases and public statements, Lauer’s dismissal was about behavior on his part that violated NBC’s terms of employment. Yet they were vague on the specifics of what Lauer had been accused of. The truth about Lauer’s predatory history soon came out, as well as NBC’s complicity in covering it up.
Lauer had, in fact, cultivated a sexually demeaning and predatory environment at Today for years. Former female employees came forward with sexually aggressive emails Lauer had sent them, in which he advised them how to dress and told them how sexy they looked in certain outfits. Outtake videos emerged of him telling production assistants (and even his co-host, Meredith Vieira) to “bend over” so he could get a closer view. But this was hardly the worst of Lauer’s misconduct.
A woman named Brooke Nevils came forward to Farrow with her Lauer story. In 2014, Nevils had been working for Meredith Vieira, helping NBC cover the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. She, Lauer, and Vieira got drunk on vodka one evening at the Olympic Village. After Vieira retired to her room, Lauer unexpectedly summoned Nevils to his hotel room, on a loose professional pretext (similar to Weinstein’s modus operandi). Once Nevils arrived, Lauer aggressively kissed her, pushed her onto her stomach, and violently anally raped her. Afterwards, he warned Nevils not to say anything to Vieira. Lauer’s abuse of Nevils went on for months afterwards, during which he repeatedly propositioned her for and forced her into sex at NBC’s offices.
As the story came out, it was revealed that Nevils and dozens of other women had been reporting Lauer’s behavior to higher-ups at NBC for years. The network’s response was remarkably similar to that of the Weinstein Company: denials, threats, professional sabotage, and finally, the signing of non-disclosure agreements. Under the leadership of Oppenheim and Lack, NBC had presided over a toxic culture of abuse and cover-up. Women who came forward with accusations about Lauer were told to either keep quiet or face career sabotage.
Rich McHugh later told Farrow that he suspected the Weinstein Company, through its contacts, knew about Lauer and the toxic culture at NBC. Weinstein knew that he could use this knowledge as blackmail against NBC, to prevent the network from running stories about his own history of sexual assault. This begins to explain NBC’s refusal to air the Weinstein story. They didn’t want to expose a predator, because they were harboring one of their own.
The story of Weinstein’s decades of abuse can tell us a lot. We can look at it as a negative and dispiriting story, one in which a handful of high-status men—Harvey Weinstein chief among them—used their power, wealth, and influence to commit sexual assaults with impunity over a period of decades. We can also see it as a tale about the corruption of key institutions of American society, like the free press and law enforcement, that are supposed to promote the public good. And indeed, men like Weinstein, Trump, and Lauer do not operate in a vacuum: they are predators because they operate within a system and a culture which enables their predation.
But we can also see it as an uplifting story, in which a handful of brave women staged an act of rebellion and defiance against a criminal patriarchy, with the help of a journalist, Ronan Farrow, who wanted to tell their stories. Catch and Kill is ultimately not a story of exploitation: it is one of courage.
Explore the main takeaways from Catch and Kill.
Why do you think a powerful and wealthy sexual predator like Harvey Weinstein was able to get away with his crimes for so long?
Briefly summarize how powerful institutions like the media and the law enforcement community colluded with figures like Weinstein to help them get away with sexual misconduct.
What role do you think an independent press has to play in exposing stories of abuse by the wealthy and powerful?