4 The New York Review
The Good Guy
Anne Diebel
Catch and Kill:
Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy
to Protect Predators
by Ronan Farrow.
Little, Brown, 448 pp., $30.
In 1995 CBS lawyers ordered 60 Min-
utes not to broadcast an interview with
Jeffrey Wigand, a former vice president
of research and development for Brown
& Williamson Tobacco Corporation
(B&W). In the interview, Wigand as-
serted not only that B&W’s CEO lied
when he testified before Congress that
he did not believe nicotine was addic-
tive, but that the tobacco industry op-
erated by fine-tuning nicotine delivery
and was thoroughly aware of health
risks. The lawyers were concerned
that the network would be sued for
“tortious interference” for inducing
Wigand to break his confidentiality
agreement with his former employer.
Lowell Bergman, the producer who
had gotten Wigand to talk, was infuri-
ated by CBS’s capitulation and leaked
the story of the spiking to The New
York Times. Three months later, try-
ing to repair its reputation, and less
worried about litigation since Wigand’s
main allegations had been made public
by The Wall Street Journal, CBS aired
the original interview.
In August 2017 Ronan Farrow,
then an investigative correspondent at
NBC News, attended a meeting with
Kim Harris, the general counsel of
NBC Universal, regarding the status of
his story on sexual harassment and as-
sault by the renowned film producer
Harvey Weinstein. In the meeting,
Farrow writes in his book Catch and
Kill, Harris warned that the network
might be “open to a tortious interfer-
ence argument,” as several of Far-
row’s sources, including the actress
Rose McGowan and an Italian model
named Ambra Gutierrez, apparently
had breached their confidentiality
agreements by speaking to him. Far-
row was aghast at this warning. When
he told his partner, the podcast pro-
ducer and former Obama speechwriter
Jonathan Lovett, about the meeting,
Lovett carped, “Hasn’t anyone in this
company seen The Insider?,” referring
to the 1999 film about the CBS scandal.
Seven months earlier, Farrow and his
producer, Rich McHugh, had begun
researching a story about the modern
Hollywood casting couch. Noah Op-
penheim, the NBC executive in charge
of Tod ay and Farrow’s boss, suggested
looking at McGowan’s tweets about
being raped by an unnamed studio
head. Farrow was soon on the phone
with McGowan, who told him the rap-
ist was Weinstein. Over several months,
Farrow uncovered other accounts of
Weinstein’s preying on women who
met with him about work, as well as
on women employed by Miramax or,
later, the Weinstein Company; in many
of these cases, Weinstein had bought
the women’s silence. (McGowan later
discovered that her agreement did not
stipulate confidentiality.)
But NBC executives soon told Farrow
and McHugh to “pause” their report-
ing and cancel interviews with ad-
ditional accusers, and offered little
explanation. With the story all but
dead at NBC, Farrow took up Oppen-
heim’s earlier suggestion that he shop
the story to a print outlet. As he waited
for an official assignment, Farrow shot
an interview with Ally Canosa, a pro-
ducer who claimed Weinstein raped
her, on his own dime. Seven weeks later
his reporting was published in The New
Yorker, five days after Jodi Kantor and
Megan Twohey’s groundbreaking re-
port in The New York Times on other
allegations against Weinstein.
Catch and Kill is a dramatized ac-
count of Farrow’s reporting as it played
out at NBC and The New Yorker. The
reluctance of victims to talk, the ag-
gressive tactics used by Weinstein and
his team to thwart reporting, and stall-
ing by network executives are among
the obstacles Farrow encountered.
(The first two also come up in She
Said, Kantor and Twohey’s recent book
about breaking the Weinstein story.)
Parts of this story were told in Farrow’s
New Yorker articles on Weinstein and
his minions; the new material is mostly
related to what happened at NBC, a se-
ries of mystifying bureaucratic twists
recounted with the pique and satisfac-
tion of a former employee who’s gone
on to better things.Farrow writes that NBC pulled away
from his story in part because Wein-
stein threatened to expose Matt Lauer,
the network’s star anchor who would
soon be fired in his own sexual mis-
conduct scandal. Farrow suggests that
Weinstein acquired damaging informa-
tion about Lauer from Dylan Howard,
the editor of the National Enquirer,
and connects this to a larger practice in
which American Media Inc. (AMI), the
Enquirer’s parent company, “caught,”
and then either ran or “killed,” stories
at the behest of powerful men, includ-ing Weinstein and Donald Trump. The
book concludes with the sexual assault
allegation that prompted Lauer’s firing
in November 2017, and the revelation
that NBC had for years been paying
“enhanced severance” to women who
had complained, formally or infor-
mally, about harassment by men in its
upper ranks, including Lauer.
Farrow won a Pulitzer Prize for his
Weinstein stories and more acclaim,
subsequently, for reporting allegations
against other powerful men, including
former CBS CEO Leslie Moonves and
former New York attorney general Eric
Schneiderman. His vita, golden though
it is, did not foretell this outcome. Born
Satchel Ronan O’Sullivan Farrow in
1987 to Woody Allen and Mia Far-
row (who has suggested Frank Sinatra
was actually the biological father), he
was ambitious from an early age and,
as he says of Oppenheim, “enjoyed a
charmed ascent in each of his careers.”
After graduating from Bard College
at fifteen, he interned for the diplomat
Richard Holbrooke and became a UNI-
CEF spokesperson. He graduated from
Yale Law School at twenty-one and re-
turned to working in government, first
as a liaison to NGOs for Holbrooke in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then
as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton
when she was secretary of state.
In 2012 Farrow began studying in-
ternational development as a Rhodes
Scholar at Oxford, where he went on
to earn a doctorate while also writing
a nonacademic book on the decline of
American diplomacy. He started out in
journalism writing op-eds on foreign
policy, and in 2014 began anchoring
Ronan Farrow Daily, a midday news
show on MSNBC that was canceled
after a year. With three years left on
his NBC contract, he was switched to
general investigative work; Page Six re-ported that he could be seen sitting in a
cubicle in the newsroom background of
the show that replaced his. In his tell-
ing, he was uncertain about his profes-
sional future, and had no idea how big
the Weinstein story would be.
Farrow is playfully cagey about his
extraordinary access to Hollywood. As
an illustrious member of the Second
and Fourth Estates, Farrow could get
other famous people on the phone, in
spite of his being, in Megyn Kelly’s esti-
mation, “kind of a rookie reporter.” In
their book, Kantor and Twohey, both
accomplished journalists with years of
relevant experience—Kantor had writ-
ten about workplace discrimination
and Twohey about sex crimes—recount
the difficulty of getting through to the
big-name actresses who were integral
to the Weinstein story. Farrow already
knew McGowan, from a State Depart-
ment dinner at which they were seated
together because, he jokes, he “spoke
fluent actress.” Midway through his
investigation, he writes, “I canvassed
Hollywood for more leads.” To begin,
he rang up a chirpy Meryl Streep while
she was cooking for friends, and she
gasped at the notion that Weinstein,
who gave to “such good causes,” cou ld
be a monster. He then rang up Susan
Sarandon, who “gamely brainstormed
leads” and teased, “Oh, Ronan. You’re
gonna be in trouble.”
In She Said, Twohey recalls the ques-
tions she pondered at the outset of her
and Kantor’s investigation: Did a pro-
ducer propositioning women who were
not employees count as sexual harass-
ment? Were the unpleasant experiences
of movie stars an appropriate subject?
Wasn’t journalism meant to give voice
to the voiceless? Kantor dispelled these
doubts—sexual harassment is sexual
harassment, and if this is happening to
celebrities it’s happening everywhere—
and they pursued the story with a clear
sense of its worthiness.
Farrow, whose book does not touch
on such larger questions, professes a
more personal connection to the mate-
rial. He writes that he had spent much
of his life “trying to outrun” his sister
Dylan’s allegation that their father,
Allen, molested her when she was
seven. “I don’t see why you can’t just
move on,” he remembers saying to her
when she told the family she wanted to
revive the accusation. In 2016, The Hol-
lywood Reporter, which was facing crit-
icism over a positive profile of Allen,
asked Ronan to respond. He read the
old court records, concluded that his
sister’s claim was credible, and wrote
an op-ed for the Reporter arguing
that media silence around such allega-
tions was not just wrong but “danger-
ous.” When he began investigating the
claims against Weinstein, he thought
of his sister and even sought her advice
on how to talk to accusers. Weinstein
would later turn this family history into
a hammy line of attack: “You couldn’t
save someone you love, and now you
think you can save everyone,” he said
when Farrow called him for comment.NBC claims that Farrow’s report-
ing did not meet the network’s stan-
dards—in particular, that he hadn’tRonan Farrow