6 The New York Review
gotten any victims to speak on the re-
cord. Farrow passionately disputes this
claim, and is backed up by an account
that McHugh wrote for Va nity Fair.
Both point out that if NBC executives
truly were concerned about quality,
the proper response would have been
encouragement to keep going and
strengthen the material. The question,
then, is not whether the network should
have killed the story, but why it did.
In the drama of answering this ques-
tion, Farrow’s characters divide un-
mistakably into two groups. On the
side of good: Farrow, McHugh, the
accusers, miscellaneous celebrities
and journalists who provided leads,
everyone at The New Yorker, and two
spies who came in from the cold—not
to mention Farrow’s mother, his sister
Dylan, and Lovett. On the side of evil
is nearly everyone else. In the course
of his reporting, Farrow discovers
that one seemingly good person after
another, along with the obvious bad-
dies, are on Weinstein’s team in one
way or another—to the point that he
becomes “inured to people contorting
their bodies into the shapes of gears
for Harvey Weinstein’s machine.”
This Manichaean scheme reflects the
idea, suggested throughout the book
and in its very title, that various par-
ties engaged in a “conspiracy” to pro-
tect Weinstein and other predators. It
also reflects Farrow’s presentation of
himself as a singular hero. “You came
in with a glorious flaming sword,” Mc-
Gowan writes him after his first story
runs. “So fucking well done.”
Catch and Kill is a mythic narrative
and moral allegory in the form of a
thriller; it’s David and Goliath by way
of All the President’s Men. It’s a story
of spooks and creeps and bullies, of
false identities and secret meetings.
And it’s always raining. As Farrow in-
vestigates, weird stuff starts happen-
ing: a Nissan Pathfinder is repeatedly
parked outside his apartment building;
his phone is hit with barrages of spam
texts; on the subway he sees a bald man
who might have been sitting in the Nis-
san; he receives an odd e-mail from a
London wealth manager who proposes
meeting to discuss her firm’s women’s
advocacy program; he gets a call from
an English journalist who is excessively
curious about what he’s working on. As
he learns how many reporters before
him tried to confirm the rumors about
Weinstein—“the white whale of jour-
nalism,” a former Hollywood Reporter
editor tells him—he begins to suspect
the odd happenings are connected to
his investigation. He puts copies of his
reporting materials in a safe-deposit
box, with a note: “Should anything hap-
pen to me, please make sure this infor-
mation is released.” A movie producer
tells him to get a gun. He moves into
a “safe house,” a friend’s Chelsea man-
sion. A Weinstein accuser tells Farrow
that she’s been contacted by the Eng-
lish journalist, who then admits to Far-
row that he’s working for Black Cube,
an Israeli private intelligence firm
founded and in part staffed by former
government intelligence agents. When
Farrow asks around about what to do if
Black Cube is after him, a source tells
him to “just start running.”
Through a Black Cube whistle-
blower who leaked documents to him,
Farrow discovered the full scope of
the firm’s engagement with Weinstein,which began in October 2016. Con-
tracts stated the client’s goals: to halt
the publication of negative articles,
and to get information about a memoir
McGowan was writing. The contracts
also laid out the firm’s approach, which
included sending a full-time employee,
“Anna,” to the United States. Posing as
the London-based wealth manager and
women’s rights advocate, Anna had be-
friended McGowan and, according to
a lawsuit filed by McGowan, secretly
recorded her reading sections of her
manuscript and possibly stole a copy
from her computer. Black Cube also
hired local subcontractors to follow
Farrow and Kantor in order to iden-
tify their sources. David Boies of Boies
Schiller Flexner, a firm notorious for
its combativeness, signed Weinstein’s
contracts with Black Cube, though
he later claimed he did not direct the
investigators.
Farrow also learned that three
American investigative firms—the
New York–based Kroll Inc. and K
Intelligence, and the California-based
PSOPS—were tasked with finding dirt
on Weinstein’s accusers and, to an
extent, on Farrow, Kantor, Ben Wal-
lace of New York magazine, and other
reporters.* She Said reveals that Lisa
Bloom, a lawyer celebrated for cham-
pioning women with sexual harass-
ment claims, oversaw parts of this
operation.Shady characters are hardly limited
to the Weinstein machine; cloaks and
daggers abound in the executive suites
of NBC. Farrow becomes particularly
suspicious of Oppenheim, who was
promoted to president of NBC News
during Farrow’s initial reporting, and
Rich Greenberg, head of the network’s
investigative unit. In documenting
their and others’ treachery, Farrow
either relies on improbably detailed
contemporaneous notes or engages in
New Journalism on the sly. When Far-
row and McHugh presented a draft of
their script to Oppenheim, “a groove
deepened in his brow,” and when they
played him a recording of Weinstein
admitting to having groped Gutierrez,
he “slouched deeper into the chair, like
he was shrinking into himself.” When
Greenberg suggested calling Wein-
stein for comment, “a nervous titter of
laughter escaped” Oppenheim, who
then said he was going to talk to Andy
Lack, the chairman of NBC News and
MSNBC.
Soon after, Greenberg apparently
switched sides; when he told Farrow to
“pause all reporting” while the story
went through legal review at NBC-
Universal, he “was fidgeting, jiggling
a knee under the desk,” and “his eyes
flicked away.” When Farrow told Op-
penheim that a new accuser—Emily
Nestor, who had been harassed by
Weinstein while working as a temp—
was willing to do an on-camera inter-
view, Oppenheim “swallowed hard,
laughed a little.” When Farrow told
him that yet another accuser, Canosa,
was considering appearing, Oppen-
heim’s face went “pale and slick,” and
when Oppenheim brought up a possi-
ble conflict of interest—Weinstein had
distributed some of Allen’s movies in
the 1990s—his “gaze shifted off to theside again.” Finally, Oppenheim told
Farrow, regarding Gutierrez’s groping,
that he didn’t think a movie producer
who wasn’t a household name “grab-
bing a lady’s breasts a couple of years
ago” was “national news.” “It’s news
somewhere,” he added. “Do it for the
Hollywood Reporter.”
The NBC executives are meant to
hang themselves with their uninten-
tionally revealing statements and uni-
formly incriminating somatic tells—it
is as if everyone were being outed by
their superego, or suffering spirit pos-
session by the better angels of their
nature. But, as NBC has noted in its re-
sponse to Catch and Kill, the network
aired numerous stories of sexual mis-
conduct by powerful men over the past
decade. If we fairly assume both that
Farrow had strong material and that
NBC did not have a categorical aver-
sion to such stories, then it’s reasonable
to conclude that there was something
about the Weinstein situation in partic-
ular that gave the network pause. And
Farrow never quite answers the tanta-
lizing question of what that something
was.
When he gives Oppenheim a chance
to explain what happened, the re-
sponse is hardly clarifying: “there was
a consensus” among the executives
and lawyers “about the organization’s
comfort level moving forward.” I n one
of the book’s most trenchant passages,
Farrow riffs on this formulation:And there it was, at the end of his
arguments: an unwillingness not
just to take responsibility but to
admit that responsibility might, in
some place, in someone’s hands,
exist. It was a consensus about the
organization’s comfort level mov-
ing forward that stopped the re-
porting. It was a consensus about
the organization’s comfort level
moving forward that bowed to law-
yers and threats; that hemmed and
hawed and parsed and shrugged;
that sat on multiple credible alle-
gations of sexual misconduct and
disregarded a recorded admission
of guilt. That anodyne phrase, that
language of indifference without
ownership, upheld so much silence
in so many places. It was a con-
sensus about the organization’s
comfort level moving forward that
protected Harvey Weinstein and
men like him; that yawned and
gaped and enveloped law firms and
PR shops and executive suites and
industries; that swallowed women
whole.Tom Brokaw called the killing of the
story “NBC’s self inflicted wound.” But
here Farrow makes clear that, even if
we don’t know the executives’ exact
motives, their handling of the story
and refusal to explain what happened
(beyond the claim that the reporting
wasn’t up to snuff) reverberated be-
yond the organization, reinforcing the
widespread complacency that enabled
Weinstein and obscured the precise
workings of his machine.In trying to answer the question that
Oppenheim wouldn’t, Farrow offers
one particularly explosive explana-
tion: that Weinstein blackmailed NBC
with dirt on Lauer furnished by Dylan
Howard. The sequence of events is sug-
gestive: in 2015 AMI struck a television*I worked as a private investigator at
K2 Intelligence in 2017. I was not in-
volved in the firm’s work for Weinstein.Mary Weatherford
The Frog, 2018
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