8 The New York Review
production deal with the Weinstein
Company, and Weinstein and How-
ard became close. In the summer of
2017 there were fifteen calls between
Weinstein and what Weinstein Com-
pany staffers called the NBC “trium-
virate”—Oppenheim, Lack, and Phil
Griffin, the president of MSNBC. (NBC
says that of those fifteen calls, one was
to Oppenheim, one to Lack, and thir-
teen to Griffin, who did not answer
them all.) By the end of the summer,
the executives told Weinstein “they’re
not doing the story” on the allegations
against him.
In early September Weinstein and
Howard met at a Manhattan hotel and
examined the contents of several thick
manila folders. Howard had asked a
colleague to retrieve a file of unpub-
lished material on Lauer in the fall of
2016, and over the following year the
Enquirer published three negative sto-
ries about him, focusing on his infidel-
ity; a fourth such story would appear
within three weeks of this meeting.
And at an unspecified time, presum-
ably that summer or fall, Weinstein
“made it known” to NBC “that he was
aware of Lauer’s behavior and capable
of revealing it.”
Unfortunately, the claim is not well
substantiated: Farrow’s sources are a
named member of NBC’s investigative
unit who was “told” about the threat
by two people apparently unknown to
Farrow, and two anonymous AMI staff-
ers who “heard the same thing.” He did
not corroborate it through additional
reporting, or explain why he couldn’t.
NBC asserts that this is because the
threat “did not happen” and points to
Farrow’s own timeline, which places
the meeting between Weinstein and
Howard around September 5—after
Farrow told Oppenheim he was taking
the story elsewhere and Oppenheim
told Weinstein’s crisis manager that
Farrow was “no longer working on the
story” for NBC.
This doesn’t mean Weinstein didn’t
make the threat. He could have done
so before his meeting with Howard
and while Farrow was still at NBC. He
could have done so after Farrow left
NBC, to pressure the network into as-
serting its ownership of Farrow’s work
product, making it impossible for the
story to take root elsewhere. (In late
September, Charles Harder, a Wein-
stein lawyer, sent Farrow a letter de-
manding he turn over his work to
NBC’s legal department, though Far-
row presents no evidence that NBC ap-
proved of this questionable demand,
and the network’s own communica-
tions with him suggest that it was try-
ing to wash its hands of, not bury, the
story.)
If the Lauer threat was indeed made,
and taken seriously, then NBC’s killing
of the story is not just a case of muddy
corporate cowardice; it’s a case of ab-
ject journalistic malfeasance and moral
failure. But in the absence of persua-
sive sourcing, Farrow’s exploration of
the alternatives is insufficient. If the
Lauer threat was not made (or even if
it was), for what other reasons might
the executives have bent to Weinstein’s
will, and how would this fit with NBC’s
broader culture? Was it a fear of litiga-
tion? Surely they were used to dealing
with legal threats. Was it a concern that
Weinstein’s conduct was “not national
news,” as Oppenheim argued? There’s
no direct evidence that other decision-
makers held this view. Was the story
a casualty of what one NBC employee
called Lack’s tendency to “spike sto-
ries about women”? That pattern, if
it existed, goes unexamined. Were the
executives intent on staying friendly
with Weinstein for professional or per-
sonal reasons? The book presents no
particularly strong relationships be-
tween the executives and Weinstein,
or specific business opportunities
they feared would vanish. Was there
a vague worry that coverage of secret
settlements would be likelier than
other sexual-misconduct reporting to
somehow shake loose the network’s
own history of exchanging payouts for
contractual silence? This is the most
intriguing possibility, but it’s essen-
tially conjecture.
The book includes a few telling but
frustratingly isolated anecdotes about
the network’s handling of external
influence in the past. For instance,
according to an anonymous network
executive, an unnamed Hollywood
power broker and his lawyer called
NBC News to demand that the net-
work not air an interview. The execu-
tive recalled Steve Burke, the CEO of
NBC Universal, who had come from
Disney, telling him to pull the inter-
view, adding that the power broker
will “owe you his life.” The executive
protested, and when another member
of Burke’s team raised the same objec-
tion, Burke agreed to run the story.
The executive told Farrow, “I don’t
think it’s even about protecting his
friends, it’s just, ‘This guy is powerful,
I’m getting these calls, I don’t need
this problem.’ He doesn’t know [giving
in is] not ethical.”Catch and Kill aspires to go beyond
the Weinstein story and examine the
systems that shield the powerful from
scrutiny, yet it’s strikingly lacking in
background and analysis on a range
of relevant subjects. It might have in-
cluded examples, beyond an insidery
reference to The Insider, of respect-
able news organizations giving in
to powerful interests, or of refusing
even to consider certain stories. (“If
you speak to any reporter... every-
body has a version of their story get-
ting killed,” McHugh recently told
the Los Angeles Times.) It might
have included a rubbishing of the tor-
tious interference argument beyond
Farrow’s observation that “this was
bullshit” and that “a significant por-
tion of all political and business re-
porting would be impossible” “if we
refused to talk to sources who were
breaching contracts.” It might have
dealt, even briefly, with the cultural
and legal history of sexual harassment
in the workplace; with distinctions be-
tween employees and nonemployees;
with the not wholly diabolical use of
secret payments as a method of resolv-
ing misconduct claims; or with the
enforceability of nondisclosure agree-
ments if the precipitating conduct is il-
legal or if the terms and conditions are
unconscionable.
Since this is a story in which lawyers
play a major role, and Farrow is a law
school graduate and member of the
bar, he might have acknowledged the
substantial range of lawyerly turpitude
present. There’s Bloom, who repre-
sented women in the harassment claims
that led to Bill O’Reilly’s firing from
Fox News, and who publicly supported
Dylan Farrow in her accusation againstAllen. When Ronan sought advice
on dealing with NDA-bound sources,
Dylan suggested that he contact
Bloom, and they had several conversa-
tions before he learned that Bloom was
on Weinstein’s legal team. This is out-
rageous behavior. Not only did Bloom
betray her advertised principles in
working for Weinstein (She Said repro-
duces a pitch letter in which Bloom tells
Weinstein she feels “equipped to help
you against the [Rose McGowans] of
the world, because I have represented
so many of them,” a hideous boast that
goes beyond the common practice of
switching sides and using one’s prior
litigation experience as a selling point);
she failed to disclose to Farrow that she
was working for the very subject of his
investigation.Then there’s Kim Harris, general
counsel of NBCUniversal, who is in-
troduced as having approved the re-
lease of the Access Hollywood tape
in which Donald Trump bragged of
grabbing women “by the pussy,” before
unnamed parties at NBC “hesitated”
and the network lost out on the story
(another retreat worth examining).
But once it’s clear that she’s going to
wind up on the wrong side, Harris is
described as having “presided over the
‘pussy grab’ tape imbroglio,” suggest-
ing she was somehow responsible for
the network’s error. She’s memorial-
ized as the invoker of “tortious inter-
ference,” though when it comes to the
network’s smothering of the Weinstein
reporting, all Farrow is able to ferret
out is that she was “involved.” After
Harris releases a report on Lauer’s
workplace conduct, she holds a crisis
meeting with the investigative unit,
responding with careful “no”s to
questions about whether the network
settled any harassment claims about
Lauer or anyone else; and when Far-
row later discovers these answers were
narrowly based on what constitutes a
“settlement,” he is offended. But law-
yers aren’t known for volunteering
information adverse to their clients or
employers. Harris’s sidestep to avoid
increasing NBC’s exposure to litigation
was weaselly. It was also an unsurpris-
ing part of her job.
Lack of context is particularly con-
spicuous when it comes to the private
intelligence industry, about which the
general public knows little. Farrow pro-
vides a few vague sentences on it, say-
ing almost nothing about what kinds of
services such firms normally provide
and to what kinds of clients. He jumps
from the industry’s origins in the 1970s
to its spread to Israel in the 2000s, and
Black Cube and its dirty tricks seemlike an inevitable outgrowth of an in-
nately dubious trade.
The reality is more complex. Two
firms Weinstein hired were, in the 1995
CBS case Farrow gestures toward as
precedent, on the “good” side. PSOPS
founders Jack Palladino and Sandra
Sutherland worked, initially pro bono,
to disprove claims made in a five-hun-
dred-page dossier on Jeffrey Wigand
that another investigative firm created
and that B&W used to try to discredit
him. Kroll Associates, meanwhile,
provided security services to the be-
leaguered Wigand; the firm agreed to
do so gratis but was ultimately paid by
CBS. (Not to mention that women pur-
suing sexual harassment claims against
employers regularly engage private
investigators, including this writer, to
gather information that might bolster
their cases.)
Such context would detract from the
singularity of Farrow’s story, and nu-
anced distinctions would complicate
the morality play at its core. Harris’s ac-
tions are equated with the reprehensi-
ble conduct of Bloom and of Boies, who
tried to suppress a Times story while
his firm was representing the Times
in another matter and who, McGowan
alleges, knew that Black Cube would
“use illegal and unethical tactics.” And
the American intelligence firms’ largely
public-source background research on
the accusers and reporters, distasteful
though it may be, is lumped with the
invasive surveillance and deceptive
cozying-up undertaken by Black Cube
employees and contractors. The book
consistently fails to describe degrees
of participation and culpability with
precision. How did people become
members of Weinstein’s team or gears
in his machine? How did they stand to
profit? Who was a pawn, a mercenary,
a hypocrite, an accomplice? These are
not distinctions without a difference:
they would help to define the kinds of
enablement and complicity that allow
powerful, wealthy abusers to operate
as they do, and how we might appor-
tion blame.The lack of subtlety or generosity is
even more pronounced in Farrow’s
public statements. In interviews, he
calls the book “very fair” and “very
measured,” yet in the same breath goes
beyond what’s substantiated in it, turn-
ing dotted lines into solid ones without
providing additional evidence. In the
book, Hillary Clinton’s “flack” calls
Farrow to reschedule her interview for
his diplomacy book, and says the Wein-
stein investigation is “a concern for us.”
(Farrow then gratuitously describes
Clinton’s stationery as “very lovely, and
not the sort of thing that wins Wiscon-
sin.”) In a Financial Times interview,
he acts as if Clinton’s reason for re-
scheduling were established fact: “It’s
remarkable,” he says, “how quickly
even people with a long relationship
with you will turn if you threaten the
centres of power or the sources of fund-
ing around them.” (This comment was
quickly amplified by right-wing media,
ranging from major outlets to full-on
Pizzagate truthers.)
Farrow takes particular liberties in
portraying the “international espio-
nage plot” in which he was ensnared.
The legitimate suspicion and fear that
being surveilled generated in Farrow
are fair subjects for the book, not least
because they speak to the effectivenessFélix Vallotton: The Theatre Box, 1909Private^ Collection