Ronan Farrow’s killer of a scoop

Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill is a gripping account of his uncovering the conspiracy of silence around Harvey Weinstein.

Harvey Weinstein enters Manhattan criminal court. Picture: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / AFP

The best moment in Catch and Kill comes just a few weeks before journalist Ronan Farrow is due to publish his earth-shattering expose on Harvey Weinstein in 2017. The movie mogul is in panic mode, scrambling for the best strategy to ­destroy Farrow and keep his history of sexual assault quiet. So he calls Farrow’s estranged ­father, Woody Allen, and asks if he can help. Allen has nothing for him except a piece of knowing consolation: “Jeez, I’m so sorry,” he says. “Good luck.”

Having this baby-faced assassin on your case is no picnic, as Weinstein discovered. It’s almost as though Farrow were custom-built to break this story of American excess. He has the celebrity upbringing, as the child of Allen and Mia Farrow; the early exposure to sexual assault allegations, made by his sister Dylan against Allen; and the requisite brains, having arrived at Yale Law School by the age of 16.

And somehow the weirdness of Farrow’s life to date has been channelled into an almost terrifying investigative zeal that has helped bring down multiple alleged predators, including media titan Les Moonves and New York ­attorney-general Eric Schneiderman.

But Weinstein was the white whale, and this scoop-filled book, part reporting memoir, part spy thriller and part score-settling revenge tour, provides a mostly riveting and often shocking account of how Farrow hauled in his catch, ­publishing just after two New York Times ­journalists, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor.

Ronan Farrow appearing on the ABC's 7.30

Catch and Kill has gone off like a hand grenade in the world of New York media because of Farrow’s deep, intricate dive into why NBC, a huge American network and his former employer, passed on the story of the decade.

Beyond that, the book addresses the most ­urgent question thrown up by the #MeToo scandal: how did Weinstein, along with so many other powerful predators, get away with it for so long?

First then, NBC, about which Farrow makes two related sets of allegations. One is that it shut down his investigation into Weinstein when he first tried to air his findings through the network. Farrow alleges that NBC “bowed to lawyers and threats”, “hemmed and hawed” and eventually “sat on multiple credible allegations of sexual assault”. When Farrow finally published his prize-winning story in The New Yorker, NBC’s red-faced response was to claim that the reporting he had shown it a few weeks earlier wasn’t ready.

His second allegation is that NBC’s own culture of sexual misconduct and pay-offs was the real reason for its reticence over Weinstein, who he suggests blackmailed it into silence. At the centre of this story is Matt Lauer, the longtime host of NBC’s flagship Today show and a central figure at the network until 2017, when he was fired following allegations of sexual misconduct. Farrow claims NBC top brass must have known about Lauer’s depredations for years before taking action.

For its part, NBC has vigorously denied this. NBC News president Noah Oppenheim recently published a scorching memo calling the book a “smear” and a “conspiracy theory” written by an ex-employee with “an axe to grind”. He questioned Farrow’s timelines and denied there was any cover-up over Lauer.

Much of this is he said-he said, but certain facts are undeniable: NBC let a giant story walk out the door. Lauer reportedly behaved inappropriately for years. And just last week another complaint surfaced about a sexual assault story being killed by the network. There may yet be a guillotine outside its 30 Rock headquarters in the coming weeks.

But NBC is far from the only target in Catch and Kill, which features a cast of alleged blackguards and hucksters who have become all too familiar in the Donald Trump era.

There are the muckrakers at National Enquirer magazine, run by Dylan Howard and David Pecker, whom Farrow says worked with Weinstein and Trump, and whose habit of ­buying up and quashing salacious stories gives the book its title.

There are the ferocious lawyers such as David Boies, Charles Harder, Lanny Davis and Lisa Bloom, all of whom worked for Weinstein among others. In one devastating scene, Farrow reportedly complains to Bloom, who made her name as a defender of female assault victims, that she promised not to tell Weinstein’s “people” about the multiple friendly conversations they’d had about the case. “Oh Ronan,” Farrow says she replies, “I am his people.” She had been in Weinstein’s camp all along.

Then there are the spies, from bumbling ex-Soviet street sneaks to expensive ex-Mossad spooks Black Cube, who are said to have followed Farrow, tracked his phone, trailed his boyfriend and exhumed his past in an alleged hunt for kompromat to save Weinstein’s bacon. And there are publicists such as Matthew Hiltzik, who has worked with the Trumps, the Clintons, National Enquirer’s ­parent company American Media Inc and Weinstein. Farrow calls Weinstein’s flunkeys an “army of collaborators”.

These same names come up again and again in Farrow’s work as he sketches out America’s celebrity doom loop, built for protecting the powerful and crushing those who threaten them. It’s this cosy, fame-worshipping, money-obsessed, favour-trading world that granted Weinstein so much apparent impunity.

The book’s emotional heart, though, lies not with the relentless, neurotic Farrow, nor the dark forces arrayed against him, but with his sources, the women who spoke up despite the fear and intimidation. Some of these are familiar from his original reporting, such as Rose McGowan, Mira Sorvino, Asia Argento and Ambra Gutierrez, whose recording of Weinstein’s sexual onslaught allegedly was sat on by New York police and NBC. A new name joins them, too, Brooke Nevils, a former NBC employee whose alleged rape by Lauer at the 2014 Winter Olympics is recounted for the first time in grim but sensitive detail (Lauer has denied the allegation).

This compelling story does offer a glimmer of hope amid the ordure: these women finally may be exposing the corruption and exploitation that lies at the heart of American public life. They deserve the credit, but it’s worth a nod to Farrow, too. He can be terribly sanctimonious, but the man’s thirst for a story cannot be denied. He even uses the book to slip out the news that he is engaged to Jon Lovett, the ­podcaster and former Obama speechwriter. For Farrow, it’s a rare admission of private emotion. And yet another scoop.

Josh Glancy is the Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

By Ronan Farrow. Fleet, 464pp, $34.99