Ronan Farrow: ‘Catch And Kill’ Tactics Protected Both Weinstein And Trump
Ronan Farrow’s 2017 exposé of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker earned him a Pulitzer Prize and helped usher in the #MeToo movement. Now, in his new book, Catch and Kill, Farrow writes about the extreme tactics Weinstein allegedly used in an attempt to keep him from reporting the story.
“Harvey Weinstein’s attorneys … signed a contract with this Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube explicitly tasking secret agents with killing reporting on Harvey Weinstein,” Farrow says. “There was a full-on international espionage operation that was built up around this.”
Farrow says that he was followed and that his house was bugged as a result of his work on the story. He eventually moved into a safe house and put his reporting documents into a safe deposit box with a note reading, “Should anything happen to me, please make sure this information is released.”
Farrow had started investigating Weinstein as a reporter at NBC News. But, he says, network executives blocked the story from ever being broadcast and eventually let Farrow go. Farrow speculates that the network was doing so, in part, to protect news anchor Matt Lauer, who was subsequently accused of sexual misconduct. Farrow spoke about NBC’s efforts to stifle the Weinstein story in this NPR interview. NBC News has maintained that Farrow’s story on the sexual misconduct allegations was not solid — that he had no accusers on record, specifically — when it refused to move forward with the story in 2017 before he took it to The New Yorker.
Farrow notes that NBC’s efforts to quash the story are part of a broader “catch and kill” strategy, whereby powerful entities and individuals go to extreme lengths to keep unfavorable stories from being reported. His book alleges that American Media Inc., the parent company of the tabloid National Enquirer, engaged in such practices in an effort to control negative stories about then- presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“I personally reported a number of stories about cases in which AMI sought or actually did buy the rights to a story in order to get rid of it during the election, and that subsequently has become the subject of a serious criminal investigation,” Farrow says.
He adds that the practice of catch and kill is “used both literally in the plot with respect to several stories that AMI goes after and tries to bury for Donald Trump and others, but also figuratively about the media’s role in sometimes not just advancing, but also suppressing, stories.”
Photo: A.J. Chavar for NPR
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