Who is the author of Catch and Kill?

The author of Catch and Kill is Ronan Farrow.

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Catch and Kill Book Summary - Catch and Kill Book explained in key points

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Catch and Kill summary

Name: Catch and Kill
Rating: 4.3 (38 reviews)
Author: Ronan Farrow

Ronan Farrow

Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

4.3 (38 ratings)

37 mins

Brief summary

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow is a gripping account of his investigation into powerful men who had been accused of sexual misconduct. It exposes their tactics to silence victims and the behind-the-scenes power dynamics that enabled them to continue their abusive behavior.

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Catch and Kill
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Key idea 1 of 12

What’s in it for me? An inside account of the story that exposed Harvey Weinstein.

In 2017, Ronan Farrow was conducting a routine TV investigation when he stumbled across a story that had long been whispered about but rarely addressed openly. At its center was a man who had become synonymous with Hollywood itself – Harvey Weinstein.

Wherever Weinstein went, rumors of sexual impropriety surfaced. Journalists had tried to get to the bottom of these allegations, but none of them had managed to publish their findings. The closer they’d come to the truth, the more they’d learned how easy it is for people with friends in high places to make problems go away.

Over the following year, Farrow would find out just how deep the rabbit hole went. As his investigation progressed, he was dogged by Weinstein’s lawyers, undermined by his employers, and held at bay by a conspiracy of silence. But he had one thing previous reporters had lacked: the trust of Weinstein’s victims.

In these blinks, we’ll explore the trials and tribulations of Farrow’s attempt to uncover Hollywood’s most notorious predator.

Along the way, you’ll learn

how the movie mogul succeeded in keeping his victims silent for so long;
why NBC backed off and attempted to kill Farrow’s story before it could air; and
how the investigation ultimately succeeded in exposing Weinstein.

NBC’s response to a scandal involving one of its hosts was the first sign it was uncomfortable reporting on sexual abuse.

In early October 2016, the Washington Post released a leaked recording that showed presidential candidate Donald Trump having what the paper called an “extremely lewd conversation about women.” Readers who clicked on the link found a three-minute video filmed in 2005 for the celebrity gossip show Access Hollywood. In it, Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

It was a bombshell. Papers and TV stations across the United States rushed to report on the Post’s potentially election-defining scoop. One network, however, seemed reluctant to enter the fray – the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC for short.

Access Hollywood belonged to NBC’s parent company, NBCUniversal, and the video put the corporation in a tight spot. It hadn’t just recorded Trump’s coarse comments – it also captured the show’s host, Billy Bush, happily agreeing that “you can do anything” to women when you’re a star. NBC had recently promoted Bush, and when it did air the video, it cut its star presenter’s most offensive remarks out.

That wasn’t the worst of it. How long had NBC known about the tape and, more to the point, how long had the network been sitting on it? Senior executives claimed that the story hadn’t been broadcast earlier because it was still under legal review. That wasn’t true – in fact, two NBCUniversal lawyers had cleared it for release.

This wasn’t the only story NBC was concerned about.

Ronan Farrow, a young reporter who had joined the network back in 2013, was frustrated. The host of the investigative segment on the Today show, Farrow had just finished a report about colleges botching sexual assault investigations on campus. It was a solid piece of journalism, but his superiors were blocking it. What was going on?

The problem became clear when Farrow looked at the programming schedule: his report was set to air as Bush issued an on-screen apology. Farrow would be explaining why sexual assault needed to be taken more seriously while Bush was effectively claiming that his comments didn’t merit him losing his job. There were two ways to solve this jarring contrast: address it head-on or attempt to make the problem go away.

NBCUniversal chose the latter path, quietly suspending Bush and running a spot on Adderall abuse in place of Farrow’s original report. Farrow texted his producer, the barrel-chested and plain-spoken TV veteran Rich McHugh, with a blunt question. Was NBC scared of broadcasting sexual assault stories?

McHugh’s answer? “Yes.”

Farrow began investigating a Hollywood studio head after an actress alleged that she’d been raped.

The Access Hollywood tape lit a fuse, but the powder keg was already in place. It was, after all, only the latest in a string of high-profile cases of powerful men exhibiting predatory sexual behavior. In 2014, allegations of sexual assault against the comedian Bill Cosby resurfaced. Then, in July 2016, Fox News personality Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment suit against the network’s head, Roger Ailes.

In early 2017, after Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions of women marched and held sit-ins in cities across the United States. Their chants and banners reappropriated Trump’s language and featured images of yowling cats and claims like “pussy grabs back.” Meanwhile, the well-known Vox journalist Liz Plank took to social media to ask why #WomenDontReport.

Harvey Weinstein’s behavior was an open secret, but fear kept his victims from speaking out.

The man Rose McGowan accused of raping her was Harvey Weinstein. Farrow had already encountered his name before speaking to the actress. Every inquiry he made led back to Weinstein, but no one wanted to go on the record.

There was a good reason for that. Since the establishment of the first film studios a century ago, few movie executives have been as powerful as Weinstein.

Farrow’s personal history helped him win McGowan’s trust, but she was reluctant to name Weinstein on camera.

In early 2016, the Hollywood Reporter printed a glowing profile of Farrow’s father, the filmmaker Woody Allen. It was a controversial piece, as the author soft-pedaled the fact that Allen’s daughter, Dylan, had accused him of sexual abuse. When the Reporter decided to commission an article on the merits of the criticism being leveled at the magazine, it asked Dylan’s brother Ronan to do the reporting.

Farrow interviewed his sister about the alleged assault and looked at the available court records. His op-ed concluded that Dylan’s claim was the kind of credible sexual abuse allegation all too often ignored in Hollywood. This silence, he argued, wasn’t just wrong – it was dangerous. Essentially, it told victims that it wasn’t “worth the anguish of coming forward.”

A tape recorded during a police sting in 2015 contained hard proof of Weinstein’s wrongdoing.

Only one woman’s allegations against Weinstein had made it into the public record by this point.

In March 2015, Ambra Gutierrez, a Filipina-Italian model, left Weinstein’s New York office in tears and headed to a local police station to report that she’d been groped.

Farrow managed to get hold of the Gutierrez tape, but opposition to his investigation was mounting.

Two years after putting pen to paper, Gutierrez opened her nondisclosure agreement on an iPhone and slid it towards Farrow. He skimmed it, landing on the clause which stipulated that she destroy all copies of the tape made during the police sting. “Ambra,” he asked, “are all the copies destroyed?”

They hadn’t been. Gutierrez had delayed Weinstein’s lawyers’ access to one of her email accounts just long enough for her to download the recording onto an old laptop. A couple of weeks later, in a bookshop near Union Square, Farrow listened to the two-minute audio file.

A tip-off from another journalist gave Farrow enough evidence to begin contemplating publication.

In late 2016, Ben Wallace, a New York magazine reporter, spent three months investigating the Weinstein rumors. By the end of the year, he had a solid story. That’s when Weinstein’s associates began calling his employer and threatening to disclose damaging personal information about Wallace and the women he had interviewed. In January 2017, New York dropped the story.

The experience left a bad taste in his mouth, and Wallace was more than happy to help when Farrow contacted him that spring. In May, he gave the NBC reporter a new lead.

Farrow’s boss at NBC, Noah Oppenheim, put the brakes on his investigation in the summer of 2017.

By mid-June 2017, Farrow had his ducks in a row. Together with producer Rich McHugh, he had crafted a tight, economical script that didn’t pull any punches. It included Gutierrez’s tape, McGowan’s interview, the Reiter correspondence, and a second, anonymized interview with Nestor. The evidence was inarguable; the testimony compelling.

Noah Oppenheim didn’t see it that way. When he heard the tape that summer, he was silent. Finally, realizing people were waiting for him to comment, he sighed. What did it really prove? Farrow told him: It proved that Weinstein groped Gutierrez, a misdemeanor that could put him behind bars.

NBC killed Farrow’s story after a series of calls between Weinstein and the network’s senior staff.

Weinstein had been in contact with senior executives at NBC ever since finding out about Farrow’s investigation that spring. When he first spoke with the network’s chairman, Andrew Lack, he suggested that the rumors had been blown out of proportion. “It was the nineties,” he explained, “we all did that.” Lack said he’d keep an eye on Farrow.

Then, in early August, word reached Weinstein that NBCUniversal had deemed Farrow’s script “reportable.” According to TWC staffers, Weinstein asked Phil Griffin, NBC’s head of news coverage, why the story hadn’t been put to bed. Griffin, they added, reassured him. Everything had been resolved – Farrow wouldn’t be running the story with NBC.

The New Yorker agreed to publish Farrow’s story if he could find another source.

On a sunny afternoon in late August 2017, David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, was sitting in an office on the 38th floor of One World Trade Center with his colleague, Dierdre Foley-Mendelssohn.

The pair had spent the previous evening rereading a New Yorker profile of Weinstein published in 2002. It didn’t delve into the rumors trailing the movie mogul, but it did note that his business partners felt “raped” – a word “often invoked by those dealing with him.”

Weinstein’s last-ditch attempt to prevent publication failed and Farrow’s story went public in October 2017.

On October 5, 2017, the New York Times published an article about Weinstein by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. Just as he was nearing the finish line, it looked like Farrow had been beaten to the punch.

The Times story, Remnick said, was “very strong,” but it wasn’t exhaustive. Kantor and Twohey had documented harassment claims against Weinstein; Farrow could add credible assault allegations to the charge sheet.

NBC’s internal culture of harassment and secrecy made it vulnerable to Weinstein’s pressure.

Why did NBC attempt to kill the Weinstein story? One answer to that question emerged in the weeks after the New Yorker published Farrow’s article.

On November 29, 2017, NBC announced it had fired its star presenter, Matt Lauer, after receiving a complaint from a colleague detailing his inappropriate advances toward her.

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What is Catch and Kill about?

Catch and Kill (2019) is the gripping inside account of how the abuses of Hollywood’s most notorious predator, Harvey Weinstein, were brought to light. Along the way, veteran investigative reporter Ronan Farrow unpicks the conspiracy of silence that attempted to prevent his findings from ever being published and help Weinstein evade accountability for his history of sexual harassment, assault, and rape.

Catch and Kill Review

Catch and Kill (2019) is a gripping exposé on the dark underbelly of power, covering sexual misconduct and media manipulation. Here's why we recommend reading it:

Featuring intensive investigative journalism, this book uncovers shocking revelations and brings them to light, offering a unique perspective on a high-profile scandal.
Ronan Farrow's meticulous research and firsthand accounts give readers an inside look at the efforts to suppress the truth, making it a page-turner from start to finish.
With its unflinching pursuit of justice and the voices of courageous survivors, the book is an important testament to the power of journalism in exposing abuse and holding the powerful accountable.

Best quote from Catch and Kill

This precarious culture of secrecy made NBC more vulnerable to Weinsteins intimidation and enticement.

—Ronan Farrow

Who should read Catch and Kill?

Journalists and reporters
Media industry insiders
Women’s rights advocates

About the Author

Ronan Farrow is a contributing writer to the New Yorker and the author of many meticulously documented accounts of wrongdoing in high places. His reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the National Magazine Award, and the George Polk Award. Farrow was previously an anchor and reporter for MSNBC and NBC News. Before taking up journalism, he served as a State Department official. Farrow is also the author of War on Peace, a 2018 study of American diplomacy.

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