Catch and Kill summary

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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.