Predators and Enablers

~ Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow ~

This remarkable book outlines and details the investigative journalism that led to the exposure of decades of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, and his eventual arrest.

Ronan Farrow’s name and history are generally known and a source of curiosity to many. He briskly deals with the issue in a single paragraph at the beginning of Catch and Kill.

I didn’t love talking about my family background but most people were familiar with it: my mother, Mia Farrow, was an actress; my father, Woody Allen, a director. My childhood had been plastered across the tabloids after he was accused of sexual assault by my seven-year-old sister, Dylan, and began a sexual relationship with another of my sisters, Soon-Yi, eventually marrying her. There had been a few headlines again when I started college at an unusually young age and when I headed off to Afghanistan and Pakistan as a junior State Department official. In 2013, I’d started a four-year deal with NBCUniversal, anchoring a midday show on its cable news channel, MSNBC, for the first year of it. I’d dreamed of making the show serious and fact-driven, and by the end, was proud of how I’d used the inauspicious time slot for taped investigative stories. The show got some bad reviews at the start, good reviews at the end, and few viewers throughout. Its cancellation was little-noticed; for years after, chipper acquaintances would bound up at parties and tell me that they loved the show and still watched it every day. “That’s so nice of you to say”, I’d tell them.

This paragraph epitomizes the style of Farrow’s writing: factual, calm, wry, informative, readable, tackling the issues head-on with not a hint of self-importance.

What a story! It would take a determined ostrich in America to be unaware of the Weinstein case, but the book is riveting regardless of the reader’s knowledge. Harvey Weinstein was the founder, with his brother Bob, of the film companies Miramax and The Weinstein Company that produced award-winning, money-making films that were popular among both critics and the public: Shakespeare in Love, Pulp Fiction, and The Crying Game among others.

Rumours of Weinstein’s pattern of sexual harassment had been swirling in media and Hollywood circles since the 90s. Most such cases, however, had ended with the woman withdrawing her complaint and going silent. As Farrow’s investigation expanded, he found more and more women with astonishingly similar stories: business meetings were abruptly moved to Weinstein’s hotel suite, they would find him clothed in a bathrobe and he would demand a massage before assaulting them. Some women were attacked on their very first visit to his office. Some were attacked in their own apartments when Weinstein made a surprise visit. Some were raped, some escaped shaken and scared. Some are very famous, some less so. Daryl Hannah, Salma Hayek, Gwyneth Paltrow, Mira Sorvino, Rosanna Arquette, Ashley Judd, and Rose McGowan are just a few of the women who have accused Weinstein. While the number and fame of Weinstein’s accusers is unusual, the stories of harassment and assault are depressingly familiar.

More revelatory, to this reader at least, was the sheer scale and complexity of the structure put into place to protect Weinstein. Women who complained or started legal action were assaulted on multiple fronts: legal threats, implicit or explicit threats to destroy their careers, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that were vast and wide-ranging, payoffs to keep quiet. Some women left the industry and moved to other countries. Some women saw their careers mysteriously foundering after they complained about the harassment. Women who signed an NDA were made to give up their cellphones and passwords to their email accounts so that the Weinstein paid flunkies could delete all relevant emails and recordings. Threats came from unexpected directions, and some women were contacted by suspiciously curious ‘friends’ who turned out to be spies for Weinstein.

Farrow got more than a taste of the same legal silencing attempts. Famous lawyers at storied law firms would call NBC top brass to check on the status of Farrow’s investigation. (These top brass, it later turned out, were also concerned that such investigations would expose the similar predatory behaviour of NBC personnel such as Matt Lauer, and the structures in place to protect them.) Since the investigation did not end and it looked like Farrow was making headway, the action escalated. One lawyer who was helpfully discussing the investigation with Farrow turned out to be on Weinstein’s payroll and passing on information. Frequent calls between Weinstein, his lawyers and the NBC executives (one of whom is currently the head of NBC) led to NBC stalling, blocking, and finally cancelling all work on the investigation with a quite illogical rationale: there was not enough supporting evidence to publish the story, they claimed, but at the same time they would not permit Farrow to collect any more evidence.

The stonewalling was legal, if deeply problematic. But Weinstein and his enablers did not stop there. They hired a private intelligence operation called Black Cube, and gave them a list of women who might speak out and reporters like Farrow who were investigating. Farrow was followed by Black Cube agents, as were at least some of Weinstein’s accusers. Their phones were somehow tagged so that their locations could be tracked, and they started getting mysterious text messages. Black Cube agents attempted to befriend them, in some cases successfully recording personal conversations.

Why did the women talk to Farrow when some of them had signed NDAs or had kept silent for years? One reason was his own public history of supporting his sister when she accused their father of assault. Reading between the lines of the book, it seems that Farrow also has a way of engendering trust. While the book is written in unemotional prose, he manages to clearly indicate his empathy for the victims.

People often ask, in such situations, why the women did not speak out sooner.

Sciorra and Hannah both talked about the forces that keep women quiet. Hannah said she’d told anyone who would listen from the get-go. “And it didn’t matter,” she told me. “I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed — we are berated and criticized and blamed.”

Sciorra, on the other hand, had been afraid to talk for all the reasons survivors of rape so often are: the bludgeoning psychic force of trauma; the fear of retaliation and stigma.

I expected the book to wind down after the Weinstein story, but there is so much more: Matt Lauer’s history of assault at NBC, the involvement of the National Enquirer in ‘Catching and Killing’ these stories about powerful men. The stories begin to sound depressingly alike: men in power harassing and assaulting women, and big corporations using both money and legal process to silence the women.

Farrow writes very well, simply but with carefully chosen and precise words, and the writing is never in the least bombastic or histrionic. He lays out the damning facts and leaves the reader to make their own judgement.

Weinstein was arrested and is out on bail, and Lauer was fired, but it is infuriating to learn that some of their enablers continue in their cushy jobs. But it is also encouraging to see the number of women emboldened to speak out, despite the risk to their careers and lives. And there are others such as Rich McHugh, a producer at NBC, who went out on a limb to collect the evidence and pushed for publication. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times shared a well-deserved Pulitzer with Farrow for their work investigating the Weinstein case;

Catch and Kill is deservedly on most lists of ‘Best Books of 2019’. You can hear Farrow’s interviews with several of the victims and investigators on the Catch and Kill podcast.