Farrow’s #Metoo book sparks battle with NBC
Ronan Farrow’s new #Metoo memoir Catch and Kill is full of explosive revelations
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators Ronan Farrow Little, Brown and Company
Unlike most journalists — most human beings — Ronan Farrow can tell you what it’s like to be tailed, surveilled and tracked by people with possibly sinister motives. It is, he attests, kind of stressful.
“I don’t want this to sound like woe is me, but I’ll be honest,” says Farrow. “It’s really hard when you’re in those moments ... when you wonder if you’re being followed, and it turns out you are. It’s frightening.”
For a few months in 2017, he eyed suspicious-looking vehicles, spent nights in friends’ apartments and took evasive manoeuvres, like walking against traffic to foil anyone following him in a car. A friend advised him: Get a gun. There are a number of these moments threaded through Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Farrow’s chronicle-memoir of his pursuit of allegations of sexual predation against Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul. As Farrow recounts, Weinstein arrayed not just some big legal guns to thwart him and other reporters, but a host of black-ops characters: former Mossad agents, Ukrainian surveillance pros, European undercover operatives. Their mission was to monitor Farrow and other journalists who were closing in on Weinstein.
Farrow pierced this legal and quasi-espionage veil to land a devastating story about Weinstein, published by The New Yorker two years ago. The story, which followed by five days a separate series of revelations about Weinstein in The New York Times, earned Farrow and Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey the Pulitzer Prize.
More important, their exposés set off a cultural avalanche. Within weeks, other powerful men saw their walls of privilege and protection come tumbling down amid the march of the #Metoo movement.
(Weinstein, who eventually was charged with crimes including rape, faces trial in New York in January. He has pleaded not guilty.)
After his landmark Weinstein story, Farrow, 31, went on to expose other powerful men and institutions, becoming the go-to journalist of the movement.
The immediate followup to his Weinstein reporting was his disclosure of the “catch and kill” tactics employed by American Media Inc., parent of the National Enquirer, to suppress stories it sometimes later used to blackmail celebrities (the phrase refers to paying sources for exclusive rights to their information and then withholding, or killing, the story). Among the beneficiaries of the tactic: U.S. President Donald Trump. Former Playboy model Karen Mcdougal had told the Enquirer about her alleged affair with Trump, but her story was caught and killed by AMI during the 2016 campaign.
Farrow, of course, is no ordinary reporter. Aside from his background as an intellectual prodigy, his mother is actress Mia Farrow and his father is Woody Allen, although both his parents have suggested at times that his real father is Frank Sinatra (to which Ronan Farrow quips: “We’re all possibly Frank Sinatra’s son. I’ll leave it at that”). His family issues have been tabloid fodder ever since Farrow’s sister, Dylan, accused Allen of molesting her when she was seven. (Allen has denied the allegation and is long estranged from Mia Farrow and the Farrow siblings.)
Dylan Farrow is both the muse and moral centre of Catch and Kill as Farrow, then an investigative reporter for NBC News in early 2017, sets about investigating vague allegations against Weinstein.
Dylan Farrow’s experience, and Allen’s long-running efforts to suppress and undermine her account, were a kind of foreground story for the book, Farrow says. But he adds, “This isn’t a story in which I’m the hero of her narrative.” Long before the #Metoo era, he confesses, he’d sometimes ask his sister to “shut up” about her accusations.
“I felt I had to be nakedly honest and vulnerable about that,” he says. In tribute to his sister, Farrow included some of her illustrations in the book.
Catch and Kill is chockablock with scoops. The most headline grabbing is an allegation by a Today show producer, Brooke Nevils, that she was raped by Matt Lauer, the program’s co-host, when they were covering the Winter Olympics in 2014. Lauer — who was fired shortly after Nevils went to NBC’S management in late 2017 — denied Nevils’ account in a statement Wednesday.
Much of Farrow’s book seeks to answer a question that hovered in the background of his New Yorker article about Weinstein: Why did the story wind up in The New Yorker when Farrow spent months investigating him for NBC News?
In Farrow’s telling, Lauer is the key to that question. His thesis is that Weinstein pressured NBC News and its executives by using AMI’S accumulated dirt on Lauer to stop Farrow’s reporting on Weinstein. Farrow writes that NBC covered up multiple allegations against Lauer stretching back years by paying his accusers and ensuring their silence through non-disclosure agreements. He also writes about several instances of workplace misconduct by NBC News’ chairman, Andrew Lack, and MSNBC’S president, Phil Griffin, making them vulnerable to exposure by Weinstein.
Farrow writes that NBC even had a corporate euphemism for its settlements — “enhanced severance” — that enabled it to plausibly deny that the payments were hush money. The network has vigorously disputed Farrow’s premise and his reporting about it.
Lack said on Wednesday that NBC was unaware of any issues involving Lauer until Nevils stepped forward, reiterating NBC’S statement on the matter since the story first exploded.
Further, an NBC executive who spoke with NBC’S approval but would not be identified said in an interview with The Washington Post that Lauer was the subject of four employee complaints, but three of them came in after he was fired following Nevils’ allegations.
In the days leading up to the book’s publication on Tuesday, the network has launched a public relations counterattack against Farrow. NBC News president Noah Oppenheim has visited seven news organizations, including The Washington Post, to present an elaborate rebuttal, complete with binders containing timelines, interview transcripts, expense logs and contemporaneous text messages and emails to and from Farrow and his editors documenting his progress on the Weinstein story.
The short version of Oppenheim’s presentation is that Farrow’s reporting wasn’t ready, that he didn’t have any of Weinstein’s accusers on the record at the time he walked away in frustration in August 2017.
But Farrow and his producer at the time, Rich Mchugh, say they had several women on the record, and commitments from others to follow suit. They also had a damning audio recording of a police sting in which Weinstein admits to assault.
NBC’S “actions were a massive breach of journalistic integrity,” said Mchugh, who left NBC in 2018. “They can do all the verbal gymnastics they want, but at the end of the day, they ordered us to stop reporting.”
Farrow’s editor at The New Yorker, David Remnick, also said the reporting was well advanced, though not yet ready for publication, when Farrow initially approached the magazine. It was published within seven weeks. Interestingly, NBC doesn’t dispute one of Farrow’s scoops, a minor one but telling nonetheless. After the Weinstein imbroglio, he writes, the network hired a “Wikipedia whitewasher” to scrub references to the episode from some of its pages, a curious decision for a news organization dedicated to transparency.
Whatever the merits of NBC’S full-court press against Catch and Kill, the network’s campaign seems more likely to boost the book’s sales than to diminish it, and to raise the author’s already ascendant profile.