Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
the trials of exposing a big-gun sex predator
CATCH AND KILL: LIES, SPIES, AND A CONSPIRACY TO PROTECT PREDATORS
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 nervously eyed suspicious-looking vehicles, spent nights in friends’ homes and took evasive manoeuvres like walking against traffic to foil anyone following him in a car.
There are a number of these moments threaded through Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy
to Protect Predators, Farrow’s chronicle 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. One of Weinstein’s sub rosa retainers was an Israeli intelligence company.
Farrow pierced this legal and quasi-espionage veil to land a devastating story about Weinstein, published by The New Yorker exactly 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 importantly, their exposés touched 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.
In the wake of 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 follow-up 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: 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. His family issues have been tabloid fodder ever since Farrow’s sister, Dylan, accused Allen of molesting her when she was 7. Dylan Farrow is both the muse and moral centre of Catch and Kill as Farrow, then an investigative reporter for NBC News, sets about investigating vague allegations against Weinstein.
While the cinematic elements of
Catch and Kill make it likely bait for a movie or TV adaptation, Farrow says he hasn’t actively considered offers for the book, though there’s been interest in it since it was first announced last year.