CATCH AND KILL
LIES, SPIES AND A CONSPIRACY TO PROTECT PREDATORS
RONAN FARROW
Fleet, 464pp, £20
Catch and Kill is ‘a rip-roaring account of the years spent chasing the Weinstein story and its spin-offs. It’s a deep dive into the world of US media, Hollywood pay-outs, Donald
Trump’s eccentric ways, spies and spineless editors,’ wrote Harriet Alexander in the Daily Telegraph.
This ‘page-turner... is dripping with jaw-dropping revelations and moments of astonishing pathos... Farrow is a skilled storyteller, and the pacey book is absolutely – ironically – made for film.’
Rachel Cooke, in the Guardian,
wondered why Weinstein got away with it for so long. ‘Why did no one speak out? Why did nothing concrete ever stick? Ronan Farrow’s extraordinary Catch and Kill, in which he masterfully tells the story of his quest to reveal Weinstein’s repugnant activities to the world, doesn’t merely answer these questions. It makes them come to seem complacent, even profoundly stupid...
‘As some American critics have already observed, Farrow’s narrative has the pace of a thriller.’ Were it fiction, ‘the collusion at its heart would be too much: you would dismiss it as airport pulp. Here is a conspiracy so deeply embedded and far-reaching that even as I write, those alleged to be involved not only remain in their jobs... they have pugnaciously denied all wrongdoing in the matter of the reporting of Weinstein’s behaviour.’
In her review for the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai, explained that the book gets its title from the practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it that was sometimes adopted by the publisher of the National Enquirer. ‘What Farrow suggests is that NBC News, which employed him at the time, did something with the Weinstein story that wasn’t entirely dissimilar. Instead of hush money, Farrow says, NBC officials used the institutional levers at their disposal to shut down his work on Weinstein – from intermittent discouragement to elaborate stonewalling to a legal review that turned out to be both labyrinthine and absurd.’
For Sunday Times reviewer Jonathan Dean, ‘humour is the impressive and, indeed, surprising quality found in this meticulous account of how Farrow helped bring down Harvey Weinstein in 2017. The journalist and son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen writes his story like a thriller, with added snark, which actually makes the book enjoyable.’