Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Trigger warning: This outline and book contain descriptions of sexual violence that may be distressing. A fuller description of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes is available in this book and in Ronan Farrow’s reporting for The New Yorker (link at the bottom).

People/Organizations of Import

• Ronan Farrow: investigative reporter at NBC and later at The New Yorker
• Rich McHugh: supervising Producer in the NBC News Investigative Unit
• Harvey Weinstein: co-founder of production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company
• Noah Oppenheim: president of NBC
• Andy Lack: NBC Network Head
  • Lack had pursued sexual relationships with underlings and talent. NBC offered one woman a substantial payout to sign an NDA; former employees recalled another relationship with a young producer, whom Lack later treated with hostility.
• Phil Griffin: executive producer at NBC
  • “Four colleagues said Griffin was known for making lewd or crass remarks in work emails.…[A]fter the television personality Maria Menounous’s vagina had been photographed in a bathing suit wardrobe malfunction, Griffin waved around a printed page bearing a zoomed-in image, smirking. ‘Would you look at that?’ he said, and exhaled hard. ‘Not bad, not bad.'”
• Rich Greenberg: head of the Investigative Unit at NBC
• Dylan Howard: editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer
  • He openly described his sexual partners, discussed female employees’ sex lives, and forced women to watch pornographic material.
• David Pecker: CEO of the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc. (AMI)
  • “AMI routinely engaged in…’blackmail’—withholding the publication of damaging information in exchange for tips or exclusives.”
• Black Cube: an intelligence organization run largely by former Mossad officers.

This outline, for the most part, retains the chronology in which events take place in the book.

Harvey Weinstein

In a meeting with Oppenheim, Farrow said that he heard of actresses being harassed in Hollywood, and Oppenheim suggested looking into Rose McGowan.

Rose McGowan

• Weinstein raped McGowan and her defense attorney said that because she had done a sex scene before, nobody would believe her. She was paid $100,000 for her silence.
• Ben Affleck, who saw her visibly distraught after the incident, said, “God damn it, I told him to stop doing this.”
• She believes she was blacklisted after the incident because she could barely find work.

Farrow and McHugh, wanting to run McGowan’s story, spoke with Oppenheim, who ordered them to hold.

Ambra Gutierrez

• Gutierrez met Weinstein in 2015 at a meeting and said that he lunged at her, groped her breasts and attempted to put a hand up her skirt while she protested. She and her agent went to the police, who asked her to wear a wire.
• Weinstein, on tape, confessed to groping her. 
  • Then tabloids alleged she was a prostitute and two weeks later, the DA Vance’s office said they weren’t going to press charges.
• Other law enforcement officials whispered that DA Vance’s office had behaved strangely, as if Weinstein had personally infiltrated his office.
  • Several members of Weinstein’s legal team donated to Vance’s campaigns.
• In exchange for $1 million, Gutierrez agreed to never again talk publicly about Weinstein. She wanted to support her family, and her English wasn’t very good, so she signed.
  • The contract ordered the destruction of all copies of the audio recording, but she surreptitiously made a copy: “Gutierrez’s panic was palpable. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. She asked him why he had groped her breasts the day before. ‘Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in. I’m used to that. Come on. Please.’

Weinstein started calling people about NBC and asked about this reporting. He told people that he was getting information directly from NBC and knew exactly how much information the network had. Weinstein called Lack about Farrow, and Lack said they would look into it. 

Farrow contacted Lisa BLoom, an attorney familiar with such cases. He asked about the enforceability of NDAs and she said they usually held up. He told her it was about Weinstein, and she promised that she wouldn’t say anything. Lisa kept calling Ronan, offering to help.

Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu

• Weinstein made physical advances on Perkins, but was unsuccessful. Then he asked her to bring girls to him, though she wasn’t immediately aware of the intent.
• She started warning candidates that he would make sexual advances. She chose Chiu for a part, who later told her that Weinstein attempted to assault her. They both sent notice that they were resigning and pursuing legal action. Ultimately, they settled. 

Emily Nestor

• She worked as a front desk assistant and Weinstein would boast to her about his sexual liaisons and constantly harass her.
• Irwin Reiter, a senior Weinstein executive, sent her messages that acknowledged the incident and alluded that the behavior was a pattern inside the company.

Rose McGowan

• McGowan told the Amazon Studios head that Weinstein raped her, and soon after she was terminated. Then she offered to go on camera and name Weinstein on the record.

Farrow asked the lead NBC attorney if she saw any outstanding legal issues based on her review of the material collected thus far, and she said she didn’t. However, Oppenheim said that he wasn’t sure that this was news. “Like, is this really worth it?” Later, Farrow and McHugh found out that the story was being reviewed by NBCUniversal, not NBC News, which was atypical. Oppenheim ordered them to pause reporting and prohibited contact with sources.

Ally Canosa

• Weinstein kept trying to kiss her and she was worried about what would happen if she spurned him. One time, he left a jacket behind and she found a treatment for erectile dysfunction, implying that he was arming himself for sex ahead of their meetings. 
• Weinstein also raped her multiple times, and in a lawsuit against him, court documents stated: “Oral sexual conduct or anal sexual conduct with plaintiff by forcible compulsion and/or when plaintiff was incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless.”
• She signed an NDA and tried to talk to her therapist but found out that the therapist was a producer for a Weinstein movie.

Weinstein called Griffin, telling him to get Farrow in line. Oppenheim told Farrow that “Harvey says you’ve got a huge conflict of interest” because of Farrow’s piece in Hollywood Reporter about sexual assault and Woody Allen. (Not a real journalistic conflict.) Oppenheim ordered him to stop going to sources, and Farrow refused.

Farrow met David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who listened to Gutierrez’s tape of Weinstein’s confession and was stunned that NBC let him walk away from it.

David Boies, Weinstein’s high-powered attorney, called Lack to see whether the story was ongoing. Greenburg told McHugh and Farrow to stop reporting. Later, Oppenheim told a Weinstein employee that “[Farrow’s] no longer working on the story. He’s not working for us.”

Weinstein kept gleefully saying, “If I can get a network to kill a story, how hard can a newspaper be?” He sent Oppenheim a bottle of Grey Goose. Later, Weinstein’s legal team, which included Lisa Bloom, threatened to sue Farrow. Farrow called Lisa, reminding her that she swore that she wouldn’t tell his people, and she said, “Ronan, I am his people.” 

Mira Sorvino

• Weinstein tried to kiss her, massage her shoulders, and she refused and reported his behavior; she had a strong feeling that he retaliated.
• Director Peter Jackson said that when he considered casting Sorvino in The Lord of the Rings, Weinstein interceded and said she was difficult to work with.

Asia Argento

• An intermediary led her not to a party, as he had promised, but to Weinstein’s hotel room. Weinstein pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex as she repeatedly told him to stop. 
• He kept contacting her and she eventually yielded to his further advances because her movie was coming out and she feared what might happen if she refused.

Sophie Dix

• Weinstein invited her to his hotel room to view footage, and then pushed her on the bed and tugged her clothes off. She escaped when room service knocked on the door. 
• Her friends were sympathetic but did nothing. (Colin Firth, like Quentin Tarantino, would later join other men who publicly apologized for doing nothing.)

Claire Forlani

• She posted on social media about her struggle over whether to talk to Farrow regarding Weinstein’s harassment: “I had already told Ronan I would speak with him but from the advice around me, interestingly the male advice around me, I didn’t make the call.”

Weinstein continued to call Farrow’s sources and sent a letter to The New Yorker, arguing that because of Farrow’s sister’s sexual assault, Farrow was not qualified to report this story. Weinstein also had an IT specialist delete a file entitled “HW friends” that listed the locations and contact information of dozens of women.

The competing New York Times story broke, which detailed verbal abuse and unwanted advances. Lisa Bloom worked hard to frame these allegations as mild indiscretions.

Weinstein started calling executives at NBC and Comcast. Oppenheim told the media that Farrow said he never secured anything useable. Oppenheim also ordered NBC to avoid covering the story. He called Farrow and said that NBC had to release a statement stating that NBC never had the story, and he wanted Farrow to sign.

Hillary Clinton, for whom Weinstein raised a lot of money, said nothing over the weekend while the stories exploded. Multiple people stated that they had warned Clinton about Weinstein.

Weinstein told NBC that he was aware of Matt Lauer’s behavior and could reveal it. (Eventually, Lauer would be terminated because of sexual harassment claims.) Two sources at AMI told Farrow the same thing. 

NBC hired Ed Sussman, a Wikipedia whitewasher, to clean certain information on the Wikipedia pages of Oppenheim, Weinstein, and Lauer. Several pages, including Oppenheim’s, did not mention killing the Weinstein story.

Donald Trump

Sources around American Media Inc., (which owned the Enquirer, run by Dylan Howard) said that Weinstein wasn’t the only figure with whom the tabloid empire had worked to suppress stories.

Karen McDougal

• She met Trump at a party (Trump’s son Barron was a few months old). They slept together and saw each other frequently. In April 2007, McDougal ended the affair. 
• In June 2016, she met with Howard, who offered, and she accepted, $150,000 to grant AMI exclusive ownership of her story, which AMI then buried.
• Later, McDougal agreed to speak on the record, hoping to expose a deeper and wider system of burying stories to cover up more serious behavior. 
  • AMI employees used the same phrase to describe this practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it: “Catch and kill.”

Trump was close with David Pecker, the AMI CEO, who killed at least ten fully reported stories about Trump, and many more potential leads. “We never printed a word about Trump without his approval.” And, “[s]ome of the employees felt that the most significant reward was AMI’s steadily accumulating blackmail power over Trump.”

Black Cube

• Throughout the book, Farrow mentions people following him, odd blips on his phone, and uncomfortable calls to him and his sources: specifically, contact from Seth Freedman, a former journalist, and a woman named Diana Filip.
• Farrow discovers that Freedman is working for the intelligence company Black Cube. Farrow contacted Black Cube and they promised to send documents that would dispel any claims that Black Cube had followed accusers or reporters.
  • Farrow instead received a leaked email from Sleeper1973, which included a complete record of Black Cube’s work for Weinstein.
    • Black Cube was to provide intelligence to stop the publication of a new negative article and obtain content of McGowan’s book being written that included harmful negative information. (Diana Filip befriended McGowan under a ruse, in order to extract this information).
    • The contract—to kill The New York Times article and obtain McGowan’s book—was signed by the Black Cube director and Boies Schiller, an attorney who represented The New York Times.
• Black Cube, through spies, collected extensive reports on all the sources and reporters.
• Farrow met with Igor Ostrovskiy, a private investigator, who tailed Farrow at Black Cube’s behest. Ostrovskiy told Farrow about the efforts to track him in person and through his phone, fearing that it may be illegal. Ostrovskiy said that he felt that tailing and gathering information on reporters undermined the type of free society he wanted to live in.

• Disturbing details of Weinstein’s Black Cube orders, including how Diana Filip and Seth Freedman embedded themselves in Rose McGowan’s life, and how frequently Black Cube contacted sources and reporters
• An extensive section on Matt Lauer and his accusers and how readily NBC dispelled them with NDAs for years
• Significant details about how AMI worked with Weinstein and Trump to either catch and kill a story, or find unflattering and damaging information on female accusers
• Excerpts of interviews of many witnesses who state that they saw Weinstein inappropriately touching women and that these women would then be paid off
• Story after story of the women Weinstein terrorized