Catch and Kill

by Ronan Farrow

  It was a blow. I had her name from documents. But the intermediary had described O’Connor’s raw panic. I was painfully aware that I was a man writing a story about women’s consent, confronting a woman saying she didn’t want her life upended in this way. Eventually, she would begin to tell her story publicly. But at the time, I promised I wouldn’t include her.

  Then there were those who hesitated. The actress Claire Forlani would later post an open letter on social media about her struggle over whether to describe to me her claim that Weinstein had harassed her. “I told some close men around me and they all advised me not to speak,” she wrote. “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.”

  I canvassed Hollywood for more leads. Some of Weinstein’s contacts seemed sincerely to know little about the claims surrounding him. Late that September, I reached Meryl Streep, who had made films with Weinstein for years, including The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic that had won Streep her most recent Oscar. When we connected, Streep was hosting a fiftieth reunion with school friends. “I am hosting and cooking tearing my hair,” Streep wrote.

  “Sounds like you’ve been in a maelstrom there,” I said, on the phone. She replied, not missing a beat, “a femalestrom.”

  She hummed along, luminous and buoyant, asking who it was I was reporting on.

  I told her Harvey Weinstein. Streep gasped. “But he supports such good causes,” she said. Weinstein had always behaved around her. She’d watched and sometimes joined in his Democratic fund-raising and philanthropy. She knew him to be a bully in the edit room. But that was it.

  “I believe her,” I told Jonathan later.

  “But you would either way, right?” he replied, considering it a thought exercise.

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Because she’s Meryl—”

  “Because she’s Meryl Streep. I get it.”

  Other industry veterans I spoke with sounded a different note. Weinstein’s predation was an open secret, they said, and if they hadn’t seen it, they’d heard about at least some of it. Susan Sarandon, the kind of ethical futurist who had stubbornly refused to work with accused predators for years, gamely brainstormed leads. She let out a cackle when I told her what I was up to. “Oh, Ronan,” she said, going into a teasing, singsong delivery. Not mocking, just delighting at the impending drama about to befall me. “You’re gonna be in trouble.”

  Still others appeared to report back to Weinstein. When I reached the director Brett Ratner, I implored him to keep the conversation in strict confidence. I told him there were vulnerable women who might get blowback if Weinstein became agitated. “Do you feel comfortable not repeating anything I mention, for their sake?” I asked. Ratner promised he wouldn’t. He said he knew of a woman who might have a story about Weinstein. But he sounded jittery. Months later, six women would accuse Ratner of sexual harassment in a Los Angeles Times report—though he denied several of their claims. He informed Weinstein of my inquiry almost immediately.

  “Harvey says Brett Ratner called him and now he’s all spun up,” Berger told me, in the this-is-gonna-be-the-death-of-me inflection that by then dominated our exchanges. Berger had been supportive of the story, if occasionally fretful about its effect on my professional prospects. “It’s causing too many speed bumps,” he said. “Either run it or move on.”

  Weinstein was doing canvassing of his own. As September turned to October, he sought out the figure at the heart of his claims that I had a conflict of interest. Weinstein had his assistants place the call. On a movie set in Central Park, another assistant brought a phone to Woody Allen.

  Weinstein seemed to want a strategic playbook—for quashing sexual assault allegations, and for dealing with me. “How did you deal with this?” Weinstein asked at one point. He wanted to know if Allen would intercede on his behalf. Allen shut down the idea. But he did have knowledge that Weinstein would later put to use. That week, Weinstein’s credit card receipts show his purchase of a book of interviews with Allen, written by a die-hard fan of his, documenting all of the arguments Allen and his army of private investigators and publicists had come up with to smear the credibility of my sister, the district attorney, and a judge who had suggested she was telling the truth.

  “Jeez, I’m so sorry,” Allen told Weinstein on the call. “Good luck.”

  Weinstein was also placing calls to my sources, sometimes frightening them. The day after I received the legal demand letter from Harder and company, Weinstein called Canosa again. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, but this seemed not to inform the sentiment of the call. He told her that he knew people were talking. “You’d never do something like that to me,” he said. Unsure if this was a question or a threat, Canosa got off the phone shaken. I told Remnick sources were getting jittery, that Weinstein appeared to be redoubling his efforts to shut people up. “I fast and he threatens,” Remnick replied. “Judaism comes in many forms.”

  Late that month, Weinstein met again with his team in the back room of the Tribeca Grill. He had been there for some time, huddled with his lawyers, discussing the latest developments in the amfAR story. Then there was a changing of the guard, some of the team members focused on that scandal shifting out as several operatives from Black Cube arrived. Their update was triumphant. “We got something good for you,” one of them said, smiling. They’d been mindful of the ways they’d fallen short earlier, but this time they’d gone big. They’d obtained a crucial, elusive piece of property that Weinstein had sought all summer long, and described the elaborate heist that had achieved this.

  There were three Black Cube operatives present that day: Yanus, the director, was there, and the project manager who worked under him; the third member of the team was a working-level employee who had been deeply involved in the operation. In a white shirt and blazer, she evinced crisp professionalism. She was blond, with high cheekbones, a strong nose, and an elegant, hard-to-place accent. She was introduced, in her meetings with Weinstein, as Anna.

  Anna was deferential to Yanus and their colleague, letting them direct the conversation. When they turned to her, she explained, with enthusiasm, the many months she’d spent gaining an important target’s trust and secretly recording hours of conversation. Then, as Weinstein’s eyes widened, and he muttered, “Oh my God, oh my God,” the Black Cube operatives read aloud what they said were the passages about Weinstein from Rose McGowan’s forthcoming book.

  CHAPTER 38:

  CELEBRITY

  Throughout September, The New Yorker’s work on the story picked up pace and intensity. Foley-Mendelssohn and Remnick and the rest of the team scrutinized the accumulating reporting and pored over drafts. I stayed at the World Trade Center late, making reporting calls. Arriving home near dawn one day, I saw a silver Nissan Pathfinder parked outside and felt a cold jolt of recognition. I still had no proof that I was being followed, but a jittery suspicion persisted.

  A few friends had offered to put me up that summer, and mostly these conversations had ended with a laugh from me and a promise that I was okay. Only one of those friends, Sophie, the daughter of a wealthy executive, said she was accustomed to security threats and told me to take my suspicions seriously. She said to call her if I needed somewhere safe to stay. Finally, I did.

  At the end of that month, I packed up my things and moved into what would become my safe house: a section of a building in Chelsea where Sophie’s family owned several floors. It was a space to comfortably house everyone you’ve ever met. The rooms were proportioned like airplane hangars—imposing and beautiful and full of ornate couches you’d be afraid to sit on and objets d’art you’d be afraid to touch.

  The place had several layers of security: card, physical key, code. I felt safer. But I still couldn’t shake the paranoia that I was being watched. “I’m saying get a gun,” Polone had said. And I’d laughed. But later, as others said the same thing, I star
ted to consider it. At a range in New Jersey, I brushed up on pistols and revolvers. I told myself this was just recreational. But, aiming a Glock 19 downrange, feeling its weight, squeezing the trigger, I felt nervy and flushed, and not much like a guy with a hobby.

  The signs that the New York Times was closing in on the story were picking up, too. I’d learned that two respected investigative reporters—Kantor, who’d been mentioned in the dossiers sent by the private investigators, and Megan Twohey—were leading the paper’s effort. They were formidable, chasing sources just as aggressively as I had. After Arquette and Nestor received calls, I told them they should work with whomever they were comfortable with. “In the end it’s good for us all that multiple people are working on this,” I texted Nestor. I was sincerely glad the Times was there to draw some of the heat and ensure the story saw the light of day, whatever happened to my effort. But privately, I was also feeling competitive, with some self-pity mixed in. For six months, the only support I’d had was Noah Oppenheim scrunching his nose and holding journalism at arm’s length, afraid it might get on him. Now, finally, I had The New Yorker, but it might be too late. I had no idea what the Times had. For all I knew, if it published first, our work at the magazine would be be rendered moot. The arms race was another source of pressure, another way in which it felt like I was working in an airlock, waiting to be blown out into the vacuum.

  McHugh texted in late September that he was hearing from his sources that the Times was on the verge of running something. NBC had banned him from taking calls about the sexual assault allegations, but he had kept at the story about amfAR, the AIDS charity. A source had pointed him to a line item buried in the charity’s tax returns suggesting that $600,000 had been diverted to the American Repertory Theater, which had incubated Finding Neverland, the musical Weinstein had later produced on Broadway and had entreated Gutierrez to see after their first encounter. McHugh had sought permission to work on the story. Greenberg, after conversations with Oppenheim, had appeared to allow it. But the permission had been hard-fought, and McHugh felt that the network dragged its feet afterward. “They were slow playing it,” he lamented later. He wasn’t sure whether they wanted him to be reporting, or just wanted the appearance of not having killed two stories about Weinstein in rapid succession.

  “Twohey filed her story today,” McHugh wrote to me. We debated about what might be in the Times story—whether it was their main story about sexual misconduct at all. “Either way,” McHugh wrote, “it’s showtime soon for Harvey.”

  Weinstein and Dylan Howard were having a similar conversation that day. The bond between the two men continued to grow stronger. “Dear Dylan,” Weinstein wrote after Twohey filed, “I just wanted to let you know that the New York Times are going to be posting their article today.”

  The next day, there was a Times breaking news alert about Weinstein. I clicked through. “It’s all amfAR,” McHugh texted. It was a false alarm.

  “How quickly can you get it out?” asked McHugh. “Get Remnick aware of the Weinstein news swirl. You’ve got the story. Time to get it out.” Auletta, calling in anxiously, applied similar pressure: “Hurry! Meet with him stat, then get this online.”

  I badgered Foley-Mendelssohn and then Remnick. He was fiercely competitive, but the magazine’s priorities were accuracy and caution. “We’re not going to race to beat anyone,” Remnick told me. The story would be ready when it was ready, after an intensive fact-checking process. “We’re an ocean liner, not a speedboat. We always knew that the Times might scoop us.”

  Nevertheless, Remnick dug into editing, peppering me with questions as he went (“Where is the Weinstein Co? Why does he stay in hotels all the time?”). When I wasn’t meeting with or calling sources, I was holed up with Foley-Mendelssohn or with Remnick, chiseling away at the language of the piece. We debated when to seek comment from Weinstein. “The sooner we speak to him the better,” I wrote to the editors.

  Remnick decided, in the interest of fairness and to limit Weinstein’s ability to badger the women whose names we would be revealing when we sought comment, to complete as much of the fact-checking as possible before we called Weinstein. Peter Canby, the magazine’s veteran head of fact-checking, assigned two checkers, for speed and added scrutiny. For one of the checking roles, Foley-Mendelssohn suggested E. Tammy Kim, a former attorney with a cool and serious disposition. When she was approached about the job, Kim folded her arms and said, unsmiling, “Is this gonna be a celebrity thing or something?” The other assignment went to Fergus McIntosh, a young Scot who had joined the magazine two years earlier after finishing his studies at Oxford. McIntosh was polite to a proper British standard and a little shy. On September 27, Kim and McIntosh began their work on the story, moving fast, putting in grueling hours, calling source after source after source.

  CHAPTER 39:

  FALLOUT

  In New York City, the rippling heat wavered but did not break. Both my sources and Weinstein’s intermediaries who periodically called to sound notes of menace were spread across time zones—Europe, Australia, China. At all hours, my phone felt like a ticking bomb. Sleep was becoming an involuntary reflex, a brief moment when, with a harsh crack like a light switch, I blinked and the shadows had changed, and I’d been out for an hour, my face embossed with the grain of whatever desk at The New Yorker I’d borrowed that night. I hoped Jeffrey Toobin or Dexter Filkins or whichever other reporter wouldn’t have occasion to discover all this drooling on their mouse pads. When I made it back to Chelsea to lie down, I managed only twilight half-sleep. In the mirrors around the place, I looked drawn and pale and thinner than I had at the beginning of the summer, like a consumptive child in an ad for some Victorian-era tonic.

  As the fact-checkers began calling sources widely, Weinstein picked up his threats. On the first Monday of October, he sent his first legal letter to The New Yorker. “This law firm, along with my co-counsel, David Boise, Esq. of Boise Schiller Flexner LLP and Lisa Bloom, Esq. of The Bloom Firm, are litigation counsel for The Weinstein Company,” Charles Harder wrote this time. The reporting was “defamatory,” he argued. “We demand that you refrain from publishing this story; provide TWC with a list of all statements about TWC (including its employees and/or executives) that you intend to publish.” There was the expected invocation of NBC: “Importantly, NBC News was previously working with Ronan Farrow regarding a potential story about TWC. However, after reviewing Mr. Farrow’s work, NBC News rejected the story, and terminated the project. It would be troubling if The New Yorker were to take Mr. Farrow’s work product, rejected by NBC News, and publish it—thereby exposing The New Yorker to liability and tremendous damages in connection therewith.”

  Weinstein’s recent conversation with Woody Allen appeared to inform the letter. Harder devoted several pages to the argument that my sister’s sexual assault disqualified me from reporting on Weinstein. “Mr. Farrow is entitled to his private anger,” Harder wrote. “But no publisher should allow those personal feelings to create and pursue a baseless and defamatory story from his personal animus.” He went on to quote the book Weinstein had purchased by the Woody Allen biographer, and to echo Allen’s argument that I’d been brainwashed into finding my sister’s claim credible.

  There were other colorful personal arguments. “As a second example, Ronan Farrow’s uncle, John Charles Villers-Farrow, was prosecuted, pled guilty and sentenced to ten (10) years in prison for sexually abusing two boys. We have yet to find any evidence that Ronan Farrow has publicly denounced his uncle, and he might have publicly supported him. Either way, and in light of Mr. Farrow’s outspoken criticism of his estranged father, Mr. Farrow’s actions call into question his credibility and perspective as a journalist.”

  As far as I could recall, I’d never met that uncle. My understanding was that the case against him was credible. My mother and his daughter had both cut him out of their lives. I’d never been asked about my extended family members who weren’t public figures. Had I
been, I wouldn’t have avoided the subject. What any of this had to do with the allegations against Weinstein was unclear.

  I was struck by how closely the arguments in the letter mirrored the talking points Oppenheim had recited to me. And I was reminded of the op-eds and television appearances Bloom had devoted to defending my sister’s credibility and burnishing her own brand as an advocate for women. I was becoming inured to people contorting their bodies into the shapes of gears for Harvey Weinstein’s machine. But I still wondered at Bloom’s name at the end of the letter, alongside Harder’s.

  The first week of October, Weinstein’s assistants emailed Dylan Howard: “We just tried you, but Harvey wanted to see if you could instead meet him in front of the NY Times Building on 8th Ave near 43rd Street. He’s on his way up there no so should be there in about 30 minutes.” Originally, Weinstein had asked his staff to make sure Howard joined him and Lisa Bloom for the drive uptown from the Weinstein Company offices to the Times. But Bloom and Weinstein had left without Howard, so the Enquirer editor would have to scramble uptown himself, manila folders in hand, containing “basically dirt” on Weinstein’s accusers, by the recollection of one person involved. Howard later disputed that he ever went to the Times building. What’s not in dispute is that Weinstein was soon in the meeting, hearing that the Times was preparing to publish its story about sexual misconduct.