Catch and Kill

by Ronan Farrow

  When sources reached me with the same message, I was in a cab. I tried Jonathan, then tried him again. He was increasingly busy with work, and I was increasingly needy and annoying.

  “What?!” he snapped, when he finally called back. He was stepping out of another meeting.

  “The Times is running,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, a little impatiently. “You knew they might.”

  “It’s good it’s breaking,” I said. “It’s just—all these months. This whole year. And now I have no job.” I was losing it, actually starting to cry. “I swung too wide. I gambled too much. And maybe I won’t even have a story at the end of it. And I’m letting down all these women—”

  “Calm down!” Jonathan shouted, snapping me out of it. “All that’s happening right now is you haven’t slept or eaten in two weeks.”

  A horn sounded outside.

  “Are you in a cab?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” I sniffled.

  “Oh my God. We are going to talk about this, but first you are going to tip that driver really well.”

  After the letter from Weinstein and Harder came in, Remnick called me into his office, along with Bertoni and Foley-Mendelssohn. Weinstein’s legal argument, in order of ascending absurdity and descending seriousness, was that anything negative about him was defamatory; that reporting on any company that used NDAs was impermissible; that he had cut a deal with NBC; that my sister was sexually assaulted; and that there was a child molester in my extended family. (Jonathan howled with laughter at it. “This letter is adorable,” he said. “I love this letter.”) But I’d watched a news organization internalize thin arguments before. As I filed into Remnick’s office, part of me was still braced for capitulation or skittishness. He said plainly, “This is the most disgusting letter I’ve ever gotten about a story.”

  Still a little apprehensive, I reminded Remnick that Weinstein was also threatening to sue me personally and that I didn’t have a lawyer. “I want to be clear,” he said. “We will defend you legally, no matter how far Harvey Weinstein goes.” Bertoni responded briefly to Harder: “With regard to your statements about the independence and ethics of Mr. Farrow, we find the issues you raise to be without any merit whatsoever.”

  As I left work that evening, Remnick called to say that Asia Argento’s partner, Anthony Bourdain, had contacted him. Bourdain had been supportive of Argento speaking before, but even so, my heart sank: over and over, women who had withdrawn from the story had done so after an intervention from a husband, a boyfriend, a father. Outreach from significant others was seldom good news. But there are exceptions to every rule: Bourdain said Weinstein’s predation was sickening, that “everyone” had known about it for too long. “I am not a religious man,” he wrote. “But I pray you have the strength to run this story.”

  The New Yorker team rallied around the reporting, which was proving out, one allegation after another, under pressure from the fact-checkers. We were still waiting until all the claims were fully checked before seeking comment from Weinstein. But several Weinstein intermediaries had already made contact, their tone not combative but resigned. One member of his legal team took the extraordinary step of calling the magazine shortly after Harder’s letter arrived, saying that the threats in it had been wrong, inadvisable. “This is not a situation where I’m telling you you’re getting it wrong,” that attorney said. “The allegations of gross improper conduct—a great many of the instances are true.”

  The temperature rose, turning Foley-Mendelssohn’s office into a sweatbox. She and I sat bowed over print-outs of the draft, with perspiration beading on our foreheads. There was impassioned debate over choices of language, Remnick pressing for caution wherever possible. Initially, we’d excluded the term “rape,” fearing it might be distracting or prejudicial. Foley-Mendelssohn and Kim, the fact-checker, pushed back. To exclude the word, they argued, would be a whitewash. In the end, Remnick and Bertoni agreed, and the word stayed in.

  One of those days, I stepped out of the heat and into Remnick’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Outside, at the margin of the building’s limestone facade, there was a tin Fallout Shelter sign. Inside, a double-height living room was lined with books. Remnick’s wife, the former Times reporter Esther Fein, shooed me into the kitchen, insisting I eat. The couple met in the late eighties and went to Moscow on assignment for rival papers, Remnick for the Washington Post. The family had preserved a section of wall bearing the recorded heights of its two sons and one daughter through their years of growth, just like in the movies. In his small home office, Remnick and I fine-tuned the draft. I was frazzled and sleep-deprived, and he was generous, even when I was dead wrong about edits.

  If this passed for calm, there was a sense that it was before a large storm. Early that first week of October, Kim Masters ran a story for the Hollywood Reporter, headlined “Harvey Weinstein Lawyers Battling N.Y. Times, New Yorker Over Potentially Explosive Stories.” Variety ran its version a few minutes later. The cable news cycle began to chatter. This development had the upside of emboldening sources. That day, the actress Jessica Barth, who had appeared in the Ted films with Seth MacFarlane, reached out to tell me that Weinstein had sexually harassed her during a hotel-room meeting—a story that ultimately checked out. But the headlines also made me feel exposed. Whatever happened next would take place under stadium lights.

  CHAPTER 40:

  DINOSAUR

  The world was changing around Harvey Weinstein that October. He looked haggard. Fits of rage were his baseline, but the outbursts that month were more erratic than usual. Inside the Weinstein Company he grew suspicious. It would later be reported that he’d been monitoring the work communications of Irwin Reiter, who sent Nestor the sympathetic messages and whom Weinstein had branded “the Sex Police.” On October 3, Weinstein had an IT specialist pull up and delete a file entitled “HW friends” that mapped out the locations and contact information of dozens of women in cities around the world.

  On the morning of October 5, Weinstein summoned much of his defense team to his offices on Greenwich Street, where a makeshift war room took shape in a greenroom. Bloom was there, and Howard. Pam Lubell and Denise Doyle Chambers, the veteran employees who had been brought back to help assemble the target list, were also there, not very confused about the status of their book proposal. Davis and Harder called in, the assistants placing them on speakerphone. Weinstein was crazed, shouting at the top of his lungs. The Times story hadn’t broken yet, but he had been told it was imminent. He roared name after name at Lubell and Doyle Chambers and the assistants, of board members and allies in the entertainment industry who he hoped would defend him after the stories started breaking. Bloom and others pored over printed and digital pictures that showed ongoing contact between Weinstein and women on the target list: McGowan and Judd, on his arm, smiling politely. “He was screaming at us, ‘Send these to the board members,’” Lubell later recalled. And she dutifully sent them on.

  Farther downtown, I took a seat at a vacant desk at The New Yorker and called the Weinstein Company for comment. Sounding nervous, the front desk assistant I reached said he’d check if Weinstein was available. And then there was Weinstein’s husky baritone. “Wow!” he said with mock excitement. “What do I owe this occasion to?” The writing about the man before and after seldom lingered on this quality: he was pretty funny. But this was easy to forget as he veered swiftly toward fury. Weinstein hung up on me several times that fall, including on that first day. I told him I wanted to be fair, to include anything he had to say, then asked if he was comfortable with my recording. He seemed to panic, and was gone with a click. The pattern repeated that afternoon. But when I got him to talk for a sustained time, he abandoned his initial caution, didn’t put the conversation off the record, just got sharply combative.

  “How did you identify yourself to all these women?” he demanded.

  I was caught off balance a little.

  “Depending on the timing,
I accurately described the outlet.” I started to say that this wouldn’t help us hear him out on the allegations, but he jumped in again.

  “Oh, really? Like you’re a reporter at NBC. And what do your friends at NBC have to say about that now?” I felt a flush rising in my cheeks.

  “I’m calling because I want to hear you out,” I said.

  “No. I know what you want. I know you’re scared, and alone, and your bosses abandoned you, and your father—”

  Remnick was outside at this point, tapping on the glass quietly. He shook his head, made a “wrap it up” gesture.

  “I’m happy to talk to you, or whomever you want on your team,” I said.

  Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.

  Weinstein told me to send all my questions to Lisa Bloom. By the end of the calls, he was charming again, politely thanking me.

  At just after 2:00 p.m., phones chimed and an assistant walked into the Weinstein Company greenroom with the news about the Times. “The article’s up,” the assistant said. “Oh shit,” said Dylan Howard, and asked staffers to print copies for everyone. As the team read the article, the tension broke. For a brief moment, Weinstein was relieved. It was good news, he told the assembled staffers, that the story had come out on a Thursday rather than a Sunday, which he deemed to be the Times’s preferred real estate for major stories. Then he departed to see his wife, Georgina Chapman, who was attending a fashion show for her clothing label, Marchesa. “She said, ‘I’ll stick with you,’” Weinstein told several of the team members when he got back. But he was already turning to the reporting still to come. After the New Yorker story, he said under his breath, “She’s gonna leave me.”

  Foley-Mendelssohn and I sat opposite Remnick in his office and read the Times article, him on a monitor, the two of us scrolling on our phones. The story was powerful, with Ashley Judd finally attaching Weinstein’s name to the account she’d given Variety two years earlier about unwanted advances from a producer, which finally made sense of the odd call I’d had with Nick Kristof months earlier. It also discussed O’Connor’s story about verbal abuse, and Nestor’s about workplace propositions, though without their involvement.

  There were no allegations of assault or rape. Lisa Bloom quickly put out a statement, referring to the allegations as, mostly, a matter of misunderstanding. “I have explained to him that due to the power difference between a major studio head like him and most others in the industry, whatever his motives, some of his words and behaviors can be perceived as inappropriate, even intimidating.” Weinstein was just an “old dinosaur learning new ways,” she argued. By the next day’s morning programs, Bloom was working to frame the allegations in the Times piece as mild indiscretions. “You’re using the term sexual harassment, which is a legal term,” she said to George Stephanopoulos. “I’m using the term workplace misconduct. I don’t know if there’s a real significant difference, to most people, but sexual harassment is severe and pervasive.” She said that she’d counseled Weinstein sternly against talking in the office “the way you talk to your guy friends, you know, when you’re going out for a beer.” Weinstein, in his own statements, said that he “came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” and professed to be on a “journey” to “learn about myself,” with “Lisa Bloom to tutor me.” Weinstein pledged to devote himself to fighting the National Rifle Association. As far as Bloom and Weinstein were concerned, he would get therapy, start a foundation for female directors at USC, and that would be that.

  In Remnick’s office, I looked up from the Times story. My phone vibrated on the desk, a text from Jonathan. “Times ran. They have harassment, not assault,” he wrote. “Race race race.” And then, rapidly, another text from McHugh, making the same point. The Times, he added, had “less than what we were stopped for.”

  “It’s very strong work,” Remnick said, looking up from the story.

  “But they don’t have anywhere near what we have,” Foley-Mendelssohn said, with undisguised relief.

  “So we keep going,” I ventured.

  “We do,” Remnick said.

  CHAPTER 41:

  MEAN

  After declaring his relief at the Times story and its timing, Weinstein issued what was supposed to be a galvanizing message to the staff. “Roll up your sleeves,” he announced. “We’re going to war.” One assistant responded, “I’m done, Harvey,” and left. Weinstein said to stop, offered to write a glowing recommendation. “I looked at him like are you fucking kidding me?” the assistant recalled.

  That evening, the Weinstein Company board of directors convened an emergency conference call. The nine members of the all-male board would be on the line, including Weinstein. For several years, rancor had deepened between a small group of directors seeking to oust Weinstein and a majority of loyalists who considered him indispensable to the company’s success. With painful frequency, stories of abuse by powerful people are also stories of a failure of board culture. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, held two seats on the board, and the company’s charter allowed them to name a third. Over time, Weinstein was able to install loyalists in many of the remaining seats, too. By 2015, when Weinstein’s contract was due to be renewed, he essentially controlled six out of nine board seats, and used that influence to evade accountability. When an adversarial board member, Lance Maerov, demanded to see Weinstein’s personnel file, Boies and Weinstein were able to prevail in preventing this, instead enlisting an outside attorney to render a hazy summary of its contents. Maerov later told a Fortune writer that there had been a cover-up.

  That evening in early October, Weinstein got on the phone with the board. He denied everything, then argued that the Times story would blow over. The call devolved into bitter recrimination between the factions within the board and between the Weinstein brothers. “I’ve never heard such mean people all around,” Lubell recalled. “You know, Bob: ‘I’m gonna finish you, Harvey, you’re done!’ Harvey: ‘We’re gonna open up the books on you!’”

  In the small hours after the emergency board meeting and on into the following morning, Weinstein bombarded his allies with emotional calls and emails. Among them were executives at NBC and Comcast. Meyer, the NBCUniversal vice chairman, reached out. (“Dear Ron,” Weinstein responded that morning. “I just got your message, and thank you—I will. I’m on my way to LA. All my best, Harvey.” The two men agreed to talk.)

  At 1:44 a.m. on October 6, Weinstein sent an email to Brian Roberts, the head of Comcast, Noah Oppenheim’s boss’s boss’s boss, calling in a favor. “Dear Brian,” he wrote. “There comes a moment in everyone’s life when someone needs something, and right now, I could use some support.”

  In Auletta’s files, I’d found a taped interview with Roberts, in which he’d served as a rare defender of Weinstein against those who characterized him as a bully. “It’s been sort of a joy,” Roberts said of Weinstein’s and his friendship, and their time spent hobnobbing in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard. “I don’t personally get put off by all these Hollywoodisms,” Roberts said of Weinstein’s personality. “I look and see a guy who is doing great things and built a company.” Roberts called Weinstein a good father, a good person. “I think,” Roberts added, “he’s like a teddy bear.”

  Comcast, NBC’s parent company, was a family business, founded by Roberts’s father. The company’s articles of incorporation gave Roberts unshakable power: “The Chairman shall be Mr. Brian L. Roberts if he is willing and available to serve…. The CEO shall be Mr. Brian L. Roberts if he is willing and available to serve.” Several executives who worked with Roberts called him mild-mannered or gentle. He was the only person in the corporate chain of command who later approached me to apologize, saying that he had daughters and believed in the reporting. But the executives who worked with him also said that Roberts avoided co
nflict. On contentious issues, he “doesn’t stand up,” one of them said. “He won’t get in the way of Steve doing dirty work”—that is, Steve Burke, who served under Roberts as the CEO of NBCUniversal.

  Burke had a rapport with Weinstein as well. A former member of Weinstein’s staff—who facilitated Burke’s provision of Minions costumes for the Weinstein-produced show at Radio City Music Hall where the studio head met Ambra Gutierrez—described Burke as being “in Weinstein’s pocket.” And the executives who worked with Roberts said that Burke was similarly conflict-averse. One recalled a case in which another Hollywood power broker and his lawyer began to call NBC News, demanding that the network not air an interview. The executive recalled informing Burke that the network intended to proceed with the story, and Burke replying, “Pull it,” adding that the Hollywood power broker “will owe you his life.”

  “Steve, oh my God, we will have destroyed the reputation of NBC News,” the executive remembered saying. After another member of Burke’s team interceded to make the same point, Burke agreed to run the story. Prior to his time at NBCUniversal, Burke worked at Disney, with considerable accomplishments in the company’s retail and theme park endeavors. But the executives said that he was less attuned to news media. “I don’t think it’s even about protecting his friends, it’s just, ‘This guy is powerful, I’m getting these calls, I don’t need this problem,’” said the executive who pushed back on Burke’s suggestion that they shelve an interview. “He doesn’t know it’s not ethical.”