Catch and Kill

by Ronan Farrow

  At NBC News, there were more signs of anxiety about Weinstein. Soon after Twohey published her story about the amfAR scandal, McHugh was set to publish what he considered a significant follow-up based on his own reporting. At the last minute, management spiked it. Greenberg, who had for days expressed enthusiasm about McHugh’s reporting, changed his posture, saying it didn’t sufficiently advance the story. It was only after Janice Min, the former Hollywood Reporter editor, tweeted that more Weinstein-related news was languishing at NBC that Greenberg came back to McHugh and asked if he could revive his work quickly.

  Oppenheim had said I could finish out the other stories I was still working on for NBC. But when the next one’s air date arrived, I was told there was no time in the schedule for me to appear on set. Then, when the story was rescheduled, I was given the same excuse again. “Noah says Ronan’s not allowed on set,” a senior producer told McHugh. “Did something happen?” Lauer read my introduction instead.

  The night after the Times story ran, CBS News and ABC News prominently covered the deepening scandal on their evening programs. Both networks did so again the following morning, airing detailed segments with original interviews. Only NBC didn’t mention the news that first evening, and only NBC offered no original reporting the next morning. Instead, Craig Melvin, filling in for Lauer, read a script that ran less than a minute and was dominated by Weinstein’s rebuttals to the allegations. That weekend, the pattern repeated: Saturday Night Live, which had eagerly riffed on similar stories about Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump, didn’t mention Weinstein once.

  Nevertheless, NBC News was quietly shaping the public narrative around the story. Oppenheim and Kornblau, the head of communications, began talking to media reporters. The two executives suggested NBC had only passing involvement in the story. “Oppenheim says Ronan came to him several months ago and said he wanted to pursue sexual harassment, and after about two or three months, never secured any documentation and never persuaded any women to go on camera,” read a memorandum filed internally within an outlet Oppenheim and Kornblau spoke with. “This was a guy who really didn’t have anything,” Oppenheim said in one of the calls, “I understand this is very personal for him and he may be emotional about it.” Asked if he’d had any contact with Weinstein, Oppenheim laughed and said, “I don’t travel in those circles.”

  Several people involved later told me that, in those first days after the Times published, NBC avoided covering Weinstein at Oppenheim’s direction. “Noah literally went to them and said, ‘Do not run this story,’” one person recalled of Oppenheim’s conversations with producers at the time. As the story accelerated late that week, Oppenheim and a group of senior staff assembled for a routine coverage meeting. “Should we be doing something on this?” one of the producers present asked. Oppenheim shook his head. “He’ll be fine,” he said of Weinstein. “He’ll be back in eighteen months. It’s Hollywood.”

  CHAPTER 42:

  EDIFY

  One additional source joined our story after the Times published. A mutual friend alerted me to an allegation by Lucia Evans, a marketing consultant. In the summer of 2004, Weinstein had approached Evans at Cipriani Upstairs, a club in Manhattan. She was about to start her senior year at Middlebury College and was, at the time, trying to break into acting. Weinstein got her number and was soon calling late at night, or having an assistant call her, asking to meet. She declined the late-night advances but said that she would meet with a casting executive during the day.

  When she arrived for the meeting, the building was full of people. She was led to an office with exercise equipment in it and takeout boxes on the floor. Weinstein was there alone. Evans said that she found him frightening. “Even just his presence was intimidating,” she told me. In the meeting, Evans recalled, “he immediately was simultaneously flattering me and demeaning me and making me feel bad about myself.” Weinstein told her that she’d “be great in Project Runway”—the show, which Weinstein helped produce, premiered later that year—but only if she lost weight. He also told her about two scripts, a horror movie and a teen love story, and said one of his associates would discuss them with her.

  “After that is when he assaulted me,” Evans said. “He forced me to perform oral sex on him.” As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. “I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t,’” she recalled. “I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “he’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” She added, “I just sort of gave up. That’s the most horrible part of it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it’s their fault.”

  She told me that the entire sequence of events had a routine quality. “It feels like a very streamlined process,” she said. “Female casting director, Harvey wants to meet. Everything was designed to make me feel comfortable before it happened. And then the shame in what happened was also designed to keep me quiet.”

  We’d sent a detailed fact-checking memo to Bloom that Friday, and she’d promised to respond. When we still hadn’t heard back on Saturday, I called. She let it go to voicemail, then texted, “I’m not available today.” When she finally picked up, I was at Remnick’s place, the two of us huddled over the draft and our respective phones. Bloom sounded disconsolate. “What?” she snapped. And then, when I reminded her that Weinstein had asked me to work with her: “I can’t talk! I can’t comment on any of this!” She told me to call Harder, Boies, anyone else.

  Bloom’s voice gathered into something accusing and injured. She reminded me how persistently she’d tried to reach me. “For months!” she spat—as if my sharing more information might have led her to step away from Weinstein. Only Bloom and I had talked and, as far as I could tell, she’d used the occasion to offer opposition research on women, not to solicit information about her client. It had been a busy summer for Bloom. She’d also begun representing Roy Price, the Amazon Studios executive, after a harassment allegation against him was reported—representation she’d end that fall, amid criticism. Forty minutes after we got off the phone, Bloom tweeted that she’d resigned. She’d been sending emails to the Weinstein Company board describing her plans to discredit accusers virtually until the end.

  With Weinstein’s team in chaos, we decided to go back to the man himself. Over that weekend and into the following week, I reached him first for less formal calls, and then for long sessions during which I was joined by Remnick, Foley-Mendelssohn, and Bertoni, and Weinstein by lawyers and crisis advisors. Weinstein had added to his team the public relations firm Sitrick and Company, which handed the assignment to an even-tempered former Los Angeles Times reporter named Sallie Hofmeister.

  Large portions of the conversations with Weinstein were placed off the record. But there were also, among the calls, exchanges for which no ground rules were set, or which Weinstein explicitly placed on the record. At times he sounded defeated. There could be an almost boyish charm in the small “Hi, Ronan,” at the top of each call. But more often, there were flashes of the old Harvey Weinstein, arrogant and raging. “Allow me to edify you,” he’d say. “I’m giving you insights.”

  Weinstein suggested repeatedly that an interaction wasn’t rape if the woman in question came back to him later. That this was at odds with the reality of sexual assault as it so often transpires within inescapable workplace or family relationships—that it was at odds with the law—seemed to escape him. He was skeptical, too, of the theme of retaliation that ran through the women’s claims. “There’s no retaliating in Hollywood,” he said, calling the concept of powerful men intimidating women in the industry a “myth.” And when I wondered how he figured this was the case, he said that people could simply call up a Ronan Farrow or a Jodi Kantor or a Kim Masters and the retaliation would go away. I marveled at this logic: helping to create a problem,
then pointing to the response it had generated to claim the problem didn’t exist.

  In the earlier, less formal calls, there was a sense that Weinstein was still living in a parallel reality. He would acknowledge wrongdoing, then characterize his actions by discussing a time he wrote an offensive comment in a girl’s yearbook, or looked at a colleague the wrong way. Each time I reminded him that we were reporting multiple allegations of rape, he sounded startled. He’d been overwhelmed, he’d say, and hadn’t focused on the fact-checking messages in detail. And this seemed likely enough.

  Later, as the advisors joined the fray, the response that we ultimately included in the story came to the fore: a blanket denial of all “non-consensual sex,” with little engagement on the specific allegations. This seemed to reflect Weinstein’s sincere view: he seldom suggested events hadn’t transpired, instead insisting that the interactions had been consensual and were being recast years later in a spirit of opportunism.

  He spent an inordinate amount of time attacking the character of women in the story. “Harvey, I have a question,” Remnick interjected at one point, in all earnestness. “How does this relate to your behavior?” Weinstein seemed comparatively unconcerned with disputing specific facts. Sometimes, he simply couldn’t recall them. Once, he launched into a detailed discussion of an allegation not included in the story. He’d mixed up a name we’d given him and a similar-sounding one from his own memories.

  Each time I brought up the audio from the police sting, Weinstein would bristle, outraged that a copy had survived. “You have a copy of a tape that was destroyed by the district attorney?” he asked, in disbelief. “The tape that was destroyed?” Later, spokespeople in Vance’s office would say they never agreed to destroy evidence. But Weinstein was convinced of it. Hofmeister later called and put the point on the record. Weinstein, she told me, was very concerned that a deal he’d reached was being breached. “There was an agreement between the police and our—or the DA, I’m not sure who the agreement was with,” she said. “But it was with our law firm that the tape that the police had would be destroyed.”

  Weinstein continued to emphasize what he took to be an arrangement with NBC News. “NBC is pissed,” Weinstein said on several occasions. He wanted to know what I was going to do with the footage I’d shot there. He said that the network had promised him it would explore legal remedies against me if I ever used those recordings. When these points came up on the group calls, Remnick listened patiently, then dismissed the arguments. “NBC is not a consideration here,” he said. “This business of NBC is just—you’re gonna find that’s a nonstarter.”

  As the calls progressed, Weinstein’s temper flashed and flared. “Emily has an NDA,” he said of Nestor. “Be careful for her. We like her.” Dismayed handlers stepped in and began rapidly talking over him, with limited success. “She’s a sweetie and a sweetheart,” he continued. “Doesn’t deserve it.” There were threats to The New Yorker, as well: to sue, or to leak our fact-checking memo to preempt our story. “Careful,” Weinstein would say. “Guys, careful.”

  Once, when Hofmeister and the other handlers found themselves unable to stop Weinstein, they appeared to hang up. “We lost you,” Remnick said after the abrupt disconnection.

  “They didn’t want him to say that,” said Foley-Mendelssohn.

  “Yeah, that’s good lawyering right there,” Bertoni added, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s what he’s paying them the big bucks for, to fucking hang up the phone.”

  When we got them back on the line a few minutes later, Remnick said, “Sallie? Did a lawyer press the button?”

  “Are you on the phone?” Hofmeister replied.

  “I certainly am,” Remnick said.

  Where Weinstein offered specifics, the draft did evolve to reflect them. And by the end, even as his anger arced, Weinstein sounded resigned. Several times, he conceded that we’d been fair—and that he “deserved” a lot of it.

  On October 10, Foley-Mendelssohn circulated the final edit of the story at 1:00 a.m., and a final copyedit began at 5:00 a.m. By opening of business, the rest of the team had signed off, Kim and McIntosh scrutinizing the last small details. Michael Luo, the respected Times alumnus heading The New Yorker’s website, oversaw the final details of the web presentation. When I arrived, the magazine’s offices were quiet and flooded with sunlight, like a prism. As Monica Racic, the magazine’s multimedia editor, stood at her desk, preparing to go live, Foley-Mendelssohn and a few others began to gather, and I moved to take a picture. The idea had been unsmiling documentation, not triumphalism, but Remnick broke it up all the same. “Not our style,” he said, and shooed people away, and departed to get back to the grind.

  When it was done, I wandered over to one of the office’s windows and looked out at the Hudson. There was a numb feeling; Peggy Lee droning, “Is that all there is to a fire?” I hoped the women would feel it was worth it; that they’d been able to protect others. I wondered what would become of me. I had no arrangement with The New Yorker beyond that first story, and no path forward in television. In the glass, I could make out the dark circles under my own eyes and, beyond that, the world clear to the glittering horizon. A news chopper hovered over the Hudson, watching.

  My phone chimed, chimed again. I hurried to the nearest computer, pulled up a browser. From my email in-box and on Twitter and Facebook, the ping, ping, ping of alerts sounded. Message after message arrived, quickening to a constant scroll.

  Eventually, I’d hear from fellow journalists, including Kantor and Twohey, who’d labored long and hard over their story. Several reporters said they’d fielded efforts to intimidate them. One magazine writer who broke a significant story about Weinstein showed me the messages and played me the voicemails that eventually graduated to explicit threats of harm to him and his family. The FBI had gotten involved. He’d run his report anyway.

  But mostly the messages came from stranger after stranger, saying they, too, had stories. Some were from women and others from men. Some were searing accounts of sexual violence and some focused on other species of crime or corruption. All whispered of abuses of power and of the systems—in government, media, law—deployed to cover them up.

  That first day, Melissa Lonner, the former Today show producer who’d met with me while she was working at Sirius XM, sent a message I barely noticed: “There are more Harveys in your midst.”

  CHAPTER 43:

  CABAL

  “Confident we can get new deal done,” Noah Oppenheim texted that day. I’d been a liability inside the building; now I’d be a liability if I left. He called less than an hour after the story ran. “I’m glad it worked out,” he said. “Good, good, good!” He continued: “As I’m sure you can imagine, Nightly, MS”—as in, MSNBC—“everyone is sort of calling and saying ‘Hey, how do we reach Ronan? Can we book him to come on and talk about the article?’ So, I just wanted to see where your head was on that.” Oppenheim said they’d give me an NBC title again for the appearances.

  “The only reason I would be hesitant about going on NBC is I don’t want to put anyone there or put you in an awkward position. Obviously Harvey made the story behind the story and the history of it at NBC a big part of his thrust against me,” I told Oppenheim. “If I’m asked about the history of it at NBC, I don’t want to be in a position where I have to be hiding anything.”

  Oppenheim and Kornblau were making the issue harder to avoid. By then, several media reporters had called me, claiming that the two executives had been dissembling about the history of the story in background conversations. Stressed, I’d punted the calls to Raabe, The New Yorker’s head of communications, and to Jonathan. While Oppenheim and I spoke, Jake Tapper, of CNN, had tweeted, “Speaking of media complicity ask yourself why NBC reporter Ronan Farrow wrote this for The New Yorker.” Soon, Tapper was on air reading a quote. “An NBC source told the Daily Beast, quote, ‘He brought NBC News early reporting on Weinstein that didn’t meet the standard to go forward with t
he story. It was nowhere close to what ultimately ran. At that time, he didn’t have one accuser willing to go on the record or identify themselves. The story he published is radically different than what he brought to NBC News.’” Then he furrowed his brow and said, “That seems like a real lie to me.”

  When I mentioned not being able to lie if the matter arose on air, Oppenheim laughed nervously. “I mean, look, unless—unless you’re gonna, like—I mean, it doesn’t sound like you’re inclined to do it—unless you’re gonna bring up—”

  “No. No,” I replied. “My honest goal here, Noah, as it has been throughout this process, is to not have anything overshadow the stories of these women.”

  Oppenheim asked if I’d get over to 30 Rock quickly to shoot a spot for Nightly News. I sensed I was being sent to deodorize a public relations problem. But the women’s claims really did deserve exposure on NBC’s platforms. And the truth was, I wanted my job back. I told myself that avoiding the story behind the story wouldn’t be the same as lying about it.

  A few hours later, my phone pinged: “Ronan, it’s Matt Lauer. Let me be the 567th person to say congratulations on an amazing piece!”

  The arrangement with Oppenheim was a tightrope walk. On other networks, I dodged questions, redirecting the conversation toward the women. On NBC programs, I appeared under shifting titles: contributor or correspondent, investigative or not, the detritus of hasty resurrection. When I arrived that afternoon to record the Nightly News segment, colleagues approached, ashen-faced. A producer who often worked the police beat, trembling with something like grief, said that he would have loved the chance to help and that he couldn’t understand what had happened. A correspondent texted, “As a survivor of sexual abuse, I feel like we are working for a media cabal akin to the Vatican, willing to cover up sex crimes.” These were some of the best journalists I knew, the people who had made me proud to be associated with NBC News. They were fiercely committed to the network’s ideals of truth and transparency. “People who cared about journalism in the building were very discomforted by all this,” a different member of the investigative unit later told me. “It’s taken a long time for things to heal here.”