by Ronan Farrow (Little, Brown 2019)
Reading Catch and Kill immediately after She Said was interesting. Most of the book details Farrow’s pursuit of the same story that Twohey and Kantor were chasing in She Said–Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse of hundreds of women over many years. Naturally, both books share many of the same characters: victims/witnesses/sources, predators, and enablers. In Catch and Kill, there is also a whole new cast of characters from NBC News, where he worked when he began investigating Weinstein, and The New Yorker, which eventually published the finished piece (and several follow-ups) after NBC ordered Farrow and his collaborator, Rich McHugh, to stop work on the story, as well as people at The National Enquirer and its parent company, AMI, who took it upon themselves to buy the rights to stories concerning the misbehavior of people like Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump and then consign them to a vault so that they would never see the light of day (the “catch-and-kill” of the title).
Yes, it’s true: NBC was complicit in the coverup (and guilty of tolerating a similar culture of sexual abuse and coverup in the person of Matt Lauer, host of the Today show). Yet another shocker (I guess I am pretty naive). I don’t watch NBC, but I used to consider it part of the “mainstream media” which can be (more or less) trusted. No more. If I did watch it, I would stop. At least in the case of NBC, they did not attempt to stop Farrow from publishing his results in The New Yorker–in fact, Noah Oppenheim, one of Farrow’s superiors at NBC) actually suggested it.
The sheer number of people in the book is breath-taking, and I found it hard to keep them all straight. The chapter titles are weird, and in most cases I could not discern their relationship to the chapter they named: “Button”, “Quidditch”, “Syzygy”, “Spike”. I don’t know why he even bothered to name them. I suppose there is a connection, but it would have taken time and mental energy to figure out what it was, so I didn’t bother. Ditto for the Part titles: “Poison Valley”, “White Whale”, “Army of Spies”, “Sleeper”, and “Severance”.
Farrow includes enough personal details and reconstructed conversations in the story to keep the reader interested and to pave the way for a film based on the book I think it would make a good movie, if only they limit the number of characters in it. But now I think I will read something entirely different. Enough sleaze. (As of this writing, Harvey Weinstein is still a free man, still rich, awaiting his trial in New York and planning his comeback in the movie business. The creep.)
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