A Book A Week

"In the end, the courage of women can't be stamped out. And stories--the big ones, the true ones--can be caught but never killed."

Ronan Farrow's article in the New Yorker caused quite the stir when it was published in 2017. He was writing about the sexual misconduct of Harvey Weinstein, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood. The ramifications of the allegations highlighted in his writing would go on to spur the Me Too movement, a call to arms against sexual harassment and abuse by powerful men. Of course, the road to getting that article published was far from easy. Someone like Weinstein had the motivation and means to keep his skeletons tightly packed away in his closet. In his book Catch and Kill, Farrow writes about his investigation into sexual transgressions of some of the world's most prominent men and the systems that protect them.

If I didn't know that everything Farrow writes about in this book actually happened, I'd probably have mistaken it for fiction. There's so much to Weinstein's attempts at a cover-up that seems like something directly out of an espionage thriller. As Farrow meticulously worked to vet sources, interview women, and piece together the decades of abuse and retaliation he faced roadblocks at every step. I was shocked to learn that Weinstein hired an Israeli counter-intelligence service to investigate Farrow and even follow him around New York. Would an innocent man go to such lengths to stop a story from happening?

Beyond covering Weinstein's heinous crimes, Farrow spends a good deal of the book describing the systems of power and big corporations that have prevented stories like his from surfacing. He experienced the attempts at censorship firsthand. At the time that he began investigating Weinstein, Farrow was a correspondent for NBC. He took the story to their news division and began the process of taping interviews with women. Andy Lack, head of the news division at the time, was wary of the story from the start, even claiming that there was not a story there when the evidence was overwhelming. Farrow had multiple women agree to tell their story on camera and one the record, but the higher-ups at NBC refused to bring the story to air. Eventually, he was allowed to shop the story elsewhere, and it landed at The New Yorker.

With the outing of NBC's Matt Lauer as another perpetrator of sexual misconduct in the workplace, it seems the company would have benefited from keeping the microscope of this kind of story quiet. Farrow writes a detailed account of a rape committed by Lauer that NBC was made aware of back in 2014. It is worth noting that Lauer was not fired from his role as anchor of the network's juggernaut morning program until 2017. It is easy to imagine that his tenure with the company would have continued to be protected if Farrow's article and the Me Too movement had not begun.

Catch and Kill is a thorough and riveting look into Ronan Farrow's investigation into Harvey Weinstein and the events that followed. Farrow is extremely candid about his own history with sexual misconduct (his sister Dylan has long spoken about the abuse she suffered under her adoptive father Woody Allen) and his dedication to being a voice for the countless women who have faced this all too common treatment. His book finds the perfect balance of keeping a journalistic approach to the facts of the events while interspersing a few personal anecdotes. Some of the most powerful parts are those where Farrow quotes the women and Weinstein verbatim. We see the harrowing toll that the sexual abuse has taken on the victims and the disgusting entitlement with which these powerful men felt they could keep things quiet. Three years after his initial article was published, Farrow continues to shed light on more and more stories like this one, and the number of prominent men that have perpetrated this abhorrent behavior continues to grow. Catch and Kill is a powerful look at some of the events that helped spark a movement. It is an uncomfortable but extremely necessary read.

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(2019, 42)