Review: Ronan Farrow ‘Catch and Kill’ – How an obsessive reporter brought down Hollywood’s biggest beast

For years, Harvey Weinstein reigned supreme in both Hollywood and New York. Then Ronan Farrow came along.

In Catch and Kill, Farrow tells the full story of how he investigated allegations of sexual assault and rape against the movie mogul and, just as importantly, how he finally came to publish them.

Farrow is the son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. His sister, Dylan, has made allegations that Allen sexually assaulted her in childhood. When Farrow wrote about his family’s tragic history in 2016 for the Hollywood Reporter he said: “Being in the media as my sister’s story made headlines, and Woody Allen’s PR engine revved into action, gave me a window into just how potent the pressure can be to take the easy way out. Every day, colleagues at news organisations forwarded me the emails blasted out by Allen’s powerful publicist, who had years earlier orchestrated a robust publicity campaign to validate my father’s sexual relationship with another one of my siblings.”

There is then no pretending that this is not personal for the author (a point Weinstein and his lawyers tried to use in their defence). But the reporting is scrupulous, almost painfully so, as Farrow goes slowly from one source to the next, uncovering ever more horrendous allegations and corroborating victims’ stories.

Armed with extensive evidence, he and his producer Rich McHugh repeatedly tried and get their bosses and NBC to air the story. That’s when the PR engine started revving. In the end, NBC let Farrow go and he took his story with him. “There seemed to be no interest in the loftiest echelons of the corporation in… learning the full extent of the reporting,” Farrow writes.

The network insists that Farrow’s portrayal is inaccurate and that he is just a disgruntled ex-employee.

The reality was very different, in no small part due to Farrow’s determination to break a story that plenty of people knew about but nobody had published. It consumed him. As the months covered by Catch and Kill unfold on the page, Farrow sleeps less and less, he loses weight and his health declines. He recounts rows with his then boyfriend, now fiancée, Jonathon Lovett.

Reading this book is an exhausting, disturbing experience. This is not just because of the somewhat graphic way the women’s allegations are detailed, but also because Farrow’s desperation and exhaustion leaps off the page.

Perhaps the most excruciating moment is when Farrow takes his work to the New Yorker. Having left NBC, he keeps reporting there, but has a whole new set of editors to convince and an extensive fact-checking process to endure. As he recounts how fact-checkers at the magazine looked back over every part of his reporting, I found myself almost screaming “just publish, already”. But of course, they could not, and should not, have done so. The army around Weinstein was waiting to pounce on any error.

In the end, the New York Times scooped Farrow and the New Yorker. Sort of. They didn’t quite have the goods. With the New York Times published, Weinstein was ready and typically aggressive, telling his team: “We’re going to war.” By the end though, the weight of evidence was too great and “Weinstein sounded resigned,” recalls Farrow. “Several times, he conceded that we’d been fair — and that he’d ‘deserved’ a lot of it.”

The consequence of the New Yorker story was the downfall of an entertainment titan. But Farrow didn’t stop there. His reporting led him to the murky world of tabloid media and “killed-off” stories. These are usually items of scurrilous celebrity news that have been bought by a publication and stuffed in a safe. Having acquired the story, the publication then has total legal control over it, and can decide whether or not to publish — it has been “caught and killed”. Some of these killed-off stories were even said to involve the US president Donald Trump.

Farrow is an assiduous, brilliant investigative journalist. He writes about journalism in the high-minded and somewhat over-serious way only American reporters can. He presents his pursuit of Weinstein like a thriller, not a piece of reporting.

If I have any complaint about this book, it is that all the various media executives and sources are a little jumbled in part. Farrow often just makes reference to surnames, when perhaps a reminder of who a person is, wouldn’t go amiss. He forgets his readers aren’t as immersed in the material as he is.

But this is nit-picking. Catch and Kill is a phenomenal piece of work that perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the #metoo moment — something akin to All the President’s Men for our celebrity-driven age.

Catch and Kill (Little Brown) by Ronan Farrow