Thanks to Ronan Farrow, Harvey Weinstein is finally in court

As most of us watched, terrified, as tensions between America and Iran escalated, the media world’s trial of the decade (trademark) began. A bedraggled Harvey Weinstein slumped into a New York court room holding onto a Zimmer frame. The once mighty Hollywood mogul, a tag around his ankle, prepared to face rape charges.

A large part of the reason Weinstein found himself facing trial is down to Ronan Farrow. His reporting, published in the New Yorker after apparent stonewalling by his then employer NBC, revealed allegations against Weinstein of years of abuse from numerous women. Farrow told the story of how we got here in Catch and Kill, his gripping, thriller-like tale of more than a year of investigation.

As I outlined in my review of the book:

“Armed with extensive evidence, [Farrow] and his producer Rich McHugh repeatedly tried and get their bosses and NBC to air the story. That’s when the [Weinstein] 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.”

He confesses in the acknowledgements that he even missed his sister Quincy’s wedding as he finished the story. Ironically, the pursuit of Weinstein had personal resonance for Farrow. The son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, in 2016 he wrote in the Hollywood Reporter that watching his father combat accusations of sexual abuse against his sister, Dylan “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.”

As Weinstein arrived in the Manhattan court room, the Los Angeles district attorney, Jackie Lacey, announced further rape and assault charges against him. It means that he will face a second trial, even if found innocent in New York. Before that, we could have A-list celebrities Salma Hayek, Rosie Perez and Charlize Theron called as witnesses or cited in evidence.

I described reading Catch and Kill as an “exhausting, disturbing experience . . . 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.” Indeed, “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.”

The trial is likely to feel similarly excruciating, as the accusations, evidence, and case for the defence are laid out.

Despite Weinstein’s now somewhat haggard appearance, (I’ll leave it to readers to decide about the genuine nature of this — a theme throughout Catch and Kill is how physically imposing Weinstein is) Farrow’s reporting outlined just how determined he was for the accusations against him never to come out. It tells of various non-disclosure agreements and Weinstein’s use of Israeli private investigators to try and kill the story and to intimidate Farrow. One of the key moments in the book is when the New York Times published its allegations against Weinstein. My review recounted how he “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.”

He may no longer look physically imposing, but Weinstein appears as unrepentant in court as he does at various points in Farrow’s reporting. During the opening days of the trial, Judge James Burke has repeatedly told him to stop using his two mobile phones. Eventually, Justice Burke threatened to revoke Weinstein’s $5 million bail if he did not stop using his phones in the court room, telling the defendant: “Is this really how you want to end up in jail for the rest of your life, by texting and violating a court order?”

I regard Catch and Kill as “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.” The result of this trial could be the media equivalent of Nixon’s resignation.