407. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by: Lisa Goldberg
Author: Ronan Farrow
Genre: Nonfiction, Crime, Politics
448 pages, published October 15, 2019
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Catch and Kill is the story behind Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow’s groundbreaking story in which he helped to expose the powerful interests, including his own employer NBC News, who conspired to protect serial predator Harvey Weinstein and how that scandal ignited the “Me Too” feminist movement.
Quotes
“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.”
“You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.”
“I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”
“Look at what’s happening! No one on these calls wants to own any of this, because it’s so obviously bad! It’s like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone wants it dead, nobody wants to stab it!”
“I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program.”
“Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.”
“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”
“Bourdain said Weinstein’s predation was sickening, that “everyone” had known about it for too long. “I am not a religious man,” he wrote. “But I pray you have the strength to run this story.”
“All the women before feel I am their fault,” she said. “And if there were women after me, I feel that is my fault.”
“The writer and actor Lena Dunham disclosed how, during the 2016 campaign, she’d told Clinton’s staff that the campaign’s reliance on Weinstein as a fund-raiser and event organizer was a liability. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” she recalled telling a communications staffer, one of several she said she warned.”
“She had graduated from the best Ivy League institutions, in the sequence required to achieve maximum prestige.”
My Take
I had loosely followed the Harvey Weinstein story while it was all over the news and therefore had an interest in reading Catch and Kill. Ronan Farrow narrates a compelling story of just how hard and how many obstacles had to be overcome before dam burst and Harvey Weinstein got his due. It was especially troubling to see how corrupt NBC News was in covering up for Weinstein and Today show host Matt Lauer. Hopefully, the world we be spared from future Harvey Weinsteins.
