Catch and Kill - Ronan Farrow
I waited ages to receive a copy of Catch and Kill from my local library, and funnily enough the day I got the notification to go and pick it up was the day before Weinstein was found guilty. When the notification popped up on my phone I was walking down the street and had to take a moment to shed a few tears, breathe, and recompose myself. I think most women, and men, who have suffered at the hands of a predator must have felt the same way as I did when they heard the result of the trial: one of them finally didn’t get away with it.
I remember the day Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article was published, and I remember all of the emotions I felt while reading it. Finally. Finally something was happening. I already had so much respect for Ronan Farrow as a journalist, and after reading his book that respect has grown thousandfold.
Catch and Kill is honestly terrifying. The amount of work these predators do, the amount of money they spend, the amount of pressure they exert, just to cover up their crimes, and continue harassing, assaulting, raping women is insane. The amount of work that news networks did to cover up reports, the amount of smear campaigns created just to discredit victims who wouldn’t be silenced, the amount of undercover spy ops used to obtain information on journalists, victims, whistleblowers… It’s all insane, and it’s all terrifying because it’s true. I can’t even imagine the pressure Farrow was under while he tried to get these stories on the air, and I can’t even begin to imagine how stressful and painful it was for the survivors to come forward, only to see their lives being destroyed again by the same people.
In Catch and Kill Ronan Farrow describes in detail how he started to gather information on Weinstein, with his awesome producer Rich McHugh, and how NBC, their employer, kept halting the story from breaking, and finally killed it. He tells us about all of the women who came forward, the months of investigation, and how he finally ended up going over to the New Yorker where he was supported, and where the story was eventually published. The book also provides information on the fall-out, and also on other major names who were finally outed as predators. So many of the women’s stories made me cry, but the one story that has haunted me in the days since I have finished this book is Brooke Nevils’. Matt Lauer deserved so much worse than just being fired.
In any case this is an absolute must-read. There are triggering scenes, and I had to take a step back a few times while reading, as a lot of it affected me, but I cannot praise this book and Ronan Farrow enough.