Catch and Kill Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Catch and Kill, 2019. I think I have the next one that's going to be a book.

Ronan Farrow did stop by. I had some tough questions for Ronan about his book Catch and Kill, including the impressions he does of a certain podcast host who he makes sound like a gay snake.

He does impressions of you in the audio book?

He does the accent of a gay podcast host. It sounds like a Disney villain.

The book is is very transparent about the fact that these were people I liked and respected.

The reporting is particularly meticulous. One of the best fact checkers in the world, a senior checker from The New Yorker, really raked over every sentence. And the thing is airtight.

This was a company with a lot of secrets, as it turns out.

It's a pattern. And I document a case in which there was another Catch and Kill operation where AMI went after buying the rights to the story of a Trump Tower doorman who claimed Trump had a love child there.

I'm selling a damn book, Jonathan.

You denied it, he proved it.

They ordered a hard stop to reporting. They told me and a producer working on this that we should not take a single call. They told us to cancel interviews. The question for years has been why?

I mean, you lay out the suggestion that Harvey Weinstein was blackmailing NBC News.

Multiple sources do say that and the way in which that's framed is very careful. All of NBC's denials are in this book. We fact checked for many hours with them. That said, it is indisputable based on the evidence in this book that there was a chain of secret settlements at this company that were covered up with victims of harassment and assault.

Some of them about Lauer, some about others in the company. This was a pattern. It was concealed from journalists there.

They allow it because they were afraid information about Matt Lauer is going to get out. That is what the extensive conversations, transcripts and documents presented in this book suggest.

Ronan Farrow is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and author of the book Catch and Kill.

His book, podcast, and HBO docu-series about his investigation into sexual abuses by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein are all called Catch and Kill.

In his 2019 book, Catch and Kill, journalist Ronan Farrow documented a pattern in which Lauer pursued women on staff at NBC over the course of decades.

A few times you highlight details from Ronan Farrow's book Catch and Kill that has your story that you paint it as imprecise.

a lot of people don't like Ronan Farrow for various reasons uh but his book catch and kill highly recommend it it's a thriller like he's he's got so many interesting documents and inside sources that he's able to tell it like a novel and he and he'd tell catch and kill is is the phrase that the national inquirer would use to help somebody like trump um catch a scandal uh and then kill it so like uh you there's is there a love child somewhere sure that's interesting we'll pay you $30,000 for that story and then boom you kill the story and and now that person has signed an nda so they can't leak it anywhere else um and so that's that that's one of the services that the national inquirer was willing to provide for people like trump

I mean, look at Harvey Weinstein. Read, you know, Catch and Kill. He intimidated the media and he got his misconduct hidden.

He said in his New York Times piece, he wrote it was the 13 page statement of facts that brought me two tears, right? This is the guy who was the number two at the National Enquirer, okay, because of the role they played in Catch and Kill and not just one story, multiple stories.

And listen, and we all have our own version of that. Okay? We may not be as hot. All right. But we all have our own version.

As readers of a little book called Catch and Kill.

People need reading material during this crisis, Jonathan.

He wrote the book with Little Brown, Catch and Kill, a book about abusive men and what they'll do to control the story and prevent women from speaking out and smear women who tell the truth.

A book that also talks about what Woody Allen did to his family and the abuse that his sister suffered.

Ronan you are here because there are many new revelations about Trump that have come to light in your podcast Catch and Kill based on the book by the same name.

thank you last episodes just came out thank you guys some Catch and Kill podcast stans thank you but we weren't gonna allow you to come here and promote this podcast I figured we'd do it in the form of a game

we have a lot of new tape across this whole podcast and there's large tranches of David Pecker and his second in command Dylan Howard you kind of get David Pecker's life story like who is the guy that set up the catch and kill empire with Trump and agreed he was going to try to swing an election

so we decided to anonymize the family because the story was always about this trail of contracts and this payout which turned out to be a violation of election law and prosecutors deemed it illegal

you know through the book and then the show I get the question a lot like how do you maintain any hope about anything because there's a lot of dark stuff in there but here is one thing that I've learned there are times when the obstacles seem totally insurmountable and the status quo seems totally immovable but there are times when the story seems totally immovable but then all of these stories come out because over and over again someone does something really brave

You know, so many of my stories are about a lot of pretty dark things. They're about crimes and coverups, but also they are about the brave whistleblowers who come forward and the community of people in the general public and especially journalists who say enough and we're not gonna stop digging and we're not gonna stop asking tough questions, including of our bosses.

And it's incredibly moving to see that. And it's why I finished writing a book like Catch and Kill and still full of hope.

You can buy Catch and Kill at catchandkill.com.

And you know that while there is an Amazon link there, I recommend you go to one of the indie bookseller links because we need to support booksellers at this difficult time and we need to support Catch and Kill at this difficult time when it is number one on the indie bookseller list and not number one on the Amazon list where people are buying Elton John's book.

I watched you report the story for a year. I watched you work on this book for the better part of a year. You are the hardest working person I have ever met.

So many of my stories are about a lot of pretty dark things. They're about crimes and coverups, but also they are about the brave whistleblowers who come forward and the community of people in the general public and especially journalists who say enough and we're not gonna stop digging and we're not gonna stop asking tough questions including of our bosses

and it's incredibly moving to see that and it's why I finished writing a book like Catch and Kill and am still full of hope and it's really tough to organize in any context and it's tougher still when you're doing it and using it as a means to call out people who decide whether you get raised or get frozen out and that's what they're doing.

You can buy Catch and Kill at catchandkill.com.

And while there is an Amazon link there, I recommend you go to one of the indie bookseller links because we need to support booksellers at this difficult time and we need to support Catch and Kill at this difficult time when it is number one on the indie bookseller list and not number one on the Amazon list where people are buying Elton John's book.

I watched you report the story for a year. I watched you work on this book for the better part of a year. You are the hardest working person I have ever met.

And then he said, it's due on Wednesday, can you read it tonight? And I said, I can't read it tonight. It's a 600-page book.

He said, okay, well, can you read the next draft? I was like, yes, but you have to promise me I get one week to read the book.

He said, okay, not a week where Love It or Leave It's on the road, because then I'm doing shows.

And so I opened the book, and that is how I discovered that Ronan wanted to get married.

The proposal was in track changes in the draft of the book.

I guess it would have been it's either 2017 or 2018. I was in New York City on my book tour for conspiracy and my friend, Tib Irvin, threw together a little dinner at this stake house.

Conspiracy I think is my best book it's probably sold the least well of all the books it's still a success like if any other author published it and it sold that many copies they're like that's so nice you did a good job but like and you can make a living but it didn't do what I wanted it to do necessary like it didn't it didn't it it's success is not let's say its sales figures are not to measure it with like my judgment of it

when I interviewed Peter Tiel from my book Conspiracy and Peter is a complicated individual who I don't agree with on a lot of things.

I had heard from her and her wife, Nelly Bulls, that they had liked my book Conspiracy.

That's one of the lessons in my book, Conspiracy, a true story of power, sex and a billionaire's secret plot to destroy an Emperor.

It's the first one that's likely to be turned into a movie.

It's being adapted by Charles Randolph, who wrote The Big Short and Bombshell about Fox News.

I'm really proud of this book.

If you want to check it out, Conspiracy, a true story of power, sex, and a billionaire's secret plot to destroy a media empire, you can check it out anywhere books are sold. And I hope you enjoy it.

He's the author of Catch and Kill, Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.

It's an account of his game-changing investigation into film producer Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual assault and the difficulties Farrow faced trying to get the initial story published.

So let's get to catch and kill.

So there's the book Catch and Kill, and then there's the podcast Catch and Kill.

I would not have written this book if I thought it was just a glum and dreary account of how broken our systems are or how acute the power imbalances.