Warning: tonight’s TC topic is kind of grim. Feel free to skip straight to the comments. Because I just read Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, about the Harvey Weinstein case and coverup, and I have some thoughts burning holes in my head.
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Catch and Kill was a brilliant, scary, and completely infuriating read. Weinstein was the scandal that kick-started the current wave of the #MeToo uprising about harassment and sexual assault — and the story very nearly got buried.
The sheer number of victims is kind of overwhelming. By now, eighty-seven women have come forward about assaults, rapes, and harassment by Weinstein over a period of decades. Yet each was made to feel isolated, feared that no one would believe her, and in many cases pressured or bribed into signing a non-disclosure agreement. Weinstein put a lot of money into avoiding consequences, not just the settlements but also hiring a detective agency with former Mossad agents to harass anyone who spoke up, and look for dirt on them. (Farrow’s boyfriend Jonathan was miffed to learn that they gave up on following him, deeming his life too boring.)
It’s not quite accurate to say that “everyone” in Weinstein’s orbit knew. Whisper networks are hit-or-miss, and he seems to have behaved himself around the few women with genuine power in Hollywood. But a lot of people knew.
Victim after victim described having a female assistant escort her to a “meeting” with Weinstein, where the assistant would stay a few minutes and then disappear right before the assault. Studio execs and employees told Farrow they’d witnessed Weinstein harassing and “inappropriately touching” women. When a distraught Rose McGowan told co-star Ben Affleck about Weinstein assaulting her, she quotes Affleck as responding, “I told him to stop doing that!”
“Why didn’t the women come forward sooner?” Ambra Battilana Guitierrez worked with police and got a damning tape recording of Weinstein admitting to groping her — but the DA refused to pursue it. (Cyrus Vance Jr. — where have I heard that name before?)
But Weinstein’s predations were only half the story. The book is also about how Farrow brought the story to his bosses at NBC, and kept running into resistance that seemed inexplicable at the time. (Rachel Maddow has been on fire on this topic.) I lost count of the times Farrow discussed the story with a colleague, only to have it emerge later that the colleague had his own harassment history — including, infamously, Matt Lauer. Some of the execs with their own disturbing histories are still working at NBC.
That last part, to me, is even scarier than Weinstein. Every time I see a reporter (often female) framing #MeToo in terms of “scary times for men,” I think of CBS’s Les Moonves, Fox’s Roger Ailes, and the others like them who got to decide what stories get told. It took heroic efforts by Farrow to bring this story to light. There are undoubtedly more in the shadows.
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From siab:
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