Ronan Farrow on Harvey Weinstein’s conspiracy of silencing

Nonika Singh

It’s time for some goddamn honesty in this world…” One of the prime accusers in the infamous Harvey Weinstein’s case has been actress Rose McGowan and these are her words, defining the tone and tenor of Catch and Kill. Uncovering not just lies and hypocrisy but something far more sinister, we learn of a conspiracy to silence others.

Reading like a novel, unspooling like a movie, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Ronan Farrow’s book goes behind the scenes of the grave wrongdoings of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. The world today knows Weinstein as a serial sex offender, but what did it take to unmask the founder of Miramax, who got away with all that more than once and for decades? Despite there being more than one victim, the story is as incredulous as it is frightening. If the word cabal assumes damning proportions in the Weinstein story, so does the book’s title.

To kill a story is not an unknown term in journalistic parlance, but how systematically the perpetrators collude with broadcasters, media houses and bind victims in non-disclosure contracts is a revelation shocking in both magnitude and impact.

If the courage that the victims finally find to expose the monster of a man is palpable, so is the tenacity and resolve of celebrity author Ronan Farrow, son of filmmaker Woody Allen and actress Mia Farrow. However, as he goes about retelling his accounts as an investigative reporter out to expose Weinstein, there is no self-congratulatory note. Few first person accounts have the objectivity to view their work without edifying themselves. You meet a reporter who is vulnerable, if not prone to pressure. But you also sense his commitment to tell a true story corroborated with facts and substantiated by sources, all the way from former employees of Weinstein’s company to actresses like Sophie Dix.

When the Italian actress Asia Argento says, “After the rape he won,” it’s as much a damnation of the system. Any wonder then that men like Colin Firth and Quentin Tarantino later publicly apologised for hearing without listening.

Farrow’s empathy for the victims could have something to do with his sister Dylan’s accusations against Woody Allen and his detractors have often brought in this personal history to discredit him. However, when he creates the horror of the victims’ encounters with Weinstein, his felicity with words give you goose bumps. You can almost feel their fear, hear the tremor in their voice and even understand their silence. The complexity of their predicament, where many would see the act as consensual, is shared by Farrow more than once. He writes, “Victims were expected to be saints otherwise disregarded as sinners.” Aware of this dichotomy, Weinstein would destroy the credibility and character of his prey. An Italian model said, “Just because I am a lingerie model, I have to be in the wrong.”

Weinstein preyed upon scores of women, almost like a pattern — inviting them to hotel rooms and forcing himself upon them. Replete with backgrounders, like details of what he was like in his student days, the book throws light on what he eventually became. Much of the piecing together seems like dramatis personae, only if all of it was not so eerily true.

Farrow unpeels how he got to the bottom of the truth and how he was stalled in NBC, where he worked and where the story was meant to break initially. Yet, with support from The New Yorker that published his story in 2017, he managed to beat the odds, including spying agency Black Cube (hired by Weinstein to keep those on his tail in check) stalking him all this while. The 400-plus page book triggers and satiates your curiosity about what it takes to nail a powerful man with a trail of unpardonable and shocking acts of gross sexual misconduct.

In no uncertain terms, Farrow reminds us how there are many Weinsteins in this world. From the top echelons of power to big TV networks, the malaise is deep rooted. Only through detective Igor Ostrovskiy, who switched sides to make things right, he tells us, “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.” Luckily, this is a story of a winner, of collective triumph even when the odds were not in favour.