By fall 2017, I had taken my storyto the New Yorker. As the investigation moved closer to publication, I called the Weinstein Company for comment. Sounding nervous, an assistant said he’d check if the boss was available. And then there was Weinstein’s husky baritone. “Wow!” He said with mock excitement. “What do I owe this occasion to?” The writing about the man has seldom lingered on this quality: he was pretty funny. But he veered swiftly toward fury. Weinstein hung up on me several times that fall, including on that first day. I told him I wanted to be fair, to include anything he had to say, then asked if he was comfortable with me recording. He seemed to panic, and was gone with aclick. The pattern repeated that afternoon. But when I got him to talk for a sustained time, he abandoned his initial caution and got sharply combative.
“How did you identify yourself to all these women?” He demanded. I was caught off balance. I had started reporting the story for NBC, before turning to the New Yorker.
“Depending on the timing, I accurately described the outlet.”
He jumped in again. “Oh, really? Like you’re a reporter at NBC. And what do your friends at NBC have to say about that now? ”I felt a flush rising in my cheeks.
“I’m calling because I want to hear you out,” I said.
“No. I know what you want. I know you’re scared, and alone, and your bosses abandoned you, and your father… ”
The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick stood outside the office, tapping on the glass quietly. He shook his head, made a “wrap it up” gesture.
“I’m happy to talk to you, or whomever you want on your team,” I said.
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.
In the days before the story was published, I reached Weinstein again for less formal calls, and then for long sessions during which I was joined by Remnick, my editor Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, and New Yorker lawyer Fabio Bertoni; Weinstein was joined by lawyers and crisis advisors. He had added to his team the public relations firm Sitrick and Company, which handed the assignment to an even-tempered former Los Angeles Times reporter, Sallie Hofmeister.
Large portions of the conversations were placed off the record. But there were also, among the calls, exchanges for which no ground rules were set, or which Weinstein explicitly placed on the record. At times he sounded defeated. There could be an almost boyish charm in the small “Hi, Ronan,” at the top of each call. But more often, there were flashes of the old Weinstein, arrogant and raging. “Allow me toedifyyou,” he’d say. “I’m giving youinsights.”
He suggested repeatedly that an interaction wasn’t rape if the woman came back to him later. That this was at odds with the reality of sexual assault, since it so often transpires within workplace or family relationships – that it was at odds with the law – seemed to escape him. He was sceptical, too, of the theme of possible retaliation from him that ran through the women’s claims. “There’s no retaliating in Hollywood,” he said, calling the concept of powerful men intimidating women in the industry a “myth”. When I wondered how he figured this was the case, he said that people could simply call up aRonan Farrowor a [New York Times reporter] Jodi Kantor and the retaliation would go away. I marveled at this logic: helping to create a problem, then pointing to the response it had generated to claim the problem didn’t exist.
In the earlier calls, there was a sense that Weinstein was still living in a parallel reality. He would acknowledge wrongdoing, then characterize his actions by discussing a time he wrote an offensive comment in a girl’s yearbook, or looked at a colleague the wrong way. Each time I reminded him that we were reporting multiple allegations of rape, he sounded startled. He’d been overwhelmed, he’d say, and hadn’t focused on the factchecking messages we’d sent. And this seemed likely enough.
Later, as his advisors joined the fray, the response that we ultimately included in the story came to the fore: a blanket denial of all “non-consensual sex”, with little engagement on the specific allegations. This seemed to reflect Weinstein’s sincere view: he seldom suggested events hadn’t transpired, instead insisting that the interactions had been consensual and were being recast, years later, in a spirit of opportunism.
He spent an inordinate amount of time attacking the character of the women. “Harvey, I have a question,” Remnick interjected at one point, in all earnestness. “How does this relate to your behavior?” Weinstein seemed unconcerned with disputing specific facts. Sometimes, he simply couldn’t recall them. Once, he launched into a detailed discussion of an allegation not included in the story. He’d mixed up a name we’d given him with a similar-sounding one from his own memories.
As the calls progressed, his temper flared. “She has an NDA,” he said of one woman. “Be careful for her. We like her. ”His dismayed handlers began rapidly talking over him, with limited success. “She’s a sweetie and a sweetheart,” he continued. “Doesn’t deserve it.” There were threats to the New Yorker: to sue, or to leak our factchecking memo to preempt our story. “Careful,” Weinstein would say. “Guys, careful.”
Once, when Hofmeister and the other handlers found themselves unable to stop Weinstein, they appeared to hang up.
“We lost you,” Remnick said after the abrupt disconnection.
“They didn’t want him to say that,” said Foley-Mendelssohn.
“Yeah, that’s good lawyerering right there,” Bertoni added, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s what he’s paying them the big bucks for, to fucking hang up the phone.”
But by the end, Weinstein sounded resigned. Several times, he conceded that we’d been fair – and that he “deserved” a lot of it.
On 10 October, Foley-Mendelssohn circulated a final edit at 1am . When I arrived, the magazine’s offices were quiet and flooded with sunlight, like a prism. As we prepared to go live, a few of us began to gather, and I moved to take a picture. My idea had been unsmiling documentation, not triumphalism, but Remnick broke it up all the same. “Not our style,” he said, and shooed people away to work.
When it was up, I wandered over to a window and looked out at the Hudson. There was a numb feeling; Peggy Lee droning, “Is that all there is to a fire?” I hoped the women would feel it was worth it; that they’d been able to protect others. And I wondered what would become of me. I had no arrangement with the New Yorker, and no path forward in television.
My phone chimed, chimed again. Message after message arrived, quickening to a constant scroll. I heard from fellow journalists, including several reporters who said they had fielded efforts to intimidate them.
But mostly the messages came from stranger after stranger, saying they, too, had stories. Some were from women, some from men. Some were accounts of sexual violence and some focused on other kinds of corruption. A TV producer emailed me: “There are more Harveys in your midst.”
•This is an edited extract fromCatch And Killby Ronan Farrow, published by Fleet, an imprint of Little, Brown, on 15 October at £ 20.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings