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- 🥷#19: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
🥷#19: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
How do the most powerful people and organisations succeed in protecting abusers? How do they discredit victims and the people associated with them?
Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 19.
This week, we are featuring 📚 Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators 🖋 by Ronan Farrow.
Every week I read the book for this newsletter on my Kindle. As I go through I highlight certain quotes and make notes to myself about different sections for when I sit down to write. I think the nature of what this book exposes can be summed up by the one word I used most frequently in my own notes this week:
Fucked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (and yes I do use this many exclamation marks in my own notes. The more exclamation marks is how I know how fucked I thought the thing was at the time that I read it.)
So let’s jump in. All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
😳 What is Catch and Kill all about?
The cover introduces this book as:
“In a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost.”
Non disclosure agreements and buried stories that run from Hollywood to the corporate world and into politics.
🧐 So what does that have to do with trauma and recovery?
To me, if we are going to recover from this type of trauma and move towards a world where we can actually prevent them from happening to other people, we must understand two things:
How do the most powerful people and organisations succeed in protecting abusers?
How do they discredit the people who have been abused, and the people associated with them?
If we are to succeed and dismantle this broken system, we must have an understanding of the (completely appalling, horrifying, unfair) rules of the game as it’s currently being played.
🙏 The women in this book are heroes in every sense of the word
I don’t know exactly how many individuals’ stories are told in Catch and Kill, but it’s a lot. Much of the book focuses on the devastating actions of Harvey Weinstein and how it took over twenty years for the truth to come out.
Every single woman who came forward to share her story with Ronan to bring this to light did so selflessly, with enormous fear of retribution, with significant legal, financial and even physical risk. Their bravery cannot be understated.
Most of them came forward to tell their stories for one reason:
“ … in this story, there was almost no upside. Gutierrez faced legal and professional annihilation. She wanted only to stop Weinstein from doing it again.” - page 58
“These women came forward with incredibly brave allegations. They tore their guts out talking about this and re-traumatized themselves because they believed they could protect other women going forward.” - page 292
They crushingly took the weight of others on their shoulders:
“All the women before feel I am their fault,” she said. “And if there were women after me, I feel that is my fault.” She told me she was willing to take another risk—to tell her story again, for the sake of those women yet to come.” - page 412
They supported and reassured each other:
“Perez said that she urged Sciorra to speak by describing her own experience of going public about her assault. “I told her, ‘I used to tread water for years. It’s fucking exhausting, and maybe speaking out, that’s your lifeboat. Grab on and get out,’” Perez recalled. “I said, ‘Honey, the water never goes away. But, after I went public, it became a puddle and I built a bridge over it, and one day you’re gonna get there, too.’” - page 305
And each and every single one of them helped to pave the way for another to come forward.
The strength of these women to stand up in the face of pure evil, despite everything that they had been through, under the most impossible of circumstances makes it even more maddening when we understand how they were treated, because unfortunately,
“When people go up against power brokers there is punishment.” - page 240
This is what we need to fight to change.
🙅♂️ How do the power brokers go about discrediting victims?
1️⃣🤬 Blame
They flip the script. They find anything and everything they can to push responsibility back onto the victim, and away from the perpetrator:
“Arquette said, [about Weinstein] “He’s gonna be working very hard to track people down and silence people. To hurt people. That’s what he does.” She didn’t think the story would ever break. “They’re gonna discredit every woman who comes forward,” she said. “They’ll go after the girls. And suddenly the victims will be perpetrators.” - page 242
They had files prepped on people, just to pull them out as and when they needed to, for example a file dedicated entirely to Rose McGowan being “crazy”.
“The pictures of Gutierrez shifted: there she was, day after day, in lingerie and bikinis. Increasingly, the tabloids seemed to suggest that she was the predator, ensnaring Weinstein with her feminine wiles. And then, all at once, the charges went away. So did Ambra Gutierrez.” - page 53
Because apparently, if you have at any point dressed in lingerie it means that you automatically become any man’s property to do whatever he likes with. (Please note the extreme sarcasm.)
2️⃣🥺 Shame
The way that victims of sexual assault, rape and abuse are shamed is especially cruel. This shaming is so embedded that it is also perpetuated internally ourselves as well as taken on through external influences.
The same sentiments were echoed over and over and over, by Asia Argento:
“Argento, who insisted that she wanted to tell her story in all its complexity, said that she didn’t physically fight him off, something that prompted years of guilt. “The thing with being a victim is I felt responsible,” she said. “Because if I were a strong woman, I would have kicked him in the balls and run away. But I didn’t. And so I felt responsible.” - page 246
By Lucia Evans:
“I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “he’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” She added, “I just sort of gave up. That’s the most horrible part of it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it’s their fault.” - page 282
By Annabella Sciorra:
“Like most of these women, I was so ashamed of what happened,” she said. “And I fought. I fought. But still I was like, Why did I open that door? Who opens the door at that time of night? I was definitely embarrassed by it. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had fucked up.” - page 303
3️⃣🤐 Silence
Once you blame and shame people, going into a realm of silence about what happened slowly becomes the only option. They are trapped. (More on silencing in the second half and protecting abusers.)
4️⃣🗡 Discrediting anyone who is associated with someone who has been sexually assaulted or abused
If were like me, and Ronan Farrow’s name feels somewhat familiar but you can’t quite put your finger on it, his sister Dylan Farrow was abused by their step-father and big time Hollywood director Woody Allen which has been ongoingly covered in the media.
Mind blowingly, this association even brought into question Ronan’s (who for clarity, was a serious journalist at the NBC at the time these stories were breaking) competence at reporting on such a story:
“Your sister was sexually assaulted. You wrote that Hollywood Reporter piece last year about sexual assault in Hollywood, it caused this splash.”
“What are you arguing?” I asked. “That no one with a family member who’s been sexually assaulted can report on sexual assault issues?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “This goes directly to the heart of your—your agenda!” - page 188
His superiors at NBC tried to discredit him on this basis on further occasions:
“Harder devoted several pages to the argument that my sister’s sexual assault disqualified me from reporting on Weinstein. “Mr. Farrow is entitled to his private anger,” Harder wrote. “But no publisher should allow those personal feelings to create and pursue a baseless and defamatory story from his personal animus.” - page 263
Just 🤯.
🛡How are abusers protected by the most powerful people and organisations?
There are, unfortunately, so many strategies to cover in this section. I knew it was bad, but the protection is so vast, so well calculated and so well resourced that it is difficult to imagine ever being able to turn the tables.
1️⃣🐭 Catch and Kill
This tactic is so common it has attracted its own nickname for the practice:
“Over the years, the company had reached deals to shelve reporting around Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Tiger Woods, Mark Wahlberg, and too many others to count. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” George said. One after another, the AMI employees used the same phrase to describe this practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it. It was an old term in the tabloid industry: “catch and kill.” - page 346
They would pay off victims for the exclusive rights to their stories under the pretences of taking the story public, with no intention of ever doing so. But with the complete exclusivity over the story, they could then ensure silence from the victims and wrap them up in legal red tape.
Money + Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) was their secret sauce to keep everything contained.
2️⃣🙄 Technicalities and Feigning Ignorance
Another featured abuser in the book was big time news anchor Matt Lauer before his predatory behaviour came to light, raising questions of NBC’s complicity in allowing it to continue for so long:
“Prior to Monday, a lot of us have heard rumors of stuff about Matt... let’s just say that. Prior to Monday, was NBC aware of any allegations of sexual misconduct against Matt?” asked McHugh.
“No,” Oppenheim said. “We went back and looked, and, as we said in the statement, there has not been an allegation made internally in twenty years” in “any place where there would be a record of such a thing.” - page 371
But there is a big distinction in the language that Oppenheim used in his answer - that the allegations hadn’t been formally recorded.
This was a similar technicality that Harvey Weinstein had adamantly proclaimed as well as Bill O’Reilly from Fox News.
3️⃣👨🎨 PR Spin and Wikipedia Whitewashers
At NBC, after Matt Lauer was removed from his position as anchor they hired a “Wikipedia Whitewasher” specifically to:
“ … unbraid references to Oppenheim, Weinstein, and Lauer (NBC senior execs) on the crowdsourced encyclopedia. He spun the material in NBC’s favor, sometimes weaving in errors.
[…] “This is one of the most blatant and naked exercises of hard corporate spin that I have encountered in Wikipedia and I have encountered a lot,” one veteran Wikipedia editor complained.
But Sussman often prevailed: he reasserted his changes again and again, with a doggedness that unpaid editors could not match. Several Wikipedia pages, including Oppenheim’s, were stripped of evidence of the killing of the Weinstein story. It was almost as if it had never happened.” - page 400
Turns out we need to be sceptical of almost everything we read. 😔
4️⃣🤏 Minimizing and a Complete Lack of Understanding of Consent
When Ronan was taking the Harvey Weinstein exposé forward to NBC to go public, he received immense pushback. Even after obtaining an irrefutable evidence in the form of a recording of Weinstein admitting to an assault, Ronan was told:
“It’s a big story,” I said. “It’s a prominent guy, admitting to serious misconduct, on tape.”
“Well, first of all,” he said, “I don’t know if that’s, you know, a crime.” said Oppenheim. - page 118
Which then poses a concerning question. Do these powerful men even realise what rape is? What sexual assault is? Because to be honest it’s hard to tell if they get it and are just plain criminal, or if they don’t understand and think their behaviour is completely fine. I’m not sure which one is worse. For example:
“Weinstein suggested repeatedly that an interaction wasn’t rape if the woman in question came back to him later.” - page 283
Um … what?! I can’t even.
Woody Allen (again, remembering the Ronan and Dylan Farrow connection) had expressed his sympathies for Weinstein, and emphasised that:
“ … the important thing was “to avoid ‘a witch hunt atmosphere’ where ‘every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.’” - page 299
THAT’S the important thing? Really?! Do these men really believe that their actions are okay?
5️⃣👂Hearing but not Listening
Finally, we have the people who let the information only skim across the surface:
“Colin Firth, like Tarantino, would later join the ranks of men in the industry who publicly apologized for hearing without really listening.” - page 249
We have to do better. We really have to start listening.
So there we have it, a glimpse into the world of the rich and powerful, and the myriad of ways their atrocious behaviours filter down to us in the “regular world”.
We must figure out how to turn the tables.
Until next week,Eleanor ❤️🙏
🧠 Resources & Links
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📕 Next week’s book
Coming out next Friday 10th June 2022 is edition #20 featuring:📚 The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity🖋 by Norman Doidge MD
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