Ronan Farrow's 'Catch And Kill' Delves Into Corruption And Abuse In Media, Entertainment Industries

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators” is a harrowing, disturbing and sometimes stranger-than-fiction account of systemic power, corruption, sexual abuse and cover-ups in the media and entertainment industries.

Farrow details a dramatic account of how he and NBC producer Rich McHugh uncovered sexual assault and rape allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

He also outlines what happened next: NBC shut the story down in 2017, he writes, after Weinstein threatened to expose former “Today” host Matt Lauer’s sexual misconduct.

“Catch and Kill” landed on the New York Times’ best-seller list like a hand grenade — and it’s still reverberating.

The credit for “exposing this entire operation” goes to his sources “who kept coming forward and refused to stop,” Farrow told Here & Now’s Robin Young at a recent event in Boston. The story, he says, is about the courage of the women who came forward.

“In so many of the rooms where I document really bad things happening,” he says, “there was also someone brave enough to speak up.”

Farrow’s work of journalism reads like a thriller, complete with surveillance, intimidation and Herculean attempts to bury the truth. He says he wanted to show how vulnerable he felt while being stalked and “lied to a lot.”

But he says his experiences don’t compare to what his sources — many of them survivors of sexual violence — were forced to go through.

“These were women who were gaslit in some cases in a very profound way and who were on top of all of that retraumatizing themselves by telling these stories