Harvey Weinstein: The Fall of Hollywood's Biggest Predator

Ronan Farrow recounts the challenges he faced chasing the stories of Harvey Weinstein's decades of alleged r*pe, s*xual assault, and s*xual ab*se of women and the case against him.

Farrow argues that Weinstein was able to use Black Cube, a private Israeli intelligence service, to successfully pressure executives at NBC News to kill the story there, leading him to take it to The New Yorker, where it was published and helped spark the international #MeToo movement exposing s*xual ab*se, mostly of women, in many industries.

In 2017, Ronan Farrow was conducting a routine TV investigation when he stumbled across a story that had long been whispered about but rarely addressed openly. At its center was a man who had become synonymous with Hollywood itself – Harvey Weinstein.

Wherever Weinstein went, rumors of s*xual impropriety surfaced. Journalists had tried to get to the bottom of these allegations, but none of them had managed to publish their findings. The closer they’d come to the truth, the more they’d learned how easy it is for people with friends in high places to make problems go away.

Over the following year, Farrow would find out just how deep the rabbit hole went. As his investigation progressed, he was dogged by Weinstein’s lawyers, undermined by his employers, and held at bay by a conspiracy of silence. But he had one thing previous reporters had lacked: the trust of Weinstein’s victims.

In early 2017, after Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions of women marched and held sit-ins in cities across the United States. Their chants and banners reappropriated Trump’s language and featured images of yowling cats and claims like “p*ssy grabs back.” Meanwhile, the well-known Vox journalist Liz Plank took to social media to ask why #WomenDontReport.

On Twitter, Rose McGowan, an actress known for her roles in cult movies like Scream and Jawbreaker, answered Plank’s question; when McGowan first reported being r*ped by a studio head, a female law attorney told her no one would take her seriously because she’d shot a s*x scene in one of her films.

The attorney, McGowan wrote, had been right. The allegations were ignored, the actress was vilified by the tabloid media, and offers for new movie parts suddenly dried up. The whole affair was an open secret in Hollywood, and the lesson for other victims was clear: when women report abuse, they suffer the consequences. Meanwhile, McGowan’s r*pist was still the toast of the town.

Farrow was working on a new investigative series called The Dark Side of Hollywood when McGowan’s tweets went viral. His boss, NBC senior vice president Noah Oppenheim, had signed off on the idea but wasn’t happy with Farrow’s proposal to focus on allegations of s*xual misconduct with minors. That, Oppenheim argued, was too dark for morning TV.

In the end, they settled on a new angle – a look at Hollywood’s so-called “casting couch,” the practice of propositioning performers for transactional s*xual favors. Farrow had already kicked up some dust and found a couple of actresses who claimed to have stories, but he was still looking for a concrete lead.

That’s when Oppenheim suggested an idea he would later regret. Why not reach out to McGowan and see what she had to say about this studio head? Farrow, who had initially missed her tweets, agreed. It was the beginning of an investigation that would have implications far beyond the film industry.

The man Rose McGowan accused was Harvey Weinstein. Farrow had already encountered his name before speaking to the actress. Every inquiry he made led back to Weinstein, but no one wanted to go on the record.

There was a good reason for that. Since the establishment of the first film studios a century ago, few movie executives have been as powerful as Weinstein.

The son of a diamond cutter, he grew up in New York. As a teenager, he snuck out to see François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows with his brother Bob. The pair had hoped for a sex movie but instead caught one of the masterpieces of French new wave cinema. It was the beginning of a love affair with the silver screen.

As adults, the Weinsteins founded Miramax, a film distribution company, and The Weinstein Company, or TWC, an independent film studio. The two companies were great successes and presided over a series of hugely influential movies including Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, The English Patient and The King’s Speech. All in all, Harvey Weinstein took credit for 300 Oscar nominations. People often joked that no one had been thanked more often in Hollywood, save perhaps God.

This Harvey Weinstein documentary is based on Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators book by Ronan Farrow

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