Ronan Farrow, "Catch and Kill" (with Sunny Hostin)

it's especially exciting to be hosting Ronan Farrow here this evening he's here of course to talk about his new book catch and kill it's been two years since Ronan writing in The New Yorker and and Jody Kanter and Megan Chui writing in The New York Times it's been two years since they published their separate expose of the sexual assault and harassment allegations against movie producer Harry Weinstein those stories encouraged many other women around the world to come forward with allegations against other powerful privileged and previously protected men and helped give rise to them me too movement and both The New Yorker and The Times subsequently shared last year's Pulitzer Prize for for public service which honored thee the award honored that courageous breakthrough reporting of Ronan Jodie and Megan in catching Kilronan recounts his part in breaking the Weinstein story and details the the institutional resistance the attempted intimidation and the threats he faced in doing so by the book which contains additional revelations it's not just the work of investigative journalism but it's itself a compelling and it's instructive spy story Ronan writes about not only the extreme tactics taken by Weinstein what Ronan calls the full-on espionage operation but to stymie the coverage but also describes actions by executives at NBC News where Ronan initially pursued the story to keep it from being broadcast I'm not giving away any spoilers because this has been widely reported since the books release but Ronan speculates that NBC's behavior was motivated by a desire to protect news anchor Matt Lauer who himself was subsequently accused of sexual misconduct and let go in the interest of fairness let me say NBC strongly denies that it sought to block Ronan's investigation or tried to cover up flowers misconduct and Laur it maintains that his actions were consensual but Ronan stands by his account and if nothing else the controversy has certainly helped stir interest and is very revealing and very riveting book Ronan of course is accustomed to public attention having lived a sort of Boy Wonder existence but the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen he started college at age 11 and graduated at 15 admitted to Yale Law School he delayed entry to work as the UNICEF spokesman for youth and after graduating from law school at age 21 he joined the State Department to work for Richard Holbrooke focusing on NGOs in Afghanistan and Pakistan and later became Secretary of State who worked wooden special advisor for Global Youth issues in 2012 he went off to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 2014 NBC signed him to a contract handing him at age 26 his own daytime MSNBC program the show lasted a year but the network kept droning on as an investigative correspondent in 2017 after NBC's lack of support for his pursuit of Weinstein Ronan took the story to The New Yorker and finished it there last year he came out with a well-received book war on peace lamenting the decline of US diplomacy and earlier this year he ran to PhD in international relations from Oxford all that and Ronan has yet to turn 32 [Applause] [Music] wrote Ronan will be in conversation with sunny Hostin a former federal prosecutor who now serves as co-host of ABC's daytime talk show The View and she's senior legal correspondent an analyst for ABC News sunny also hosts an executive producers truth about murder which is about to start on the pay TV network Investigation Discovery where she'll be highlighting the stories of victims and their loved ones so ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Ronan thank you for doing this sunny well I mean when when Ronan asked me to be here I was thrilled because as you know I'm a big fan and this book is incredible it is incredible thank you it is incredible so let's let's get right in let's do it okay and as we launch into the conversation I just have to say I asked and was really excited and hoping that you could do it because sunny has been such a powerful voice on this I don't know if you've seen the way she speaks up about issues of sexual violence and how it gets covered up by powerful people on the view including in contentious conversation sometimes and it's really important and it really shows guts and your whole history as a prosecutor and as a journalist has been about speaking truth to power so I'm honored thank you let's talk about the allegations about former Today Show anchor Matt Lauer and that made a lot of news NBC claims that Lauer was fired in 2017 for inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace and that they only found out about it very shortly before he was fired but in the book you write that they knew about his behavior for a long time so I think it's important to note here there are very salacious just headlines around individual allegations and that's not incorrect that those get a lot of attention they're very serious claims they should start a conversation but what is uncovered in this book and documented in a very carefully fact-checked way is much bigger than any one Network Star network executive anyone network it is about patterns of cover-ups in corporate America and the way in which people get hurt if problems are swept under the rug with payouts and non-disclosure agreements instead of addressed we've talked about this several times now it was a component of the Harvey Weinstein case it was a component of the reporting I did on CBS News and it is a component of the reporting about NBC News this is a company that had previously claimed that there were no sexual harassment settlements within the company in a six to seven year period their general counsel had said that and I document in this book a paper trail of at least seven settlements that multiple people involved in each said were explicitly sexual harassment settlements with women with complaints about Matt Lauer and others years before Matt Lauer's fire years before years before and I personally spoke to senior executives at a leadership level of this company who were warned about a problem with Matt Lauer and you know this is not just coming from me and my reporting this is something that Ann Curry has said that she warned leadership at this company and that checks out with the reporting here and again you know that the point here is bigger than this company it is about people getting hurt when these problems aren't confronted now my understanding is that rather than call them settlement agreements they were called enhanced severance agreements yes their enhanced severance and you know what does that mean well it's it's a good question I mean these are these are the kinds of euphemisms and contortions that you see when a problem is being covered up and NBC News's rebuttals to all of this or woven into the book and you can you know judge the facts for yourself against their responses and they continue to claim that these really were just severance packages and you know they just this woman seven figures vastly more than someone would normally get departing the company and coincidentally she also had a sexual harassment complaint it's all just coincidences coincidences and you know while we fairly relate me in the fact checkers and editors have worked on this made sure to put those responses in there it is very fair to NBC and other parties that report on here you know it's worth noting that this is what a cover-up looks like it is euphemisms it is terms that allow you to avoid saying what the thing actually is and you know as an attorney and a former prosecutor when there is a sexual harassment or sexual violence related NDA it doesn't say in big bold letters this woman was abused by this person on X date now it's it's just buying someone to silence and tries to talk around the issue entirely and that's what a severance agreement right so the this company found a way to consistently sweep this problem under the rug reduce euphemisms now let's talk briefly about Brooke nevels because NBC says when they found out about her allegations that's when it was too much that's when that you know he had to go Matt Lauer was fired her allegations if true mm-hmm were of rape she says she was raped she reported it to NBC they fired him it was not reported to the police it was not reported to the DA's office what exactly did she tell you happened to her she describes unambiguously a rape good by any legal definition of the term and her full story and all its complication is laid out in this book and I encourage people to read it in context rather than just reading the headlines about it and you know Matt Lauer his thinking is reflected in here too and he released a very fiery letter kind of a slightly menacing tone towards women who might come forward with allegations and one of the points he emphasizes is that they had subsequent contacts and yeah we're asking about that I do because he wrote a response letter and he says that Brooks account is categorically false he says his sexual encounter with her was completely consensual that she was an enthusiastic and willing partner and he also says that all of these women that he's had affairs with have abandoned shared responsibility but that she continued after this alleged rape to have a sexual relationship with him and many people are questioning her because of that they're questioning the rape they're saying well if you were really raped why would you go back and have a sexual relationship and this is a recurring theme in the reporting in catch and kill it's actually a response that Harvey Weinstein has to the allegations against him that in many cases these were women who went back to him in various ways and he says at one point in these contentious calls when were fact-checking this piece and seeking comment from him you know it's not rape if they come back yes and that it that is not consistent with any legal definition of rape it's not consistent with any ethical definition of rape and indeed you would know better than I haven't worked on the criminal justice side of this it is a very common facet of sexual violence that these are crimes committed by you know pastors and bosses and parents and there's a dynamic with power dynamics that entrap people into ongoing contact with professional dynamics that make it very difficult to get away from someone and there was a machine that spun up from the moment Brooke nevels came in to NBC an unambiguously described a non-consensual sex act with potential criminal implications where this company despite the fact that her attorney very clearly signaled this is not consensual and while she was not using the term rape she was describing one began to plant in the press and to discuss within that news organization the idea that this was an affair and Matt Lauer and his letter says this was an affair and NBC PR continued to plant I'm saying this was an affair up to and including last week's news cycle yes and you know I understand that there is a strong incentive for certain executives at this company who are under scrutiny for not doing enough to stop this over the period of time in which people knew about and talked about these problems to downplay it to suggest that if they knew they knew about something lesser but the fact is that is what she described and the follow-on contacts that she describes are not consistent with any definition of an affair that I know you know she as a junior employee at this company with the most powerful man at that company was in a dynamic that she described as entrapment when he said come to my apartment for drinks come to my office come to my dressing room right and then at times as she struggled to get away from this in her narration of events was simply in situations where she was under orders from her bosses to go get something for purely professional reasons from Matt Lauer and he would be demanding sexual favors in his office and were in his dressing room and you know that is a difficult and complicated dynamic and she describes a mix of consensual and non-consensual interactions over the course of that she readily concedes that there were periods especially early on after the alleged assault where she tried to put him at ease desperately and and sent texts and made calls that sounded maximally enthusiastic because she wanted desperately to make this situation okay and to not anger this incredibly powerful guy with a lot of control over her career but while all of those shades of grey are laid out they are not actually germane to this question of was there a sexual assault exactly and that's important to note and you would understand that as a prosecutor but Zach people see in the media cycle this discussion of an affair or not and follow on contact and they conflate it with these legal questions of what happened that night what happened after has nothing to do with what happened that night that's right and these kinds of follow-on ambiguities are common but she very eloquently points out in this book that regardless of whether he thought she was flirting with him beforehand regardless of how he interpreted their Interac afterwards that night she was too drunk to consent she says and she said no repeatedly to a sex act that he then proceeded with and you know he denies that his denial was present in there but this is consistently how she has told the story from the beginning now what you described also in this book is a culture of misogyny baked in to the very fabric of NBC and not only just NBC just in our culture and you describe Noah Oppenheim you say that with a little bit of no no I said neutrally really book is very fair to NBC news executives it goes out of its way to be generous in it I mean the facts speak for themselves but the tone is is very measured your tone may not be measured after you read it and he was I guess the head of NBC News right time and you write on page 186 that during his years as a writer at the Harvard Crimson he wrote some things that were pretty provocative in fact he had some headlines titles reading cliff notes transgender absurd he wrote to the angry feminists there is nothing wrong with single sex institutions men just like women need to themselves and then he adds women who feel threatened by the club's environment should seek tamer pastures however apparently women enjoyed being confined pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon they feel desired not demeaned now this is the same person that would have been told about Brooke nevels he and who had the conversations with journalists at that organization immediately afterwards and said things like she did not describe a non-consensual interaction and was part of that machine that when she learned that this was being downplayed in this way she threw up you know this the way that this was handled after the fact was extraordinarily traumatic but there is a bigger point here about these patterns of corporate behavior she talks very eloquently about making the painful decision to come forward in this book and feeling that the women who came before her and had voiced complaints within this company about Matt Lauer carried a sense of guilt yeah that her alleged assault happened and that she in turn carried a sense of guilt about anyone who might face violence afterwards and that ultimately is why she wanted to speak to break the cycle and a sense of guilt because of the silence because the moment you have a set of legal structures to conceal is alleged crimes and to allow their perpetrators to stay in positions of power you expose subsequent people to victimization and it that is a feature of so many of these stories I've reported of the weinstein company where there was nothing in his HR file that was technically about sexual harassment at fox where bill o'reilly pointed out there was nothing in the HR file about it and where there were payouts happening over and over again to conceal that record it happened at CBS News and this is not an NBC problem this is a problem in our culture and in corporate America and I think Brooke nevels is not wrong it shouldn't have been on her shoulders to break the cycle it should have been on the shoulders of that company of the corporation that's right but it is only now coming under scrutiny because she was brave enough to speak and because a whole variety of sources there are seven claims about Matt Lauer there's a still wider group of claims about executives at the company and mysterious misconduct so a lot of people were really brave to expose the story that plays out in this book now I asked you this on our show on the view how do the folks like the open Himes and ELAC who also you outline on page 213 and forward that he also had a history of preying upon people that worked for him while at NBC News she has read this book did you hear that prosecutorial precision can't help myself the page number you described yes multiple women are on the record in this book saying that Andy lacks slept with underlings yes Hal eiated against them yes and and so how do they survive something like this when you have people like megyn kelly and gretchen carlson greta van susteren that are calling for an outside law firm to come in investigate these claims and are asking if it's found to be true they need to go they need to be fired and it is pretty striking that again again and again in this book the wonderful brave journalists at NBC many of whom are sources in this book and many of whom are holding their boss's feet to the fire now and demanding accountability which is a tough thing to do about your own bosses say over and over again to the executive chain of command in this company why don't we do an outside investigation they demand it it has been demanded inside and outside of that company for years and they have flatly refused and this is another big broad important point about corporate America internal investigations self investigations are not investigations because if you asked me to grade myself I get an a every time hey and in your case rightly so but but it's it's a real serious problem and you know that there are a set of techniques when a company is trying to conceal something including doing their own self investigation and then having outside firms kind of rubber stamp it without having any access to the evidence process and NBC has deployed that full set of tools but they have steadfastly said we will not do an outside investigation and I think that's pretty telling that there's a very dramatic moment in the plot that unravels and catch and kill where the journalists inside this building are so angry as this is all coming out yes and there's a meeting where the general counsel of the company Kim Harris sort of descends from the executive suites into the investigative unit and tries to do damage control and she's getting all these contentious questions and someone a woman journalists in the room says you know what about an outside investigation even if we don't like the outcome it will help us be transparent as a news organization and Kim Harris gets mad finally and says well if the press would just stop talking about this it'll go away and another reporter says after a beat of stunned silence we are the practice well let's talk about the Harvey Weinstein story because you won a Pulitzer Prize for that story it was magnificent and thank God for the sources who spoke I mean you must have spoke Gill this about your prosecutorial record you know when you are able to do something that hopefully helps the conversation and helps people's healing and helps transparency and accountability you do it on the backs of and because of the bravery bravery of the source of the sort of the victims of the witnesses that's right question that's right but you had that story at NBC they refused to air it in fact they caught it and killed it and they to this day say Ronan didn't have enough they didn't his sources or his story didn't meet journalistic standards and then a few weeks later you published the Pulitzer prize-winning story at The New Yorker right across the street did you have enough what did you have when you were at NBC and if you had enough why did they kill it yeah of course we had enough yeah I mean I think that's no longer really in dispute in the in the conversation and the working-level producer on this story rich McHugh a very brave guy who resigned in protest over this oh did we get some applause for mr. McHugh that's enriched McHugh fans here I am with you that guy is a Profile in Courage and you know he says what everyone every journalist who looked at this set which is this thing should have been on air we had a recorded admission of guilt from Harvey Weinstein secured during her police sting operation we had him admitting not just to a sexual assault but to serial sexual assault saying I'm used to that we had multiple named women in every version of this story it was an expansive body of reporting but that's not even the point you know it's a distraction tactic to try to pull the conversation towards this question if wasn't enough at a given point in time you know as you say I brought it across the street and the judgment of that body of reporting was it was absolutely enough and we within a few weeks it was the story that you've all seen but the point wasn't that it was you know done at any one of those points in time or that it couldn't have expanded if they had wanted it to the point is that they ordered us to stop yes and that is the striking kind of smoking gun tell that this was not a journalistic decision that was happening we were told to cancel interviews with rape victims we were told to stand down and not take a single call on this subject I was threatened that I was going to be exposed as having been terminated and let go from the company if I ever disclosed that NBC had anything to do with the story and in this book I over the course of several years of investigative reporting uncover what was happening at this company and the secrets that this company had that were under threat of exposure as Harvey Weinstein was bearing down on them in a whole slew of secret conversations and emails and contacts that were going on behind our backs well that's the thing you outlined in this story that Harvey Weinstein was really weinstein was blackmailing NBC News over the Matt Lauer allegations well I'm very I'm very careful to only go as far as the facts going it is true that we have multiple sources at both NBC News and at am i the parent company of the National Enquirer and NBC denies this and that denial is in there saying that there was a threat communicated of the type that you just alluded to yeah but there's also a bigger point which is indisputable which is these secret settlements and the high-level conversations about Matt Lauer's predation created a situation where NBC News was dealing with a lot of secrets that were about to come out and when I document these you know at least 15 secret calls between the top executives at NBC and Harvey Weinstein where they have admitted these calls happen and where they promise to kill the story ahead of any journalistic decision being made it is very clear when you look at those calls that these were executives who have who felt cornered they felt like they did have secrets to guard and who were simultaneously brokering and enforcing secret sexual harassment settlements while telling me that their legal judgment was that we could not report on secret sexual harassment settlements that Harvey Weinstein had made and they as it turns out I can now reveal they were parroting a talking point given to them by a hostile subject to the reporting Harvey Weinstein yes so my hope is that by exposing this there is a conversation about how to prevent this from happening to other people within a company who might be targeted in violent acts by individuals cloaked by these kinds of legal practices and a conversation about how to prevent this from happening to any other journalist with a tough lead well that's that's the thing you also discuss in in this book that Harvey Weinstein went to great lengths to keep this story under wraps he went so far as to hire spies to follow you and other reporters so much so that you felt your life was in danger and people advised you to get a gun multiple sources advised me to get a gun I moved out of my apartment I was very stressed out and not getting a lot of sleep put it over my shoulder a lot and you know I am like you you know someone with a legal training background and I am naturally inclined towards skepticism and there are many points in the plot that plays out in this book where I'm the last to admit okay something bizarre is happening here but even then you don't expect that the answer to the bizarre thing that's happening is an international espionage plot involving former Mossad agents and Russian spy subcontractors outside of your apartment and like an international femme fatale posing as a source yes these are all things that happened like an actual life unbelievable and and people are kind of reading the book and you know picking their drawers up off the floors I did I think this is not right and there's a lot of reviews that have now said like it reads like a spy thriller which is in a way sort of glamorizing after the fact but first of all it didn't feel that way at the time it felt extremely shitty and you know I was scared and like my poor mom I had to stop telling her about what was happening and I'm like sleeping at my desk rather than go home yes like the same car outside every night going into my apartment before I moved out of it with like my keys out god somebody I'm not good at self-defense despite the target practice regiments but and I would just point out it's it isn't glamorizing and it actually is a sign I think of just how far over the line this behavior is these are tactics that should be reserved for spy thrillers yes they should not be thrown at journalists in real life pursuing tough stories in a country with the protections of the First Amendment this seems to be the nature of where we are these days and I do try to imbue that threat of the plot with a real sense of perspective I am very aware of and grateful for the fact that I am NOT a journalist in Pakistan or Russia or any of the places where when you're reporting on power you're just dead the next day a lot of the time and journalists are killed in the line of their work every single day and their work is so important and so precious and it's important too precious in our democracy to yes and all of these stories about exotic and underhanded tactics deployed by powerful and wealthy people about the ways in which news organizations get subverted to become instruments of suppression for powerful people all of it goes to these questions about our access to free and transparent information in our democracy and the stories we tell ourselves as we enter our next election cycle and make leadership decisions yes this matters it matters and I never want to see the kinds of life-or-death stakes that I just described around the world transpire here in our country no I often think that's why it's the First Amendment because it's the most important yeah yeah it's the only profession that is explicitly and specifically protected in the Constitution and that is true for a reason and that the book is in so many ways a love letter to fellow journalists their stories were all through this and and and also to the sources who continue to speak and refuse to stop even in the face of opposition there's an incredible whistleblower named sleeper is yes who comes forward in this very dramatic turn of events and helps me expose this whole espionage operation there's this one of the kind of occasionally slightly bumbling spies from the former Soviet Union who are outside my apartment and chasing me around they actually chase a neighbor who looks like me by mistake for a while and then they're like is it him and they call me on myself I pick up at the other side of town you're cursing in Russian they're like they're pulling long hours and peeing into bottles but what one of the spies who was on my tail actually has this incredible evolution that I won't reveal all over the course of the book but becomes pivotal to the story in unexpected ways and starts to talk about having grown up in a police state and knowing what it's like to have the press controlled by the powerful and how people can suffer as a result and therefore feeling invested in turning around his involvement in it yes and it's very moving to me in it I hope that those stories being present in these pages means that you close the back cover of this book I mean you all have it right did you go get your copy it's one I'm honored by anyone who takes the time to read it and who cares about these issues and I hope you will finish it and feel optimistic as I do at the end of them so at least you know one thing that struck me you know we share friends in common one thing that struck me was some of the the stories that you write about Lisa bloom who is also an attorney and how you felt almost tricked by by Lisa what do you mean by that she has in recent days first of all she apologized to me and other reporters on the Weinstein story that she and she came on our show and also you know apologized done a bit of an apology tour I would say justifiably yeah she should perhaps consider apologizing to some of the women that she victimized and she has said in recent days as the furor around this book has heated up that she never lied to me in our calls and you know if she really believes that then I don't think she understands the spirit of honesty in conversations amongst friends or attorneys or just individuals with common decency because Lisa bloom in this story is a double agent I mean she is not disclosing that she is representing Harvey Weinstein and she is having conversations where she is presenting herself as an ally she is someone who for years appeared on my cable news program advocating for victims of powerful men who presented herself as an activist on women's rights who wrote op eds defending my sister and the credibility of my sister's claim against Woody Allen I admired Lisa bloom and respected her and Lisa bloom cashed in on the admiration and respect that she had built to work for Harvey Weinstein to Gaslight and undermine and attack women and to squash reporting efforts yeah and you know she will have to reckon with the consequences of that but I think that her behavior specifically with me where you know I had said look I know we're not under attorney-client privilege here because we're both attorneys but just as two lawyers who working a profession whose bedrock is respecting confidences yes if I'm gonna answer your in retrospect suspiciously probing questions about sources I'm working with you no I need to know that I have your assurance that you are not gonna disclose to the person I'm reporting on or anyone around them you know his people and she said absolutely yes I swear and you know I when I told her that I was working on Harvey Weinstein and immediately afterwards Harvey Weinstein's machine targeting they began wrapping up in his machine targeting these women began wrapping up I became increasingly suspicious but it was only later that I confronted her and said you know Lisa you promised at this point I had received a number of legal threat letters from Harvey Weinstein with her signature hunt him you know her name is at the bottom as a co-counsel yeah on letters that included among other things arguments that my sister had been brainwashed and was crazy you know things that directly contradicted years of writing she she'd put her name on those and and these are threats to wipe me out to whom from up from a friend yes and I said to her you know you gave me your word as an attorney and as a human being that you would not tell his people and she said rone and I am his people and yeah that was my reaction too shocking it is shocking and you know Jodi Kanter and Megan Chui of the New York Times have done excellent reporting uncovering things like memos promising to demolish these women yeah and expense reports where she was planning opposition operations against me and and Rose McGowan also was a target as well absolutely Rose McGowan was a target from Lisa bloom who and she did disparage Rose McGowan and conversations with me but also from this whole international espionage operation yes she had a an undercover agent posed as a women's rights activist and her best friend to the point where Rose McGowan finally said there's no one in the world that I can trust except you and this woman was secretly recording rose and sending those recordings to her alleged rapist so you know they're most of this story is about women who are real examples of bravery and ethics and also there are a lot of men and women in these pages who are I hope cautionary tales about just how depraved and ethically bankrupt you can become when money and power are at stake now you mentioned your sister and I think she's very brave as you know thank you I agree I agree and and that has always been significant coming from you because you know you do look incisive Lee at the facts of cases like this and I know you say it from a perspective of being read in I think you know when people return to that case with fresh eyes and look at the facts it's pretty shocking it is there was a miscarriage of just an open what was also shocking to me is that Weinstein called your estranged father Woody Allen he tried to argue that the situation with your sister who's accused woody of molesting her though woody maintains his innocence says Weinstein says that you had an agenda because of that and Harvey Weinstein tells you on the phone you couldn't save someone you loved and now you think you can save everyone there there are a lot of instances in this book and Beyond and stories I work on where personal and painful things get weaponized against me it's you know these are occupational hazards for us as journalists when you go up against tough stories a lot of stuff gets thrown at you and one common playbook is how personal can you get an RV Weinstein sent legal threat letters that were full of things like you know extensive discussion of an uncle I have who was convicted of pedophilia who I've never met you know knowledge right but it was very unclear how this was relevant to the many women accusing Harvey Weinstein of rape but uh you know I I guess the idea was to kind of convey some sense of hypocrisy like he's got some of this near him too and true I'd be the first to say it and and similarly you know this very painful effort to weaponize my sister's allegation to suggest that I you know had some axe to grind and no journalist has ever thought that looking at the facts you know reporters who become deeply invested in investigative work do have an obsessive quality and that's a real theme in this book one of the characters and it is Ken Aletta the wonderful New Yorker writer who is this great kind of genteel guy from another era and you know talks in this very stately way and for years struggled to break the Harvey Weinstein's story and didn't get it over the finish line but was really generous with me and I think I described him as being like the the homicide beat cop kept up at night by the case that got away and he used words like you know obsessed and fixated and as I kind of got these arguments thrown at me you know I really questioned is there any truth to the idea that you can be too close to the story and sure if you have an actual conflict of interest a business deal gone bad someone you're reporting on of course that's another matter but on a matter like this where there's no factual links between the stories but there is a link in terms of caring about and understanding the issue that is not only a positive but in some ways necessary to some extent you know every one of us as journalists brings to the table our investment in the issues were reporting on and that doesn't mean that you have a stake in the facts shaking out one way or another on an individual story I was adversarial with the sources with accusations against Harvey Weinstein I grilled the hell out of them I was skeptical at all times and willing to go wherever the facts may read and those pieces are very fair to Harvey wines that said I understood how crucial this issue was because of my sister's experiences and how important it was to the culture that these women were doing this brave thing and speaking now the theme of trust comes up over and over and over again in this book I wonder and I get asked this question often when I was prosecuting cases how do you get witnesses to trust you how did you get these women to trust you well I would like to hear about your process oh you know I was one of the prosecutors that was willing to go into people's homes and knock on the door and say I care I want to hear your story and I will do everything I can to bring justice to you I will do everything in my power but I need to hear your story I want to tell her my story and I don't even have one to tell I was there yeah yeah yeah I mean that that it takes time though to build that trust of course and you know the role of a prosecutor in the role of journalists are very different in some ways but this is a point of commonality it is about steady trust building and giving someone agency yes and not browbeating them into anything you know when people make a life-altering decision like coming forward with a very serious claim about a powerful person whether amend is very porous whether it's an internal istic context or a criminal context it takes tremendous bravery and it really does take grappling with the realization that your life may never be the same again I think a lot about the story of Annabelle señora yes who add an incredibly upsetting allegation of violent rape about Harvey Weinstein and I think has good days and bad days as most survivors of trauma do to this day and it was almost impossible on a physical level for her to get that story out and articulate it and almost impossible to listen to on some level - I think for me as a reporter and eventually for the public I mean these are unfathomable horrors and she did a brave thing after a long time of not being sure she was going to which included for instance and she let me tell this story eventually picking up the phone when I first contacted her and panicking and saying I don't know anything I don't know anything yeah which is another common starting yes these conversations and she not only decided ultimately to tell that story but has now volunteered to testify and Harvey Weinstein's criminal case which is upsetting and retraumatization again thrusts her up against a dynamic where she knows that her life will never be the same her public profile will never be the same she's an actress but she's an actress who loves her work and never wants to be known for anything but her work and it's not in the tabloids and she talked during our reporting conversations and some of this is in the book about knowing that she would now be walking into you know restaurants with her kids or walking out on the street and people would know this incredibly invasive personal horrible demeaning thing about her and I hope that she has come to some feeling that they also know something about her bravery yes and that she is standing up for something much bigger than herself and that is so important to so many other people out there but none of that makes it easy well I talk about this almost every day on our show the view but Trump is involved in this book too oh yes which was not so shocking to me seriously you tell the story of American media Inc and the National Inquirer keeping a safe filled with top-secret and sensitive Donald Trump related documents that was abruptly shredded in 2016 look at how excited she is this she talks about ready but you saw some of it oh yeah IDs right so this is the first time that a reporter has seen this list they made a master list during the election of all the Trump tur that the Enquirer had over the years and you know as with so many stories about The Enquirer and American Media Inc the story is in the process that played out around that was but more than it is about the contents I mean there were five Affairs on this list it's about sixty items was called sixty items it was called Donald Trump killed had a reference to killed stories on the top and it included a reference to about five Affairs some of which have become public some of them not and you know as far as I could see from the headline descriptions there weren't allegations of misconduct there so who cares on some level there there was discussion in those files of at least one allegation of misconduct which is the Jill hearth case that's right which has subsequently become public so you know I want to be clear to not overblow it's not that what we discovered on that list was here's some brand new smoking gun about Donald Trump and it should also be pointed out that was supposed to be a complete list of dirt that was the design of the list but it doesn't necessarily represent the full universe of the Enquirer's knowledge about Trump which makes another fact that we uncover in this book me and the fact-checking team and so forth which is it makes the another fact kind of even more relevant because either files on that list or other files that have not been identified at all were destroyed yeah by the Enquirer in the days leading up to the election and we have a multiple source well-documented account of a shredding party at this company which has now admitted in an agreement with prosecutors that it may have violated election laws to try to swing the outcome of the 2016 race by burying these stories and and the trail of clues that led me from The Enquirer burying stories for Harvey Weinstein to a series of stories that I break and a brand new one involving Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein that has not been disclosed until this book came out is you know a saga that I think has a lot of significance not just for the media world but for the way the political future of our country played us now these stories really are about a culture I think of sexual harassment have hit so many companies we're talking about CBS vice Bloomberg weinstein Warner Brothers Pixar now NBC do you think there's more to come I think it is indisputable that there's more to come and I don't just say that as someone who gets a lot of leads in my inbox every day so I know there's more to come hmm I say it because of the vastness of the systems that we're talking about I mean it was always very clear to me that this story was not significant just because Harvey Weinstein is a big deal this was about more than anyone producer more than just the entertainment industry this is about patterns of power protecting power in every industry and all around the world and we are just beginning to see a conversation about that and you know you talked about the unique significance of the media yeah and how it shapes the future of our nation so I am very glad that that conversation is now happening across multiple companies in the media including NBC but that's not the only area we need to focus on and it will take brave sources and whistleblowers continuing to speak and brave reporters continuing to not back down in the face of all of these intimidation tactics if we want to see a march towards accountability sure we have questions from the audience I've been given how tough are your questions guys I think summer long sunny is a prosecutor so that same this could get contentious okay our public narrative has been shaped by predators and their enablers in the news media and Hollywood what can we do as the public and as journalists to reclaim that narrative that's a good question well I think that every journalist speaking out about this and continuing to report on this is a part of that solution we've seen in response to the reporting I did on CBS News a whole lot of people step up and be forthright about addressing the problem we eventually saw leadership change at that company precisely because the great journalists there refused to shut up about it you know right after I reported on multiple allegations of sexual assault against Les Moonves at the time the head of that company and very much a darling of Wall Street and someone that a board had protected for years and years even when they knew he was under criminal investigation you know you saw people like Stephen Colbert get on air and say I demand accountability from my boss even though he's my boss yeah in the wake of this NBC reporting you have seen multiple NBC reporters do the same thing Chris Hayes I don't know if any of you saw that Chris Hayes program wonderful and that's a really hard thing to do to stand up and call out your bosses yeah and thank God there are journalists who have that backbone and so that's part of the answer and I think all of us in the public too you know in the decisions we make about where we consume media and how stridently we demand accountability from media companies can influence that decision I mean in terms of NBC News the parent company is Comcast yes so don't you demand that Comcast be a good corporate citizen and investigate NBC News you know I'm a reporter not an activist on this issue and my part of the job is to very fairly interrogate the facts and I am so grateful that now that those facts are out in the world they are prompting things like this you know letter sent by all of these reporters saying there needs to be an effort from this parent company to ensure that people aren't getting hurt in this news organization and that the coverage is independent and fair I can't be you know a part of that push but or say that I know what the outcome of it should be but I can say that I'm inspired by anyone who takes the facts and acts on them and tries to translate it into change here's another question I was disturbed by NBC's decision to sit on its infamous Access Hollywood tape for several days I was disturbed as well in 2016 until someone leaked it to the Washington Post has your reporting unearthed any trends in unfortunate editorial decision-making that extend beyond Weinstein I would say that a significant portion of this book is devoted to exactly that that it is a trend and it does extend beyond any one example and the backdrop of the Access Hollywood tape being sat on by these same executives at NBC News and the effect that had on the culture is very prominent in this story and it was a part of the backdrop of the reporting conversations I had over the course of these events that women I was talking to especially were kind of fed up with the situation over and over again that would come up as a theme that people were saying enough because there had been this moment in politics where people looked the other way in response to that and news organizations seemed to have been sitting on or suppressing or not ensuring that the public's saw and reacted in a fulsome way to this people were frustrated rightly so okay thank you Teresa for your question as a sexual assault survivor I'd like to say thank you for shining a light on such a pervasive problem as a journalist I'd like to ask how do you separate yourself from the work I imagine it's hard Thank You Teresa yeah Thank You Teresa and thank you for everyone who is brave enough to be forthright about this stuff it's really hard yeah and the question is a good one there is a struggle that plays out in this plot and I think it's worth pointing out it is a it is a story with a beginning a middle and an end you know I made the decision to not do a book that was you know a serve peas or a string of different pieces of reporting it's about a specific set of characters and a series of emotional up and ups and downs and part of that is a chronicle of a very low point in my life that where I have to be personal and honest and transparent about the ways in which I let down people around me and ways in which I felt vulnerable and frightened and that was a hard decision to make and I Chronicle how for a long time I resisted it and just wanted desperately to not be the story and I think particularly for someone like me who you know I'm yes I grew up amidst a lot of scandal and turmoil and some painful things but mostly I focused on the incredible privileges and opportunities that I had and really earnestly wanting to pay those forward when I can but because of that background you know I've really wanted the work to stand on its own and been very kind of sensitive about being in the long shadow of some of those personal things and so when I came into this situation where I was on air every day and good journalists were asking me you know why aren't you talking about the way you were targeted why aren't you talking about the shutdown of your reporting and I would say well I want the underlying story to have its moment in the Sun and these brave sources and the focus should be on them and none of us wants to be the story and they would say no this the story of did these stories not being told is significant in and of itself and in the end I I struggle with that and decide they're right they were right to grill me and I did have to spend a couple of years investigating this and to really tell it honestly I had to tell the full arc of my involvement in it you had spies chasing you right so you know one moral of the story is if you have spies chasing you you're gonna become the story a little bit and you know I think it is possible to both be transparent about your role in a story and rigorous about reporting on it and I think this book has been received in the spirit of people understanding that it does both she didn't how did you manage to juggle this book reporting and your dissertation because I'm wondering how did you do that and then it says mad props thank you who gave that question thank you very much I and a big nerd I guess that's probably already clear and I did finish a PhD earlier this year thank you thank you and I had to like slide it I did my doctorate at Oxford and I had to fly to England this Oxford ain't no big I had to fly to England in the middle of like book deadline and like crises around stories I'm doing and you know I there been it took me I honestly I think of full seven years to do this PhD so I was not like I one of my fact-checkers sent a gif of the Pokemon slow King described my progress so I'm not like a wunderkind at moving fast through doctoral degrees but I did finally get it towards the finish line in multiple times over the course of this process I had to go out to England to kind of kiss the ring and yeah tell the professor is still working on it pass various they have rounds of oral exams you have to go through and each time we'd have conversations where they'd say kind of so you appear to be anchoring an American television show every day and I would say yes but that is a side project and my man my academic pursuits full-time at Oxford and you know more recently going for my final oral exam to end the degree you know seem to have won a Pulitzer Prize in the last this is my main priority they put up with me and my [ __ ] and and I you know I did in the end have to work really hard yes it's something like you know 450 pages and I really did it's a full you know social science dissertation kind of schema tizen whether there's a correlation between the level of deception and relationships the United States has with proxy armies and the cost of those relationships which is not as boring as it sounds stop laughing it's very serious okay this comes from Peter how do you prepare a good one how do you prepare for interviews do you prepare and sequence your questions in advance so this really varies I'm a big preparer and I saw you preparing for this and it weren't my heart because honey is a big prepare it's great it's great and that is something to be proud of I think in just about any profession I do a lot of scripting and preparing when I'm doing broadcast interviews yes and that's a very different discipline if you're doing a live interview yes versus if you're doing a taped interview and I've done things like you know an hour with Malala or Angelina Jolie or something and it's you know if it's gonna be a special you have one set of priorities and then also if you're doing a contentious Cable News interview with a politician like it's a whole other arc that you're constructing but you are kind of thinking ahead and trying to plot a series of satisfying reveals right and there's a little more kind of brazen showmanship to the live TV cable news type interviews I say cable especially because those tend to be you know on the view I one thing I love about the format I really enjoyed that interview you get you get space too breathe you know and I think people don't talk about the seriousness with which this particular group of women on this version of the view imbue those proceedings some people don't enjoy our interviews well that sounds like a badge of honor I mean you're tough on some people and rightly so and you raise serious issues and that's really important and it's important to get that to the audience that you guys have because it's a position of power that comes with some responsibility but those tends to play out over a slightly longer form whereas if you have a you know two-minute three-minute even a six minute cable segment you're really like getting in the hits and by contrast when you're doing television investigative reporting you have all the time in the world and very often you're actually you're doing a lot of ramp up that's never gonna make it on camera and then trying to get to a soundbite and you're kind of thinking in terms of individual puzzle pieces much more than the whole and that's the thing if you have it all in a sequence and all written out sometimes you're not listening yes answer and then you can't build off of the answer I found absolutely and you kind of have to I find both things helpful yeah a lot of planning and a blueprint of where you could go and then the willingness to really be in the moment and kind of enough familiarity with the blueprint and then he notes you have in front of you that you can not focus on it just have it there as a reference and use it as a jumping-off point is topic areas right and you might jump around you might go in a new direction that you don't expect yeah I agree I think that was did I have any more we're supposed to get additional cards maybe are you guys feeling satisfied with the number of questions now you good all right they're good I think they're good they didn't want us a clock on stage you know we're only human I have my I'm right on time actually like a true prosecutor running it I just have one more question what's next for you you know I get asked that question a lot and I never know how to answer it and not original you can hear me buying stalling for time because I don't know I I have been so immersed in getting the reporting in this book airtight yeah and I have so much respect for anyone who writes a book yeah I mean books are really hard how many people in this audience have written a book we got a couple of book writers I am there with you like god bless you it's hot it's like it's hard for the writer it's hard for everyone around the writer I was such a nightmare to put up with during a whole lot of the events described in this book and art god bless my wonderful partner yeah put up with me this whole thing is some job many fans here it's great it's really hard and I you know this particular book and I guess any investigative book you're doing several difficult things at once one of which is you're doing a multiple year very contentious investigation that's getting you a lot of threats including legal threats and it's a high-wire act and you're going to powerful people with very difficult revelations and fact-checking and it's it's a you know very very precise almost legalistic work and then at the same time you're doing a completely different and difficult thing which is creating a dramatic work where the the plot moves at the right pace and there's hopefully real nuance and interest in the characters and everyone that's in the book has a coherent arc with a beginning and a middle and an end and this book in particular is a little bit of a Chinese puzzle box of a lot right like you there's threads that are braided together and converge in hopefully satisfying and unexpected ways and it's been such a relief after years of of trying to fine-tune this piece of intricate machinery to put it out into the world and be like are they gonna like my baby and everyone I mean its I'm so grateful already for the reviews yeah and the way the public has rallied around it and both on a repertory level where people have really rallied around these brave sources in it and cut through a lot of spin and BS and legal threats that like for instance got it banned in Australia for several days because the head of the National Enquirer don't clap for that National Enquirer guy Dylan Howard who works for Weinstein and for uh you know the Trump did not want people reading this book for reasons you can probably into it and hired lawyers in every region of the world and Amazon Australia caved and didn't yeah that you can boo at that one and you know and a couple of other big okay I love the his a couple of big retailers weren't selling it and now it's kind of a moving tribute to the importance of free speech Australians like rushed out and force and got it from independent booksellers imported it and now those those chains including Amazon are selling it in Australia so free speech wins exactly but all of which to say it's meant a lot that people have rallied around it in this way and and also at the same time understood that it is a yarn that's about more than the headlines and more than just the sum of its parts right and I'm so excited for you all to read it and I'm so grateful that you took the time to talk about it my pleasure it's my honor absolutely Billy's beautiful mr. Ronan Farrow ladies he does sunny Hostin thank you guys [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 234,343

Keywords: Ronan Farrow, Ronan Farrow Catch and Kill, Catch and Kill Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow, Sunny Hostin, Sunny Hostin The View, Ronan Farrow Matt Lauer, Ronan Farrow interview, Ronan Farrow NBC, Ronan Farrow NBC news, Ronan Farrow Brooke Nevils, Ronan Farrow Brooke Nevils nbc, Lisa Bloom, catch and kill, ronan.farrow, Politics and Prose, Ronan Farrow Politics and Prose

Id: FaTi090FVAA

Length: 67min 41sec (4061 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 21 2019