Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators is a 2019 book by the American journalist Ronan Farrow. He recounts the challenges he faced chasing the stories of Harvey Weinstein's decades of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse 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 sexual abuse, mostly of women, in many industries. The title refers to the practice of catch and kill, in which disreputable media companies purchase stories so that they can bury them. The book is published by Little, Brown and Company, and, according to Farrow, "was exhaustively vetted by Sean Lavery, a senior fact checker at The New Yorker". Background Catch and kill media practice Catch and kill is a covert technique—usually employed by tabloid newspapers—to prevent an individual from publicly revealing damaging information to a third party. Using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, the tabloid purports to buy exclusive rights to "catch" the damaging story from the individual, but then "kills" the story for the benefit of the third party by preventing it from ever being published. The individual with the information frequently does not realize that the tabloid intends to suppress the individual's story instead of publishing it. The practice is distinct from using hush money, in which the individual is bribed by the third party to intentionally conceal the damaging information. The National Enquirer and its parent company American Media Inc. (AMI) have attracted attention for using the practice.