The New Yorker Radio Hour - Ronan Farrow on a Campaign of Silence

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein and other accused perpetrators of sexual assault helped opened the floodgates of the #MeToo movement. In his new book, “Catch and Kill,” and in “The Black Cube Chronicles” published on newyorker.com, Farrow details the measures that were taken against him and against some of the accusers who went on the record. These included hiring a private spy firm staffed by ex-Mossad officers. Speaking with David Remnick, Farrow lays out a connection between accusations against Harvey Weinstein and NBC’s Matt Lauer. And he interviewed a private investigator named Igor Ostrovskiy who was assigned to spy on him—until he had a crisis of conscience. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Ronan Farrow shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for the New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein. His work since then has fueled the Me Too movement with revelation after revelation of misconduct by some very powerful men, particularly in the media. This reporting has been for so many wrenching and enrable. to read. But there's reason to hope that Pharaoh's reporting is helping to change the status quo in some very real ways. His book Catch and Kill, which was just published, has caused an uproar. Among other things, the book details how Harvey Weinstein hired a mysterious organization

called Black Cube to try to protect himself. So Ronan, what is Black Cube? Black Cube sounds like something in the worst kind of spy novel or a spy movie you've ever seen, but it's a real thing. who were they, and why were they hired to follow you? Black Cube is an Israeli private intelligence firm with very close and very blurry ties to the current active Mossad and Israeli military and other factions of the Israeli government. They do a lot of business with the Israeli government, but they are a private entity staffed by what they describe as elite operatives skilled in undercover operations, in deception. in using false identities and front companies. And to your point about it, sounding like it's from some kind of a hard-boiled spy thriller,

you know, when I presented the documentation showing that this had really happened, that there was an international espionage operation around reporters and alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein, if I recall your reaction and that above... I thought you were out of your mind. I thought you were getting a little too tired, maybe a little delusional.

I had the same thought. I mean, who could believe such a thing? Yeah, and by the way, it's a private business, am I right? It's a private business. It has government contracts. It touts the fact that it is staffed by alumni of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies, but it is private. Ehud Barak gave Harvey Weinstein. Former prime minister.

Former prime minister. The hot tip that if he had a problem, Black Cube was a great way for him to address it. And Ehud Barak has confirmed that this is the case, but also said he didn't know what it was going to be used for, et cetera, et cetera. But it does go to show the close ties between the Israeli government and Black Cube. How did you learn about Black Cube and maybe even more interesting? How did you know you were getting surveilled by Black Cube? So I first learned about Black Cube because I was getting all sorts of strange calls and sources were getting all sorts of strange calls. and sources were getting all sorts of strange calls.

And this was a period in my life where I was looking over my shoulder a lot. I was wondering, as you said, if I was just tired and going a little crazy, the walls were kind of closing in on me in several different ways. And I was stressed. And I was pushing out of my head these concerns that I was seeing the same car over and over again, seeing the same people over and over again. And just to be clear, this is before publishing even your first article? Correct.

This is over the course of the summer of 2017, as I'm working on this story. The story is embattled in various ways. And before I meet you and bring it to the wonderful offices of the New Yorker, essentially I then was able to reverse engineer this trail of clues. Who is Eager of Stravsky who plays a role in your book? So all of these suspicions that I had been surveilled were initially denied outright by Black Q. They denied they had any contact with reporters. They denied that they had any contact with accusers.

and first a source called Sleeper, who came our way during the reporting of our New Yorker stories. I know this sounds stranger than fiction, but you'll recall, began dropping us documents from inside the Black Cube operation. And that helped us expose the fact that, yes, they had done both. They had sent undercover operatives to, by way of example,

become Rose McGowan's best friend and secretly record her. But this is somebody growing a conscience inside a black cube? Yes. Sleeper is one of the many examples I'm glad to say in this book where it's not just about darkness and crime and cover-ups it's about really brave people putting their jobs and maybe more on the line

to try to out the truth. So we were able to get the contracts and documents showing there was an operation. What I still didn't have, David, was proof that I wasn't going crazy and I had been followed. And it was only in 2018 that I got a call from this additional source. This is Eager of Straff's

That's right. For a podcast to accompany this book that's coming out soon, I sat down with him and heard him out on that. I was born in Ukraine. And when I was nine, almost 10, we came to Brooklyn. I went to school. I couldn't speak English. But I picked it up pretty quickly in a couple of years. So I take this class in high school, a criminal justice class, and there I made a friend. His uncle had a private investigation company. We ended up being next to that company by accident. He said, let's go inside, say hi, I go inside. And as soon as we left, I said to my friend, I said, look, Ben, I won a job with your uncle. Four years later, they did hire me.

So tell me about the first jobs that seemed to be about what you ultimately learned is the Harvey Weinstein case. Right. So one day I get a call like, hey, we got a job tomorrow in Brooklyn, got a go, and I get into New York Times reporter. And I'm like, all right, that's weird. So this is Jody Cantor. Yep.

And he tells me the name. And I think, oh, it's a woman. Maybe her husband wants her followed. So we followed, we followed. Jody to the New York Times building. We're going to wait to see if she leaves, and if she leaves, we have to figure out who she's meeting with. So if she meets with anyone, we've got to follow that person and figure out who they are.

And now I understand that this is clearly to figure out who her source is. And I said, all right, I'm going to keep going along with this, but I'm having issues. Tell me about those issues. So you're now aware, or at least suspect, that you're being. asked to track a reporter to uncover what she's reporting on or how she's reporting on it. How does that make you feel? Not happy. And especially a publication that I respect. Pretty rapidly you guys give up on the times, right? Yeah, for some reason, I mean, we were up on Jody Cantor, I think two times and the third time. From there, they had me split and go over to you.

your house. So you guys are staking me out and what are you told that you're looking for? Well, same idea, right? So the goal was the same as with Jody Cantor to figure out who you're meeting with. Just report back your activities. But the main idea is the sources, right? At this point, I was already like, all right, we got to figure out what's going on because might have to, you know, might have to take some actions because it looks like something I believe in is being possibly attack. So it sounds like the next moment where you kind of learn more about what was really happening here is when I published that article about Harvey Weinstein's army of spies, and I reveal that he had retained this firm Black Cube out of Israel, which had targeted

journalists and sources talking to them. Right. So when I saw that, I said, okay, but this is clear who we're working for. And this is clear. that this is what they were trying to do, because this is like the story about us without mentioning our tactics or our names directly. Because the targets that I described in that article were also your targets. Right. You know, the media is now here being directly attacked, and they're trying to manipulate the reporting. Well, it came from a place where there was no press. There was press that was owned by the government. They reported. for the government.

It was 100% the agenda of the government that was being shown, and all the people had no other source of information, so they couldn't verify anything. So the government had complete control of the population. And in America, we tend to believe that if you give up an inch, you're giving up a yard, and you're giving up everything.

I thought that if I allow this to happen and I walk away and I don't do anything, then I'm complicit in allowing the media, the way of life I believe in, to be attacked and to be changed, and that could be irreversible. So, Ronan, that was Igor Ostrofsky, who was a subcontractor for Black Cube during that period. And we now know that Black Cube was selling that information about sources, about where you might place that story after NBC killed it to, of all people, Harvey Weinstein, who is then using it to bully outlets and survivors. and reporters. But, you know, I've got to say, he never called me until after the New Yorker started fact-checking, which is very strange, and that comes very late in our process. I actually think that makes sense with the timeline that I've unraveled in this book.

Harvey Weinstein was very busy, as it turns out, making calls to leadership at NBC News, which is where this reporting that I was doing began, and made a desperate bid to discover where I had taken the story and only really did discover. very late in the game. Despite chasing me around... So Black Cube wasn't very good at what they did. In this instance, they really failed. There's actually a moment in the book, David, where they spend days following a neighbor of mine who looks like me. And they, you know, get up within touching distance of this neighbor of mine and then realize, oh shit, this isn't him. Did you ever really fear for your physical self? To be completely honest, they did freak me out. And I did feel the weight

of that surveillance campaign. How so? Well, you'll recall as I was reporting this story, you know, I had conversations with my editor on some of this reporting, David Road. Yeah, you weren't eating very well and you weren't sleeping very well. That I remember very distinctly.

It's true, and there was really worrying. There were nights where, you know, I had been told by sources to get a gun. I had moved out of my apartment and into a friend's place. I do a little target practice in this book. I'll leave it at that. And, you know, I was in a very,

unsettled place. You know, I felt embattled in a way that when I tell this story in the book, I hope it's not, oh, woe is me, because this is not being a journalist in Pakistan, being a journalist in Russia. You know, I'm not winding up dead the next day. But it is a set of intimidation tactics that shouldn't be thrown at reporters in a country with the First Amendment. So Black Cube is just one of the tactics employed by Harvey Weinstein to keep his accusers quiet, intimidated. What were some of the others? Harvey Weinstein hired a number of private investigation firms to dig up dirt on accusers and reporters pursuing this story. He leveraged a wide network of media contacts.

That included the tabloid outlet, the National Inquirer. AMI had a deal with him. Am I as the publisher of the National Inquirer. He, over the course of my reporting, became closer and closer to Dylan Howard, who is the editor of the National Inquirer. We were later able to break the story that Dylan Howard had been secretly making recordings to try to dig up dirt on Harvey Weinstein's accusers and had used the inquirer to try to generate negative items about Harvey Weinstein's enemies. Harvey Weinstein laid siege to even mainstream outlets. There's reporting in this book about the way in which he called again and again the executives of NBC News and extracted from them promises about what was going to happen to the reporting. I'm just going to say many stories get killed for many reasons, but you're saying that when NBC killed the Weinstein story, that was an entirely different matter.

The reporting suggests that this is something very different. They didn't sit on it too long. They didn't show insufficient interest. They ordered a stop. And the reporting in this book, I think, gives a pretty good sense. Why? Why did they step away? They had, according to Harvey Weinstein, cut a deal. Harvey Weinstein, in his legal threat letters to me and later to the New Yorker, alludes to written assurances from NBC News that they would kill the story and assert a copyright claim if I took the material anywhere else. Why would NBC make that deal? Well, so the reporting in this book suggests that during this time frame,

when Harvey Weinstein was bearing down on them with a whole lot of threats and enticements, their secrets were under threat of exposure. I referred to this pattern of secret settlements to the fact that several of those settlements were with women who had complaints and had voiced those complaints within the company about Matt Lauer. And you have Dylan Howard working closely with Harvey Weinstein

pulling files of dirt within the inquirer about Matt Lauer in this time frame, running in the pages of the inquirer. This is not speculative. These are articles that actually ran more and more items about allegations. of misconduct in the office by Matt Lauer and NBC leadership being fed up with it.

This was all bearing down on this network as Harvey Weinstein approached them with his threats. So what you're suggesting is that Weinstein, with the help of the National Enquirer, was threatening to expose NBC's problems with Matt Lauer unless they killed the story. Was NBC blackmailed? You know, the book in this matter and in all other matters

is very, very careful and measured. And so it doesn't lay out, you know, a portrayal of a mustache twirling, backroom deal signed in blood. What it does lay out is transcripts and records of phone calls where these executives were backed into a corner and promised they would make the story go away.

Well, let's talk about Dylan Howard, who was the editor of the National Enquirer and who used his position to collaborate with Harvey Weinstein. But Weinstein isn't the only guy that Dylan Howard worked with. He also, you found, collaborated closely with the Donald Trump presidential campaign. Obviously, we reported several stories about how Donald Trump worked with the National Enquirer during the election. And they later, even though they lied to us when we reported those stories and denied it all,

admitted to all this in a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors. There's new information in Catch and Kill about just how deep that collaboration. It's the first time a reporter has seen the complete content list of all the dirt that the National Enquirer had on Trump. And they made that list and another disclosure for the first time in this book. It turns out just before the election, they shredded a bunch of documents related to Trump. So there's been news playing out now about this new revelation that there was maybe even the destruction of evidence here. So at one point, I remember this very well, at one point in your book, you write that Nick Merrill, who was a long time staffer for Hillary Clinton approached you about the Weinstein story. And Weinstein, of course, was a major donor to her campaign. And Merrill allegedly told you

that the story was, quote, a concern for us. What was he saying? And did Hillary Clinton in some way try to influence the story? You know, Hillary Clinton was not, you know, a hands-on assassin of the Weinstein story. I think she had glancing knowledge of how serious it was, how much I had. I can't speak to her state of mind

and what motivated her staff to raise concerns about my reporting on this major donor and friend of hers and then to appear to attempt to back out of an interview that had been scheduled for a foreign policy book that I was working on. But I included in the book because it did feel relevant.

It was a sign of the way in which this reporting had seeped, into political circles of power, that people were becoming aware that I was working on it, even though I was trying to keep a lid on it. And the way in which each time it leaked further, it seemed like there were more and more negative repercussions

for me, that the screws were turning and powerful allies of Harvey Weinstein's were beginning to find me radioactive. Well, one of Weinstein's biggest tactics was to slander the women who accused him of sexual assault. I don't think it's unique to him, but that was a move. And examples of this include planning,

false stories about one woman being a prostitute, if I remember correctly, digging up photos of his accusers smiling while standing next to him, which was very common, and painting Rose McGowan, in particular as, what would you say, unstable. And slut shaming has always been a part of the response to sexual assault. And you thought that might have been changing, but then Matt Lauer's statement came out, and I was incredulous. A lot of people have reacted that way to Matt Lauer's statement. Did you? Well, you know, I'd actually, before I talk about my reaction, point to the reaction of Brooke Nevels, the young journalist who accuses him of sexual assault.

He raped her in a hotel room in Sochi, Russia, during the Olympics. That's right. And, you know, he leans heavily in his response on this idea, which was also deployed by Harvey Weinstein in his responses. that they had subsequent contacts. And her rendering of those contacts is that she was a junior employee dealing with the most powerful man at her company and that she was intimidated when he said, come to my apartment, have a drink with me,

and wanted to put him at ease. And therefore readily admits that there are communications between them that could seem enthusiastic after the fact. And that also some of those follow-up communications were not consensual, that she was forced to deal with him professionally and he demanded sexual favors during those encounters. He says this was an affair.

Consensual. A consensual affair. And there was a concerted machine in motion trying to plant in the press this framing, that it was an affair, which she describes as being nauseating because this is never how she described it to anyone. But here's the thing, David.

the interpretation of the alleged crime doesn't depend on either of those accounts of events because what she says, I think, quite persuasively, and this is a story she has always told consistently, is that regardless of what happened before and after that night in Sochi and how he interpreted those other interactions, in that case, she was too drunk to consent, and she said no repeatedly, and he proceeded with a sex act that she had decreed,

declined to perform, which was, as she tells the story, violent and injured her. Journalism can be an awfully transactional occupation in the sense that the interplay between journalist and source has a purpose in a moment in time and then both sides move on to other stories, to other moments, to other aspects of life. I get the sense that that's not the case with you and your sources, that the women that you dealt with so closely for now it's now two years ago and more how often do you speak to them and what's happened to them what david is referring to possibly is that i step out of a lot of meetings because i get a lot of calls from distraught sources at all hours i do and and you know

on one level that's an honor i was so grateful that these particularly women in these stories but whistleblowers of any type that speak in any of our stories took that leap and did something in the public interest at personal risk. And the emotional tale of that commitment is long. And honestly, never ending. I mean, I think that that decision and also the earlier traumas that were described in those stories will echo in these sources' lives as long as they live. So I do feel like part of my job is to, yes, make it clear to them. I'm not their friend. I'm not their therapist. I am a lawyer, but I'm not their lawyer and maintain journalistic arm's length, but also to be there to the extent that I can. And so I do, by and large, stay in touch with

sources. And, you know, I have been hearing from them as this book comes out, and I've been immensely gratified to hear from, you know, people like Rose McGowan, who I've had my ups and downs and complications with during an extraordinarily high-stakes emotional process of reporting these stories, but who has been grateful to see the full expanse of what she went through as a target of this espionage operation exposed in this book. So these are not easy relationships, and they can be tense, it can be complicated, but I try to do write by sources when I can. The book is catch and kill by my friend and colleague Ronan Farrow. Ronan, thank you so much. Thank you, David. You can read Ronan Farrow's series, The Black Cube Chronicles at New York.

dot com. Now, for the record, take note that Matt Lauer denies having any sexual contact without consent, and AMI, the publisher of the National Enquirer, denies the documents pertaining to Donald Trump were shredded. Ronan's new book is called Catch and Kill. His interview with private investigator Igor Ostrowski was excerpted from The Catch and Kill podcast with Ronan Farrow. And that's coming out soon from Pineapple Street Studios, so keep an eye out for that.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. I hope you've enjoyed the show, and I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianan and Corby, Karen Frulman, Callalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.