Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes (2021) s01e02 Episode Script

I met Harvey at The Peninsula
at least 20 years ago.
And I remember sitting
there on the terrace
out there at The Peninsula
waiting for Harvey.
And, all of a sudden, Harvey comes
running onto this thing
screaming like a mad man.
Why do you write this shit about me?
Why do you write this shit?
Why do you say, I'm a bully?
Which was funny in the moment.
And then he said, what have you
heard about me?
And I thought, all right, like this
is the moment. Like, this is it.
I gotta do this now or do it never.
I said, I've heard you rape women.
CATCH AND KILL
THE PODCAST TAPES
THE REPORTERS
Testing. One, two, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight.
- All right, you guys speeding?
- Speed C.
How many years do you think
you circled this story for?
Long, I mean intermittently.
I don't wanna make you think
I'm just constantly every week,
like let me do a Harvey check-in.
Every once in a while, I'd be like, this
guy just left Miramax. Let's call him.
Kim Masters has been reporting
on Hollywood since the 90s,
which means she's also been reporting
on Harvey Weinstein since the 90s.
The stories of Weinstein's alleged
abuse go back literally for decades.
Do you have any advice for
a young girl moving to Hollywood?
If Weinstein invites you to a private
party in the Four Seasons, don't go.
Journalists had tried for years
to nail down these rumors,
to convince sources to go on
the record, to break this story.
Every girl knows that
if she's a competent actress,
if she could get on your good side.
You could make her a star overnight.
Howard, I wish, the movies are too
expensive, the risks are too great.
People have referred to Weinstein's
behavior as an open secret.
I'd heard rumors for years.
Two names I heard
that he had assaulted were Gwyneth
Paltrow and Rosanna Arquette.
My situation that happened at The
Beverly Hills Hotel in the early 90s
was there was a film called Romeo
is Bleeding with Gary Oldman.
And he had wanted me
to play the wife.
So, I get here, supposed to have
dinner at the Polo Lounge.
And Mr. Weinstein, we'll see you
upstairs. And I got really like
And I said okay, but they're meeting
in the hotel room,
like, you know, they always do.
It's not a big deal. I've met
a lot of directors in hotel rooms.
I did, for years.
That's where people held meetings.
If you're coming from New York, you
rent a hotel and you have a suite
and the living room part
is where the meeting is.
It's not in a bed.
There's no bed there.
I get up there, he opens the door in
his white bathrobe which was his thing.
Rosanna, I can't move my neck.
And I was like, I stood back and
I went, I have a masseuse for you.
And he took my hand, you know,
and then I yanked it away.
- He pulled your hand towards
- Towards his penis.
Which was actually
in the robe but hard already.
I had to pull my hand away.
It was gross.
Like I didn't,
and all of this stuff is like,
and then he said, Rosanna,
you're making a very big mistake.
And I said, I'll never be that girl.
What were you thinking as you left
that meeting with Harvey?
I knew, as soon as I went down
that elevator.
It was just like I knew it. It's over.
Like as I got to the bottom floor,
and I just immediately knew.
I said, there's gonna be retaliation.
I'm fucked. I know it.
And I was right.
We'd find out that Arquette's
experience was far from unique.
But when Kim Masters
was reporting on this in the 90s,
those were just rumors.
We really wanted to get at it
but there was no, it was like
trying to grab like smoke.
Because you're not gonna be able
to call up Gwyneth Paltrow
and say, were you assaulted
by Harvey Weinstein?
Given who Harvey was at that time.
Mr. Weinstein?
Who could basically say,
would you like an Oscar
or would you like to litigate
until I destroy you?
It felt like a complete hopeless thing
to try to get a hold of that.
I feel like the people in New York
got farther than the people in LA.
Like I think Ken Auletta got some
stuff maybe that we didn't have.
I profiled him
for The New Yorker in 2002
and I reached out
to Matthew Hiltzik
who was then his public
relations guy.
And they came back, as I remember,
we're not gonna cooperate.
I said, okay, I'll do it anyway.
Ken has covered the media
for The New Yorker since 1993.
Over the course of his career, he's
profiled a lot of elite power players,
everyone from New York Mayor Ed Koch
to Michael Eisner to Roy Cohn,
Nixon's advisor and a mentor
to a young Donald Trump.
Ken wanted to write the most
comprehensive piece
ever published
about Harvey Weinstein.
That's what he was trying to get
Weinstein and Hiltzik to understand.
You say, I don't wanna just talk
to your enemies and adversaries.
I wanna talk to you. I wanna
understand you. That's my job.
And at that point, they succumbed
and said, they'll cooperate.
What was his reputation at the time,
when you started digging into this?
People were afraid of him.
Harvey instilled enormous fear.
They thought he could affect their
career. He could destroy their career.
He could and he often did call people
who wanted to leave his employ
and tell people, don't hire this person,
and he bad mouthed them.
I had any number of people who say,
I'll talk but you can't quote me.
And what was that about?
It was fear.
Every time you confronted him about
a near fistfight he had,
putting a reporter in a headlock,
threatening Graydon Carter,
the editor of Vanity Fair
Throwing an ashtray at the wall
behind Donna Gigliotti, right?
- Isn't that in your profile?
- Yeah, and a marble ashtray.
I mean one, really,
like five-pound ashtray.
Every time I would confront him,
he said, I know I go to excess.
I know I have a hot temper.
I'm reformed.
Then you began to hear
about these allegations.
What you do is, as you get
to know people
and talk to them more than once,
you become more intimate with them.
And they feel, they relax a little bit.
And then you say, what am I missing?
Who else should I talk to?
Or I hear that Harvey boasts about
the women actresses he sleeps with.
Tell me about that.
And as you get to know people,
they feel comfortable enough
to share some secrets with you.
You just try to put the pieces together,
like a detective would.
The two women I came closest to
exposing Harvey's behavior towards,
Zelda Perkins, who's his assistant
in London and Rowena Chiu.
Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu
were assistants
who quit Weinstein's company,
Miramax, in 1998,
after Rowena said Weinstein
tried to rape her.
They later took legal action.
Harvey had attempted
to rape Rowena
and I knew they had signed
a non-disclosure agreement,
been paid a total of over $250,000
to sign that non-disclosure agreement.
I went to the court system
in New York.
I could find nothing in the court
system. And I'm saying, why?
There's no court record of any of it.
And then I realized what he did.
What he did was as soon
as you made an accusation
Harvey flies over his lawyer,
hires a law firm in London.
They reach an agreement.
I'll pay you, you sign this
non-disclosure agreement.
You don't get a copy of it.
It stays in my lawyer's office.
It never gets to the court.
It's a private document.
It's not a public document. And
I realized, that's what he did.
And that's why you couldn't get it out.
We didn't have anyone on the record.
But I knew he had done these things.
But I just couldn't prove it.
And so I confronted Harvey
in my final interview.
I spent a fair amount of time with him
and I have about 12 hours
of taped interviews with him.
And I confronted him,
just the two of us,
and I said, Harvey, tell me about
Rowena Chiu and Zelda Perkins
and your attempted rape at the Venice
Film Festival in '98, of Rowena.
And he stood up from his chair
and he said,
Ken, this was a consensual affair.
You're gonna ruin my marriage.
You're gonna destroy
my three young daughters' lives.
And you can't do it. And he stood
over me shaking, fists clenched.
When I stood up, at that moment,
thinking, actually,
we were gonna get into fistfight,
he broke down and started crying.
And it was quite extraordinary.
And I wondered, was that
the bully crying
or was it just so, so fearful that
finally he was gonna be exposed?
The Tuesday before Ken's profile ran,
Harvey Weinstein and his lawyer,
David Boies,
set a meeting with Ken,
his editor, David Remnick,
and the magazine's lawyer
at The New Yorker's offices.
Harvey thinks we're gonna run what
he's done with Zelda Perkins
and Rowena Chiu.
And we're sitting across from each other
in The New Yorker conference room
in the old New Yorker building
on 42nd Street.
And he started screaming,
I'm gonna stop you from publishing.
And David Boies, to his credit,
taps him on the arm and said,
Harvey, there's a First Amendment
in this country. You can't do that.
Then I lean forward and I said, Harvey,
here's what we need tomorrow.
I need to see how you paid
these two non-disclosure agreements
for Zelda and for Rowena.
And he said, I'm not gonna.
Harvey, I need to see it tomorrow.
Of course, I'm thinking, if I could
show that the corporate parent, Disney,
paid for the non-disclosure,
or Miramax itself paid,
someone's going to jail
and I could write the whole story.
I didn't need the women to talk to me
cause I had it then.
So, the next day he comes with
his brother, Bob Weinstein,
and they slide across the table two
canceled checks from Bob Weinstein.
They're personal checks.
When I confront the guy and he says,
they're consensual affairs,
I paid for silence to protect my
marriage. I can't prove otherwise.
By using personal checks
to pay off the women,
Weinstein avoided
committing corporate fraud.
Ken wasn't able to expose him.
And David said to me,
I don't see how we could run this.
And I agreed with him.
And I still agree with him.
I think it was the right decision.
We couldn't prove it.
The profile published
on December 16th, 2002.
Looking back at it, there's this
one passage that really stands out.
Weinstein doesn't wanna
share the costs of the movie
or trade half an interest
in a Miramax film.
Instead, his partners,
the studio head said,
feel raped, a word often invoked
by those dealing with him.
You couldn't get the allegations
of sexual abuse reportable.
But you did include the word, rape,
there. Talk about that decision.
It was deliberate because I knew he
was guilty but I couldn't prove it.
And I knew that, actually, he didn't
just physically rape people.
He verbally raped people.
He raped people by threatening
them with fear for their job,
for their livelihood,
for their careers.
So, rape, is a word that,
I think defines not just
the act of physical rape.
But in Harvey's case,
the way he abused people.
So, they didn't interpret it. They
sincerely took it at face value, too?
They didn't take it literally.
Well, people didn't know
that Harvey was a sexual predator.
Other than that one veiled word,
the profile made no mention
of sexual misconduct.
And this is a good man.
People don't know that.
But he's don't a lot
of good things in life.
They'll write an article about
that someday, too. New Yorker.
You know, to write about Harvey
was to make Harvey mad.
The way Kim tells it, she was always
getting into scrapes with Weinstein
over how she wrote about
the films he distributed.
She wrote about production issues
on the set of Gangs of New York.
That was a fight.
We had a big tangle
over Inglourious Bastards
because my father was a Viennese
Jew who became a British commando.
The actual guys who were Jews
and became commandos
were very offended
by Inglourious Bastards.
They were highly trained elite troops.
They were not guys with baseball bats.
I wrote about this for The Daily Beast,
My Father: The Inglourious Bastard.
Harvey threatened to sue me.
Well, it even gets better.
He had optioned, my father wrote
a memoir and Harvey optioned it.
I was not involved at all. I made
a huge point not to be involved.
- He never paid my father.
- No, he was famous for that.
And he said to me once in a meeting
when we were talking about,
he says, all these people say
I don't pay them.
Who are these people?
Where are these people?
And it was all I could do not to say,
my father, my 83-year old father,
you son of a bitch.
But I didn't because I didn't want
the door opened to Harvey
then would have said, you know,
I'll write you a check right now.
Kim circled the story for years.
But no one was willing
to give concrete answers.
When Janice Min was running
The Hollywood Reporter,
we thought we were gonna
break the story.
It wasn't me, to be fair. It was Rose
McGowan was going to go public.
The actress, Rose McGowen, had recently
Tweeted about her own sexual assault,
Tweets lots of people
assumed were about Weinstein.
Rose McGowen opened up about
a past experience
where she was sexually assaulted
by a big Hollywood studio head.
She had a series of Tweets like,
my, I was raped. My boyfriend this.
And I went to my editor and said,
we can connect the dots here.
There's only one person this could be.
Her boyfriend is Robert Rodriguez.
The rapist is Harvey. We can do this.
And our lawyers were
not ready to go there.
It really did feel like
the ungettable story.
Did the Harvey Weinstein story keep
you up at night over the years?
Yeah, I often thought about
how I couldn't solve the case,
how I couldn't expose
his sexual predation.
In 2015, Ken saw another opportunity,
when a Filipina-Italian model named
Ambra Gutierrez, went to the police
and told them Weinstein
had assaulted her in his office.
The story had been
all over the tabloids.
So, I call up Harvey. I said, Harvey,
I need to talk to you about Ambra.
And he said, I can't talk to you
cause I'm under instructions
from DA Vance not to talk
about the case to the press.
And I had a source
in the police department
and the police department's saying,
we believe this woman,
that she's got the goods on Harvey.
I said, can I get the tape?
Can't, can't do that.
Then, Vance decides
not to prosecute the case.
I'm dead. The story is dead.
By the spring of 2017,
I was working on my own Weinstein
reporting at NBC News.
I was also starting to sense resistance
within the network to airing the story.
And, so, I started reaching out
to the journalists
I'd heard had gone at this the hardest.
So, what did you think
when I called you?
I thought, does this guy
have what he says he has?
Cause you were dropping
the veil a bit.
And then I thought, when you said NBC,
I did think, are you, Ronan?
I don't know why I was so skeptical,
but I felt like they don't have
the stomach for it.
Well, you had the last laugh
on that one.
I was right. Yes.
At the same time, I was reaching out
to Ken Auletta. He encouraged me.
He even said he'd saved all his
notes from his 2002 reporting
and kept them in a private archive
in the New York public library.
Box after box of notes
and transcripts and tapes.
My wife calls me anal cause
I don't throw anything out.
And it drives her nuts.
It was a moment where I was reminded
of the importance of our profession.
I was discovering uncanny synergy
between what I had been investigating
and what you had found.
I had this other
separate source
that separately corroborated
something
that had been sitting
there in that notebook
that you kept so precisely
for 17 years, or whatever it was.
You had independently come
to the same conclusion.
You had, you know,
three women on the record.
You had five women not by name but
who were certified that he had abused.
And you had the audio tape from 2015.
I mean my heart was racing.
I said, my God, Ronan's got it.
He's got the story. I get goose bumps
as I think about it now.
I mean, it was thrilling.
Ken agreed to a filmed interview
for my NBC story.
We talked about his reporting from the
early 2000s and what he'd uncovered.
At the end of the taping,
while we were wrapping up,
Ken had one more thing
he wanted to say.
And I said, would you put
the camera back on.
- You want me to say that on camera?
- I'm rolling, so
Yeah, I think we should.
If you think it, say it.
I mean, if you don't, if NBC,
which has the evidence,
doesn't go forward
with this story, it's a scandal.
Ken's words would prove prophetic.
Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein
was making bold moves
to try to control reporters
looking into him.
Here it is.
The date is June 29th, 2017.
Says, from Harvey Weinstein,
big letters on the top.
Dear Kim, as you may
or may not know,
we have a publishing arm
of the company
and I have an idea for a fun
Michael Korda kind of biography.
Are you available to discuss today?
All my best, Harvey.
When the note came in,
Kim was in the middle of texting
with her former editor at
The Hollywood Reporter, Janice Min.
And then I say, shit,
Harvey W. is calling me. Why did
I answer the fucking phone?
Kill me. Excuse my language
but this is how Janice and I,
we're very classy.
She says, what did he want?
Three question marks.
I say, to offer me a book deal.
And she says, I mean,
is it a lot of money?
There you have it, documentary proof.
Now I would like to say,
I would very much like to know
how much money it was.
Cause I wanna know what price Harvey
put on me taking this book deal.
But I did answer the phone, as I said,
shit, I answered the phone.
And he said, I wanted to talk to you.
I said, Harvey, we're not doing this.
We're not having this conversation.
And he's like, but,
and I'm like, not gonna happen.
We're, goodbye. We're not, no.
That August, Noah Oppenheim,
the president of NBC News,
told me NBC was killing
my reporting on Weinstein.
I was free to take it anywhere.
But where could I turn?
I called Ken Auletta.
You said to me, can I call you
on a secure phone?
I said, what? I was really,
what is that all about?
And you said to me that Noah
Oppenheim rejected your work.
I just couldn't believe it. I mean,
these are fellow journalists.
How could they
have killed that story?
And I called Remnick,
the editor of The New Yorker,
and I said, David, I'll never
forget the word I used,
I said, Ronan Farrow
has broken the code.
He's got the goods
on Harvey Weinstein.
I called Remnick. We met and he agreed
that the reporting was newsworthy.
Ultimately, he decided to dig in
and get it in shape
for The New Yorker to publish.
In the days leading up to publication,
Kim Masters was watching closely.
To the very last minute, doubting it
would ever see the light of day.
Just always feeling, I'm gonna
believe this when I see it.
I wanna see it in print and then,
then I'll believe it.
Heading outside, it is a crystal clear,
still a bit of a breeze, though.
The wind chill in the city
is right around 44.
At 10:47 am, on October 10th,
we hit publish.
There are growing allegations of sexual
harassment and now outright assault
by movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein.
New Yorker magazine reporting
new claims of sexual harassment,
assault and rape.
Weinstein is heard admitting
to inappropriately touching
an Italian model.
It was like a bomb went
off in our offices.
It was unanticipatable,
if that's a word.
I could never, ever have imagined
what would happen in the aftermath.
Our phones blew up.
You talk about whether
or not people are redeemable.
Is Weinstein redeemable
at this stage?
Harvey Weinstein
is not coming back.
He offered me the book deal to prevent
me from doing exactly what I did,
which was to go on television,
literally around the world.
I was on TV in Australia, in Asia,
in France, in Germany and Britain.
I was constantly talking
about him on TV.
If I had taken the book deal,
that wouldn't been a thing.
- Why is this coming out now?
- It's a result of changing times.
You know, we're in a world
post-Cosby, post-FOX News.
I think that women
are getting a bit fed up.
In the months and years that followed,
there would be an exodus of senior
and mostly white male executives
from Hollywood, forever
changing the face of the industry.
Of course, all this change,
it's only gone so far.
Have all the enablers
been exposed? No.
And will they ever be?
Probably not.
For decades, Weinstein managed
to intimidate his victims
into keeping quiet.
His undoing would be those who dared
to speak out and face their abuser,
like a former assistant who had
kept her secret for 20 years.
I remember thinking,
he's so much bigger than me.
Holy crap, I'm really in trouble. And
thinking, I've gotta get out of here.