Catch and Kill Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 by Ronan Farrow

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  First ebook edition: October 2019

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  Interior illustrations © 2019 by Dylan Farrow

  ISBN 978-0-316-48666-8

  E3-20191009-JV-PC-COR

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  POISON VALLEY

  CHAPTER 1: TAPE

  CHAPTER 2: BITE

  CHAPTER 3: DIRT

  CHAPTER 4: BUTTON

  CHAPTER 5: KANDAHAR

  CHAPTER 6: CONTINENTAL

  CHAPTER 7: PHANTOMS

  CHAPTER 8: GUN

  CHAPTER 9: MINIONS

  CHAPTER 10: MAMA

  CHAPTER 11: BLOOM

  CHAPTER 12: FUNNY

  CHAPTER 13: DICK

  PART II

  WHITE WHALE

  CHAPTER 14: ROOKIE

  CHAPTER 15: STATIC

  CHAPTER 16: F.O.H.

  CHAPTER 17: 666

  CHAPTER 18: QUIDDITCH

  CHAPTER 19: SPIRAL

  CHAPTER 20: CULT

  CHAPTER 21: SCANDAL

  CHAPTER 22: PATHFINDER

  CHAPTER 23: CANDY

  CHAPTER 24: PAUSE

  CHAPTER 25: PUNDIT

  CHAPTER 26: BOY

  CHAPTER 27: ALTAR

  CHAPTER 28: PAVONINE

  PART III

  ARMY OF SPIES

  CHAPTER 29: FAKAKTA

  CHAPTER 30: BOTTLE

  CHAPTER 31: SYZYGY

  CHAPTER 32: HURRICANE

  CHAPTER 33: GOOSE

  CHAPTER 34: LETTER

  CHAPTER 35: MIMIC

  CHAPTER 36: HUNTER

  CHAPTER 37: HEIST

  CHAPTER 38: CELEBRITY

  CHAPTER 39: FALLOUT

  CHAPTER 40: DINOSAUR

  CHAPTER 41: MEAN

  PART IV

  SLEEPER

  CHAPTER 42: EDIFY

  CHAPTER 43: CABAL

  CHAPTER 44: CHARGER

  CHAPTER 45: NIGHTGOWN

  CHAPTER 46: PRETEXTING

  CHAPTER 47: RUNNING

  CHAPTER 48: GASLIGHT

  CHAPTER 49: VACUUM

  CHAPTER 50: PLAYMATE

  CHAPTER 51: CHUPACABRA

  PART V

  SEVERANCE

  CHAPTER 52: CIRCLE

  CHAPTER 53: AXIOM

  CHAPTER 54: PEGASUS

  CHAPTER 55: MELTING

  CHAPTER 56: ZDOROVIE

  CHAPTER 57: SPIKE

  CHAPTER 58: LAUNDER

  CHAPTER 59: BLACKLIST

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCOVER MORE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NOTES

  For Jonathan

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Catch and Kill is based on two years of reporting. It draws on interviews with more than two hundred sources, as well as hundreds of pages of contracts, emails, and texts, and dozens of hours of audio. It was subjected to the same standard of fact-checking as the New Yorker stories on which it is based.

  All of the dialogue in the book is drawn directly from contemporaneous accounts and records. Because this is a story about surveillance, third parties often witnessed or surreptitiously recorded conversations, and I was sometimes able to obtain their testimonials and records. I adhered to legal and ethical standards when creating my own recordings.

  Most of the sources you will meet in these pages have allowed me to use their full names. Some, however, remain unable to do so due to fear of legal reprisal or because of threats to their physical safety. In those instances, the code names used for the sources during the reporting process have been used here. I reached out to all of the key figures in Catch and Kill prior to publication, to offer them an opportunity to respond to any allegations being made about them. If they agreed to speak, the narrative reflects their responses. If they did not, a good faith effort was made to include existing public statements. For the written material quoted throughout the book, the original language, including spelling and copy errors, has been retained.

  Catch and Kill takes place between late 2016 and early 2019. It contains descriptions of sexual violence that some readers may find upsetting or traumatic.

  The two men sat in a corner at Nargis Cafe, an Uzbek and Russian restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. It was late 2016, and cold. The place was done up with tchotchkes from the steppes and ceramic depictions of peasant life: grandmas in babushkas, farmers with sheep.

  One of the men was Russian, the other Ukrainian, but this was a distinction without a difference: both were children of the disintegrating Soviet Union. They looked to be in their mid-thirties. Roman Khaykin, the Russian, was short and thin and bald, with a quarrelsome snub nose and dark eyes. Everything else about him was pale: eyebrows barely there, face bloodless, bald scalp slick and shining. He was originally from Kislovodsk, which literally translates to “sour waters.” His eyes darted around the room, ever suspicious.

  Igor Ostrovskiy, the Ukrainian, was taller and a little fat. He had curly hair that got unruly when he let it grow. He and his family had fled to the United States in the early nineties. Like Khaykin, he was always looking for an angle. He was also curious, meddlesome. During high school, he’d suspected that several classmates were selling stolen credit card numbers, probed until he proved it, then helped law enforcement disrupt the operation.

  Khaykin and Ostrovskiy spoke in accented English enlivened with native idioms—“Krasavchik!” Khaykin would say, a word derived from “handsome” but in practice serving as praise for talent or a job well done. Both men were in the business of subterfuge and surveillance. When Ostrovskiy had found himself between private investigation jobs in 2011, he’d googled “Russian private investigators” and emailed Khaykin cold to ask for work. Khaykin had liked Ostrovskiy’s chutzpah and started hiring him for surveillance jobs. Then they’d argued about Khaykin’s methods and drifted apart.

  As plates of kebab arrived, Khaykin explained how far he’d been pushing the envelope since they’d last worked together. A new and shadowy client had come into the picture, an enterprise he wouldn’t name that was utilizing him as a subcontractor. He was doing big business. “I’m into some cool shit,” he said. “Some dark stuff.” He’d adopted some new methods, too. He could get bank records and unauthorized credit reports. He had ways of obtaining a phone’s g
eolocation data to track unsuspecting targets. He described how much the phone hijinks cost: a few thousand dollars for the usual approach to the problem, with cheaper options for gullible marks and more expensive ones for those who proved elusive. Khaykin said he’d already used the tactic successfully, in a case where one family member had hired him to find another.

  Ostrovskiy figured Khaykin was full of shit. But Ostrovskiy needed the work. And Khaykin, it turned out, needed more manpower to serve his mysterious new patron.

  Before parting ways, Ostrovskiy asked about the phone tracking again. “Isn’t that illegal?” he wondered.

  “Ehhhh,” said Khaykin.

  On a tiled wall nearby, a blue-and-white evil eye hung on a string, watching.

  CHAPTER 1:

  TAPE

  “What do you mean it’s not airing tomorrow?” My words drifted over the emptying newsroom on the fourth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, inside the Comcast building, which had once been the GE building, which had once been the RCA building. On the other end of the line, Rich McHugh, my producer at NBC News, was talking over what sounded like the bombing of Dresden but was in fact the natural soundscape of a household with two sets of young twins. “They just called, they’re—no, Izzy, you have to share—Jackie, please don’t bite her—Daddy’s on the phone—”

  “But it’s the strongest story in the series,” I said. “Maybe not the best TV, but the best underlying story—”

  “They say we’ve gotta move it. It’s fakakt,” he said, missing the last syllable. (McHugh had this habit of trying out Yiddish words. It never went well.)

  Airing a series of back-to-back investigative spots like the one McHugh and I were about to launch required choreography. Each of the stories was long, consuming days in the network’s edit rooms. Rescheduling one was a big deal. “Move it to when?” I asked.

  On the other end of the line, there was a muffled crash and several successive shrieks of laughter. “I gotta call you back,” he said.

  McHugh was a TV veteran who had worked at Fox and MSNBC and, for the better part of a decade, Good Morning America. He was barrel-chested, with ginger hair and a ruddy complexion, and wore a lot of gingham work shirts. He had a plainspoken, laconic quality that cut through the passive-aggressive patter of corporate bureaucracy. “He looks like a farmer,” the investigative unit boss who had first put us together the previous year had said. “For that matter, he talks like a farmer. You two make no sense together.”

  “Why the assignment, then?” I’d asked.

  “You’ll be good for one another,” he’d replied, with a shrug.

  McHugh had seemed skeptical. I didn’t love talking about my family background, but most people were familiar with it: my mother, Mia Farrow, was an actress; my father, Woody Allen, a director. My childhood had been plastered across the tabloids after he was accused of sexual assault by my seven-year-old sister, Dylan, and began a sexual relationship with another one of my sisters, Soon-Yi, eventually marrying her. There had been a few headlines again when I started college at an unusually young age and when I headed off to Afghanistan and Pakistan as a junior State Department official. In 2013, I’d started a four-year deal with NBCUniversal, anchoring a midday show on its cable news channel, MSNBC, for the first year of it. I’d dreamed of making the show serious and fact-driven, and by the end, was proud of how I’d used the inauspicious time slot for taped investigative stories. The show got some bad reviews at the start, good reviews at the end, and few viewers throughout. Its cancellation was little-noticed; for years after, chipper acquaintances would bound up at parties and tell me that they loved the show and still watched it every day. “That’s so nice of you to say,” I’d tell them.

  I’d moved over to the network to work as an investigative correspondent. As far as Rich McHugh was concerned, I was a young lightweight with a famous name, looking for something to do because my contract lasted longer than my TV show. This is where I should say the skepticism was mutual, but I just want everyone to like me.

  Working with a producer on the road meant a lot of time together on flights and in rental cars. On our first few shoots together, the silence would yawn between us as highway guardrails flashed by, or I’d fill it with too much talk about myself, eliciting the occasional grunt.

  But the pairing was starting to yield strong stories for my Today show investigative series and for Nightly News, as well as a reluctant mutual respect. McHugh was as smart as anyone I’d met in the news business and a sharp editor of scripts. And we both loved a tough story.

  After McHugh’s call, I looked at the cable headlines on one of the newsroom’s televisions, then texted him: “They’re scared of sexual assault?” The story we were being asked to reschedule was about colleges botching sexual assault investigations on campus. We’d talked to both victims and alleged perpetrators, who were sometimes in tears, and sometimes had their faces obscured in shadow. It was the sort of report that, in the 8:00 a.m. time slot for which it was destined, would require Matt Lauer to furrow his brow, express earnest concern, and then transition to a segment about celebrity skin care.

  McHugh wrote back: “Yes. All Trump and then sex assault.”

  It was a Sunday evening in early October 2016. The preceding Friday, the Washington Post had published an article demurely titled “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005.” There was a video accompanying the article, the kind you used to call “not safe for work.” In a soliloquy captured by the celebrity news program Access Hollywood, Donald Trump held forth about grabbing women “by the pussy.” “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he had said. “She’s now got the big phony tits and everything.”

  Trump’s interlocutor had been Billy Bush, the host of Access Hollywood. Bush was a small man with good hair. You could place him near any celebrity and he would produce a steady stream of forgettable but occasionally weird red-carpet banter. “How do you feel about your butt?” he once asked Jennifer Lopez. And when she, visibly uncomfortable, replied, “Are you kidding me? You did not just ask me that,” he said brightly, “I did!”

  And so, as Trump described his exploits, Bush chirped and snickered in assent. “Yes! The Donald has scored!”

  Access Hollywood was an NBCUniversal property. After the Washington Post broke the story that Friday, NBC platforms raced their own versions on air. When Access broadcast the tape, it excised some of Bush’s more piquant remarks. Some critics asked when NBC executives became aware of the tape and whether they deliberately sat on it. Leaked accounts presented differing timelines. On “background” calls to reporters, some NBC executives said the story just hadn’t been ready, that it had required further legal review. (Of one such call, a Washington Post writer observed tartly: “The executive was unaware of any specific legal issue raised by airing an eleven-year-old recording of a presidential candidate who was apparently aware at the time that he was being recorded by a TV program.”) Two NBCUniversal lawyers, Kim Harris and Susan Weiner, had reviewed the tape and signed off on its release, but NBC had hesitated, and lost one of the most important election stories in a generation.

  There was another problem: the Today show had just brought Billy Bush into its cast of hosts. Not two months earlier, they’d aired a “Get to Know Billy” video, complete with footage of him getting his chest hair waxed on air.

  McHugh and I had been editing and legally vetting our series for weeks. But the trouble was apparent the moment I began promoting the series on social media. “Come to watch the #BillyBush apology, stay to watch #RonanFarrow explain to him why an apology is necessary,” one viewer tweeted.

  “Of course they moved sexual assault,” I texted McHugh an hour later. “Billy Bush must be apologizing for the pussy grab convo right within spitting distance of our airtime.”

  Billy Bush did not apologize that day. As I waited in the wings at Studio 1A the next morning, looking over my script, Savannah Guthrie announced: “Pending further review of the m
atter, NBC News has suspended Billy Bush, the host of Today’s third hour, for his role in that conversation with Donald Trump.” And then it was onward and upward to cooking, and more caffeinated laughter—and my story on Adderall abuse on college campuses, which had been rushed in to replace the one about sexual assault.

  The years before the release of the Access Hollywood tape had seen the reemergence of sexual assault allegations against the comedian Bill Cosby. In July of 2016, the former Fox News personality Gretchen Carlson had filed a sexual harassment suit against the head of that network, Roger Ailes. Soon after the tape was released, women in at least fifteen cities staged sit-ins and marches at Trump buildings, chanting about emancipation, carrying signs with reappropriated “pussy” imagery: cats, howling or arching, emblazoned with “PUSSY GRABS BACK.” Four women publicly claimed that Trump had groped or kissed them without consent in much the fashion he’d described as routine to Billy Bush. The Trump campaign denounced them as fabulists. A hashtag, popularized by the commentator Liz Plank, solicited explanations of why #WomenDontReport. “A (female) criminal attorney said because I’d done a sex scene in a film I would never win against the studio head,” the actress Rose McGowan tweeted. “Because it’s been an open secret in Hollywood/Media & they shamed me while adulating my rapist,” she added. “It is time for some goddamned honesty in this world.”

  CHAPTER 2:

  BITE

  Since the establishment of the first studios, few movie executives had been as dominant, or as domineering, as the one to whom McGowan was referring. Harvey Weinstein cofounded the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, helping to reinvent the model for independent films with movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Pulp Fiction; and Shakespeare in Love. His movies had earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and at the annual awards ceremonies he had been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, ranking just below Steven Spielberg and several places above God. At times, even this seemed a fine distinction: Meryl Streep had once jokingly referred to Weinstein as God.