Catch and Kill Read online

  “Hey, he’s on the show,” Ostrovskiy had said.

  “Is it worth going? To see if we get him coming out?” Khaykin replied.

  Ostrovskiy thought about this. Something about it made him uncomfortable. “It’s a really busy area, Rockefeller Center,” he pointed out. “We can’t get there in a car. We don’t have enough people to cover all the entrances and exits.”

  Not long after, as hot July gave way to a still hotter early August, I left home in the morning and walked right by the silver Nissan Pathfinder parked on the street immediately opposite my address. Only later did I register the memory of the two men sitting inside: one thin and bald, the other heavyset, with dark, curly hair.

  All that spring and summer, headlines about harassment and abuse had picked up pace : a fresh round of stories about Fox News; more scrutiny about President Trump. I was starting to field inquiries from women’s rights activists supportive of my reporting on gender discrimination. As Ostrovskiy and Khaykin debated 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s suitability for interception, one of those messages landed in my in-box, describing a women’s advocacy program run by a wealth management company. It included a request to meet the following week. I glanced at the email and moved on without responding. “I am very impressed with your work as a male advocate for gender equality, and believe that you would make an invaluable addition to our activities,” wrote Diana Filip of Reuben Capital Partners.

  CHAPTER 23:

  CANDY

  The first week of August, I arrived at Harris’s office, in a light-filled corporate suite high in the building. Declining a call from my mother as I arrived, I texted her, “Going into meeting with parent company lawyer. Say a prayer.” I’d broken rank to contact Harris and she hadn’t added anyone to our emails. But Greenberg arrived a few minutes later, followed by Weiner.

  The difference between the two women in the room was elemental, almost atomic. While Weiner was quiet and bureaucratic, Harris possessed outsize charisma. She had graduated from the best Ivy League institutions, in the sequence required to achieve maximum prestige. She’d worked in the Obama White House and as a partner at a top-ranked firm. She was faster on her feet than the company veterans in the room, and less intent on ceremony. She had big, genial features and a quick smile. Harris was the deadliest kind of lawyer, one sophisticated enough that you didn’t see her doing the work at all.

  She pulled out a copy of the script and ran through a few small language notes. And then: “I also think we’re open to a tortious interference argument.” I kept my face composed. I wasn’t about to parse case law with the company’s general counsel, but I knew this was bullshit.

  Still, talking to Harris was generally reassuring. Her order, from a legal standpoint—separate from the news division’s editorial decision—was not to stand down. She wanted another script, with the edits we’d discussed.

  A few hours later, on my way out of the building, I ran into Weiner. Outside, rain was pounding at the lobby’s revolving doors. To my surprise, she fixed me with a meaningful stare, and said, “Keep going.”

  As the Weinstein story had expanded to fill more and more of McHugh’s and my days and nights, I’d struggled to keep my canceled foreign policy book alive and find it a new publisher. All of the living secretaries of state had agreed to go on the record for the project, and I’d kept racing from our shoots into interviews with them. Hillary Clinton, who’d known about the book since I described it to her during my time working for her at the State Department, had agreed early and with enthusiasm. “Thank you, my friend, for your message; it is great hearing from you and I am delighted to know that you are close to completing your book project,” she wrote that July. The letter was printed on embossed stationery in a curly art deco font, like a New Yorker headline or a piece of set-dressing from BioShock. It was very lovely, and not the sort of thing that wins Wisconsin. Several rounds of calls and emails had ensued, and an interview date had been promised that month, ahead of the beginning of a promotional tour for Clinton’s latest memoir.

  The afternoon of the meeting with Harris, as I pushed through the downpour and into my building’s front door, a call came in from Nick Merrill, Clinton’s flack. We discussed the book briefly, and then he said, “By the way, we know about the big story you’re on.”

  I sat down on one of the chairs in my building’s lobby. “Well, Nick, I’m probably working on a lot of stories at any given time.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  “I really can’t say anything.”

  “Well, you know, it’s a concern for us.”

  I felt a rivulet of rain run down my neck. “Can I ask who said this to you?” I said.

  “Maybe off the record, over drinks,” he replied. “Let’s just say people are talking.”

  When I turned the conversation back to the interview with Clinton, he said that she was “really busy with the book tour.” I pointed out that this was why we’d scheduled the interview for before the book tour. “Like I said,” he reiterated, as if he hadn’t heard this, “really busy.” Over the ensuing weeks, every attempt to lock a date for the interview yielded another terse note that she’d become suddenly unavailable. She’d injured her foot. She was too tired. Clinton, meanwhile, was becoming one of the most easily available interviews in all of politics.

  Later, Merrill would swear up and down that Clinton’s sudden reticence was coincidental. Whatever the motivation, it felt ominous—another screw turning, another sign of my life outside the story shrinking. It was hard not to sense a pattern forming: each time we came back to our bosses with more reporting, word of the story seemed to spread farther. McHugh and I both worried about protecting our sources.

  “If someone’s leaking to Clinton, what’s getting leaked to Harvey?” McHugh wondered.

  “Shit,” I said. “You don’t think they would—”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

  As pressure on the story mounted, fissures between McHugh and me widened. Our exchanges grew terse. After the meeting with Harris, he was miffed he hadn’t been included, and seemed to wonder where my loyalties lay. “Just odd that you ended up solo,” he said. I explained that I’d been trying to leave the door open to a more candid one-on-one, that I hadn’t known Greenberg would join. “Just don’t want them isolating us,” McHugh said, warily.

  As I arrived home from work one day early that August, my superintendent, squat and square-jawed and graying, approached me under the building’s awning. He was annoyed.

  “You know these guys outside today?” he said, in an Albanian accent.

  “What guys?” I asked.

  “Eh, two guys. In car. Smoking by car. All the time.”

  I looked up and down the block. The street was mostly empty. “Why do you think they were here for me?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Ronan. Is always you. You move in, address print everywhere, now I have no peace.”

  I told him I was sure it was just TMZ guys on a slow day. “If they come back, I’ll bring them coffee and ask them to leave,” I said. He shook his head and looked at me doubtfully.

  It was clear that we could bring in more reporting if NBC wanted it. “I know you’d been considering taking that last step and doing an interview showing your face,” I told Nestor in a call as the review progressed. “I hate to put this on you, but it could be important if you do.”

  “I’m applying for jobs. I’m just not sure,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think it might make the difference here.”

  She thought for a moment. “If it winds up being that important, I’m open to it,” she said. “I’d do it.”

  Despite the strange signals from our bosses, McHugh and I kept working. He helped with research, clicking over to other browser windows as Greenberg walked by. I stayed up late, calling Weinstein’s former employees around the world. I needed the kind of big break that could shatter the halt on reporting.
/>   Leaving home one morning, I spotted something outside that made me stop abruptly: a silver Nissan Pathfinder I felt sure I’d seen before in the same spot. Other residents made their way into the sunlight. My neighbor who looked a little like me smiled as he passed. I stood there feeling ridiculous. There were a million reasons for two guys to be parked near Columbus Circle a few times a week, I reminded myself. But I decided I’d have more privacy working from home anyway, and went back upstairs.

  It was a minute after noon when the call from Greenberg came in.

  “How’s the script?” he asked. I’d been revising it according to Harris’s specifications.

  “It’s rock-solid,” I said. “And we’re continuing to field any relevant incoming calls from sources, of course.”

  “Legal called and they want you to pause reporting,” he said.

  This again, I thought.

  “Why?” I asked. “I assumed, since they gave us a green light to go ahead with Rose—”

  “No, we’re paused. How’s your book? Interviews going well?”

  Greenberg had never shown any interest in my book. We talked about Condoleezza Rice for a few minutes before I said, “Rich, about stopping reporting—”

  “I gotta go,” he interjected. “I’m flying to see my dad. I’ll be gone all weekend. We can talk next week.”

  And then he was gone.

  “Greenberg called,” I texted McHugh. “Legal wants us to stop any new calls. So be discreet.”

  “Oh shit,” he wrote back. “Why?”

  It didn’t make sense. Discouragement was one thing, but there was no rationale, journalistic or legal, for ordering us to stop reporting. I called Greenberg again.

  “Rich, I’m sorry to bother you again, I just need some clarification here. What, exactly, did ‘legal’ say? Who in legal? Why?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. I really have to go now, I have to catch my flight,” he said quickly. As if to leaven the tone, he added, “Sorry, man.”

  I was responding when he hung up. The call had lasted all of thirty-seven seconds.

  I paced my apartment. I called Harris’s office, said it was urgent, didn’t hear back. My phone chimed: another message from Diana Filip of Reuben Capital Partners, entreating me to meet about my reporting on gender issues.

  Leaving home that afternoon, I edged up to the front door, where I’d seen the car. Nothing there. You look like a damn fool, I thought to myself. But I was starting to take precautions. I was memorializing sensitive information in longhand form. I was moving new documents into the safe-deposit box. Eventually, I’d consult John Tye, a former whistle-blower on government surveillance practices who founded a nonprofit law office called Whistleblower Aid. He set me up with an iPod Touch with only an encrypted messaging app installed, connected to the internet through an anonymous Wi-Fi hot spot purchased with cash. Its number was registered to a pseudonym. Mine was “Candy.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, incredulous.

  “I don’t pick the names,” Tye said, all serious.

  “I sound like a nice Midwestern girl who should not have moved to LA.”

  “I don’t pick the names.”

  CHAPTER 24:

  PAUSE

  “I’ve been waiting for this call,” a crisp English accent was saying. Ally Canosa, who’d worked for Weinstein since 2010, immediately confirmed she’d been aware of the pattern of honeypot meetings. And there was more: “I was sexually abused by Harvey Weinstein,” she said. “Repeatedly.” I took a risk, showed my cards, told Canosa exactly what I had.

  “Oh my God,” she said, beginning to break down. “It’s finally going to come out.”

  When I asked if she’d go on camera, she sounded frightened, but open to the idea. “I want to help,” she said. “Let’s talk.” She agreed to meet me in Los Angeles in person. She was available that weekend. When a source offers you a break like that, you grab it.

  I started the process of booking a plane ticket, then stopped. It was a Thursday afternoon. To make it to the meeting with Canosa over the weekend, I’d need to fly out soon. But Greenberg had just issued his latest order to stop reporting, this time invoking the legal department.

  McHugh again suggested asking for forgiveness, not permission. “If you don’t explain this to anybody, you guarantee this meeting, and you can see her this weekend and have a talk, and maybe convince her to go on camera. If you tell them, you let people far more powerful than we are in this scenario dictate what happens.” But going truly rogue, rather than just keeping under the radar, as we had that spring, felt like a bridge too far. I called Weiner and told her the interview was important. Then I sent an email pleading for permission to continue reporting.

  No one replied. “They are prob talking,” McHugh texted. “Try to put it out of mind.”

  I waited a day, then booked my ticket to LA.

  It was raining again the next morning, an oppressive gray drizzle. McHugh called from the office early as I threw unfolded clothes into a suitcase. “Didn’t you say Greenberg was getting on a flight yesterday?” McHugh asked. He was speaking under his breath.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He had to get off in a hurry.”

  “Funny,” he said. “’Cause he’s here.”

  “Maybe his flight got canceled.”

  “Maybe.”

  I was putting the luggage into the trunk of a sedan when Greenberg tried me. Then he texted: “Call me ASAP.”

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m on the way to the airport.”

  “What?!” he said. He sounded like he was about to leap out of his skin. “I have to get Susan on the phone.” Then she joined, speaking slowly and carefully. “We have discussed your email about this weekend’s meeting. The company would like to put a pause on all reporting and contact with sources.”

  “All contact with sources?” I asked, incredulous. There was a heaviness to these conversations now, a strange sense that we were not just speaking to each other but also turning out, just a bit, to the crowd that might someday scrutinize our decisions. I felt this, and then felt it might be self-aggrandizing. But it gave me a strange kind of authority to push them to say what they hoped to leave between the lines.

  “I don’t understand,” I continued. “Has anyone at any point raised any issue with the reporting or how I’ve acted?”

  “No, no,” Greenberg said.

  “Is there any question about the news value of this woman offering to discuss a serious allegation of sexual abuse by a prominent person?”

  “That’s, well—that’s above my pay grade,” he managed.

  “Okay. So where’s this coming from? Is this an order from legal?” I asked.

  There followed a silence that felt endless.

  “It’s not—” Weiner began.

  “You should know this comes directly from Noah,” Greenberg said.

  “So legal hasn’t made a determination that I should stop reporting?”

  “Noah has made a determination that we should pause reporting and contact with sources.”

  “No one has expressed a rationale as to why it would place us in any jeopardy to allow reporting to continue, with full caution and in full consultation with legal. Did he articulate any reason why?”

  “Well, if I—if I had to guess, from my standpoint,” Weiner stammered, “I’d say one might want to review what we, uhh, what we have now before continuing with anything new.” She assembled this sentence like she was reading characters off of a newly unearthed cuneiform tablet.

  “This isn’t new,” I said stubbornly, referring to the meeting with Canosa. “It’s been scheduled.”

  The phone vibrated—McHugh calling. I declined the call, tapped in a text. “On w Greenberg and Weiner.”

  “Should I join?” he responded. It felt like a rescue operation.

  “Maybe poke head in,” I wrote.

  “In light of what Noah said, we think you should not be meeting with any sources,” Greenberg was saying. />
  McHugh texted to say Greenberg had waved away the attempt to enter his office. No rescue.

  “I can’t prevent sources from reaching out to me,” I told Greenberg.

  “We understand that,” he said.

  I said nothing about whether I would obey the order to cancel the meeting, agreeing instead to keep them apprised of what Canosa told me “if” we had any contact. I’d never experienced this before: pretending I wasn’t contacting sources, feigning reluctance to hear back from them.

  “I think she will very possibly agree to go on camera,” I said. “And if she does, I’ll feel strongly about proceeding with that.”

  “We’d—we’d have to go back to Noah on that,” Greenberg said.

  I got off the call feeling disoriented. I called Jonathan.

  “This is insane,” he said.

  “I don’t think I can risk trying to cancel another interview,” I said.

  “You and Rich McHugh need to start writing each other memos. Detailed descriptions of all of this, sent in real time. They’re saying incriminating shit.”

  I looked out of the car window at a snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic outside JFK. “This is all fine for you guys,” Jonathan was saying. “As long as you keep going, as long as you keep reporting.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I told him. “I’m pissing them off with this stuff. I’m going to be unemployed soon at this rate.”

  “Who cares?! Look at what’s happening! No one on these calls wants to own any of this, because it’s so obviously bad! It’s like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone wants it dead, nobody wants to stab it!”

  Back at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, McHugh, still lingering outside Greenberg’s office, knocked again.

  “What’s going on?” McHugh said.