Catch and Kill

“This is the most important story I’ve ever been on,” I texted her. “If I am late it’s because I have absolutely no choice.” After journalism, drama and being late were my great passions.

Jonathan already got a dedication and he’s quoted throughout these pages. How much more attention does he need?

As I prepared to leave, she looked me in the eye and repeated her answer to all my questions about the network. “I am obliged to tell you that I cannot disparage Andy Lack, or Noah Oppenheim, or any other employee of NBC News.”

I nodded. As I watched, a smile just began to turn the edges of her lips.

In the end, the courage of women can’t be stamped out. And stories—the big ones, the true ones—can be caught but never killed

“No more morning TV, I guess,” I replied. I was, increasingly, realizing I’d be spending the next year chasing leads about CBS and NBC.

“I’ll take care of you, baby,” he said. “I’ll keep you in finery and smoothies.”

He hugged me around the middle like a kid hugging a stuffed animal. I laughed, put a hand on his. It had been a long year, for me and for us, but we hung in there.

Later, when I decided some of that reporting would make its way into a book, I’d send him a draft, and put in a question, right on this page: “Marriage?” On the moon or even here on earth. He read the draft, and found the proposal here, and said, “Sure.”

The low points between us flickered back to me. I remembered the hard years, after I’d told her to shut up about her own allegation: walking into her room after she came back from the hospital; seeing her pull a long sleeve over the ladder of blood-red em-dashes on her forearm; saying I was sorry, and that I wished I could have done more

At one point in the meeting, Harris appeared to grow impatient with the journalists’ calls for an independent review. “It feels like having an outside voice, whether they came to the same conclusions or not, would make it go away quicker,” said one woman in the room. “It’s so frustrating.”

“Well, if the press would stop covering it, it will go away,” Harris said.

There was a pause, then still another investigative journalist said, “But we are the press.”

At NBC News, the year after the Weinstein story was fraught. In late November 2017, Savannah Guthrie, wearing a floral-print black dress fit for a morning TV funeral, announced that Matt Lauer had been fired overnight. A “detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace” had come in less than forty-eight hours before. She said she was “heartbroken,” calling Lauer “my dear, dear friend” and emphasizing that he was “loved by many, many people here.”

Guthrie read a statement from Andy Lack that suggested management was shocked about Lauer, too. The unnamed colleague had lodged “the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he’s been at NBC News.” The network moved quickly to reinforce that idea in the wider press

I’d recently posted a social media picture of a frying pan marketed under the label “Black Cube.” “Scratch resistant. May use false identities and shell companies to extract information,” I’d written. (“Hahaha,” Ambra Gutierrez commented drily.)

For all the symbolism of the perp walk, Weinstein posted $1 million bail that day and went home. Ankle-braceleted, he was permitted to move between his homes in New York and Connecticut.

For the occasion of his surrender, Weinstein had been styled as a mild-mannered professor, in a black blazer and a powder-blue V-neck sweater. Under one arm, he carried a stack of books about Hollywood and Broadway.