A review by jayneyh314
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

4.5

In 2017, Ronan Farrow stumbled into a story that had previously been only the subject of whispered rumours. One of Hollywood’s most powerful producers was a sexual predator who would intimidate and bully his way out of trouble and make sure the women he abused kept quiet. With seemingly unlimited resources he hired shadowy agencies to carry out surveillance and gather intelligence against anyone who tried to get the story out and he had been getting away with it for years. 

When the Weinstein scandal first broke, like many others, I was glued to the coverage and wondered how on earth he had managed to stay under the radar for so long. Farrow’s book shows some of the lengths that Weinstein went to to keep his secrets and the number of people involved in the cover up. 

I honestly didn’t think I’d be shocked by anything to do with this story as I thought I’d seen most of the details online but seeing it all laid out in chronological order and reading about the surveillance of victims and people involved in trying to break the story is something else. 

Farrow’s writing is extremely detailed and methodical and takes us through the story chronologically from him first getting wind of it.

The levels that Weinstein stoops to in order to try and protect himself are absolutely appalling but his behaviour towards the women during the attacks was the most shocking thing. He treated those women like they were nothing more than pieces of meat existing purely for his pleasure. The level of entitlement is astounding with the attitude of “why would you say no to me” and then later “how dare you say no to me”. 

Nobody ever deserves to be treated the way he treated people and the fact that some people spent so long protecting him, covering up and attempting to defend his frankly indefensible behaviour made me so mad! 

There’s not really any great amount of new information if you’ve been following the case in the media anyway but it was interesting to see how it developed rather than just seeing the end product and the levels of surveillance and desperation as the truth got nearer to coming out was eye opening to me. 

My only complaint would be that Farrow’s writing is quite clinical. He’s written the book from a journalistic point of view and kept a level of detachment from the material that I did find, at times, a bit emotionless. Parts of the book are quite difficult to read with the subject matter but even there he seems to keep himself slightly removed from it. There were times he talks about his personal life and how the stress he was under was affecting his relationship with his boyfriend but due to the way the rest of the book was written these small passages almost seemed a little jarring against the impersonal nature of the rest. 

Overall, it was an extremely interesting book and I’m glad that Farrow kept going when he could have taken the easy way out as his reporting was clearly key to bringing Weinstein to justice. 
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