Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow

I don't tend to read true crime, this is worth making an exception for. As many people need to read this book as possible. It is both a thriller, and a brilliant piece of well-researched (and fact checked) investigative journalism.

 

2017: Farrow was working at NBC on a routine investigation when he started hearing rumours of a powerful movie producer whose predatory behavior was an ‘open secret’ in Hollywood. As he began to dig, Farrow found the bones of stories like his that had been suppressed for years, he talked to actresses afraid to go on camera for rear of ‘retaliation’ all with stories he began to find sickeningly similar. In the middle of this conspiracy of silence one name, Harvey Weinstein, a man who doesn’t seem to understand that when a woman says ‘no’ she means it.

 

Weinstein’s attempts to kill yet another story about him included a shady security firm staffed by ex Mossad operatives, private detectives shadowing Farrow from New York to Los Angeles and staking out his apartment, phone hacking (possibly using Pegasus software), The National Enquirer and even intense legal pressure from his own network brought to bear on Farrow and his producer to bury the story. Farrow, to his credit kept going, defying NBC (who do not come out of this smelling of roses) and eventually taking the story to The New Yorker where the public finally got to read it.