The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow

In our final episode, we go inside the case that ultimately brought Donald Trump’s alliance with the National Enquirer tumbling down and landed one Trump associate behind bars. It’s the story of an historic scheme to swing a presidential race—one that starts at the Playboy Mansion and ends with a master list of Trump dirt, a safe full of secrets, and a shredding party at the Enquirer’s headquarters before the election. But it’s also a personal story, about a schoolteacher from the Midwest who found herself drawn into an underworld where porn, tabloids, and a black market for political information all intersect—and who came face to face with stark lessons about how powerful people can distort the truth, and what it takes to hold them accountable.

Donald Trump’s alleged attempts to broker legally questionable deals to secure a political advantage are facing unprecedented scrutiny. But those deals didn’t start with Ukraine and Joe Biden. In the first of a two-part series about the sprawling saga of Trump’s alliance with the National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc., we look at a secret deal between a presidential candidate and a tabloid empire—and the first instance during the campaign of a practice called “catch and kill.” It’s a stranger-than-fiction investigation of an unproven rumor and the very real transaction that buried it, featuring a former accountant named Pecker, a former bodyguard named Calamari, and the first extensive interview with the former Trump Tower doorman at the heart of the story. 

At a precarious moment for the free press—as journalists face rhetoric about “fake news,” hostility toward reporters at political rallies, and efforts by powerful interests to suppress and manipulate the news—this episode looks at a group of people on the frontlines of the fight for the truth. Take a rare trip inside the walls of The New Yorker and learn how its editors, fact checkers, and lawyer stared down threats from titans of industry (and their hired spies) to break major stories.

"If you want to spend time with me, whatever, I will mentor you, teach you, whatever. But you have to, you know, relax with me," Harvey Weinstein says in never-before-heard tape from a police sting operation. "Don't be foolish," he warns her. "If you don’t trust me then we have no reason to do anything and you will lose big opportunities." Through that newly unearthed recording and testimonials from women who encountered Weinstein across the decades, this episode examines his pattern of dangling promises of career advancement—promises that could quickly turn into traps. It explores how that pattern could play a role in Weinstein's criminal trials in New York and Los Angeles. And it looks at the women who fought back and broke the cycle.

Harvey Weinstein’s criminal trial is underway in New York City. While the allegations against him were finally made public in October 2017, whispers of Weinstein’s alleged abuse go back decades. And so does the reporting on it. In this episode, we look at the small but dogged community of journalists who spent years trying to break the story open, including two who got tantalizingly close, The New Yorker's Ken Auletta and The Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters. Taken together, their stories represent a decades-long, cross-country hunt for the hardest truth in Hollywood.