The Book Prize Index

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Ronan Farrow

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators is a 2019 book by the American journalist Ronan Farrow. He recounts the challenges he faced chasing the stories of Harvey Weinstein's decades of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse of women and the case against him. Farrow argues that Weinstein was able to use Black Cube, a private Israeli intelligence service, to successfully pressure executives at NBC News to kill the story there, leading him to take it to The New Yorker, where it was published and helped spark the international #MeToo movement exposing sexual abuse, mostly of women, in many industries. The title refers to the practice of catch and kill, in which disreputable media companies purchase stories so that they can bury them. The book is published by Little, Brown and Company, and, according to Farrow, "was exhaustively vetted by Sean Lavery, a senior fact checker at The New Yorker".

Journalism & ReportageJournalism & Reportage · medium confidenceJournalism & Reportage81 signalsLlm Classifier: Journalism & Reportage -> Journalism & ReportageKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryAward Category: National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography -> BiographyPolitical BiographyIntelligence, Secrecy & SurveillanceCrime, Policing & Violence

Award History

0 wins · 2 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current InterestMajor2019FinalistSecondary source
National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and AutobiographyMajor2019FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (2)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    • Harvey Weinstein72%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • The New Yorker55%
    • NBC News50%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    Farrow argues that Weinstein used Black Cube to pressure NBC News executives to kill the story, forcing him to take it to The New Yorker, where publication helped spark #MeToo.

    Model confidence 62%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    28 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 70%.