I had hoped to finish Catch and Kill right after She Said, in order to compare the two in a review. Unfortunately, the library hold list did not make that doable. But it’s hard not to compare the two. For what it’s worth, I think She Said was the better book, but a lot of that may have been due to my issues with how Farrow told his story…
“I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”
I am probably the 4th person to review this book for CBR in the past 3 days alone, much less all of the excellent reviews that covered it last year. So I’m sure y’all know the story about how Farrow spent months investigating Harvey Weinstein and how many powerful people at NBC tried to block the story at every turn. I did not realize, going in, how much Farrow’s personal life was affected by this story — he was followed, harassed, had his career almost destroyed, and his integrity questioned. I was a little frustrated by how MUCH of the story was about Farrow, especially since he kept saying over and over that he wanted it to be about the women he was trying to help. But I can see that he also wasn’t given much of a chance to just stand back and report.
“Weinstein’s legal argument, in order of ascending absurdity and descending seriousness, was that anything negative about him was defamatory; that reporting on any company that used NDAs was impermissible; that he had cut a deal with NBC; that my sister was sexually assaulted; and that there was a child molester in my extended family.”
I will say one really negative thing here — Farrow does the voices for every direct quote (written or spoken) in the book for the audio version, and it is INCREDIBLY distracting. Like, I almost turned the damn thing off when he was interviewing Asia Argento and imitating her higher voice and Italian accent. It sounded ridiculous. The book, obviously, is full of interviews and quotations and I think this was just a really bad choice by whoever produced this audio book.