One online distributor has withdrawn the #MeToo memoir, but other stores have stocked it, and the publisher insists it will not be withdrawn

Ronan Farrow’s book on the #MeToo movement has been withdrawn from sale in Australia by one online bookseller but was available in bookstores on Tuesday despite a legal threat from an Australian journalist who Farrow has previously alleged helped to protect the disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein from negative publicity.

The book, Catch and Kill, was released in Australia on Tuesday and was on sale in some shops, including Readings and WH Smith in Melbourne. But customers who ordered it from the online seller Booktopia were told it had been “withdrawn from sale” and had their payment refunded.

Lawyers for Dylan Howard, a former reporter for Channel Seven who is now a senior executive at the tabloid media company American Media Inc in New York, wrote to Australian booksellers last month alleging that Farrow’s book might contain “false and defamatory allegations”.

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“Our client has put the publisher, Little, Brown Book Group Limited (in the USA and UK) and Hachette Australia Pty Ltd … on notice that if the defamatory content is included in the book, we are instructed to take such legal action as may be appropriate,” the letter said.

The letter urged booksellers to liaise with the publisher to determine that the allegedly defamatory content was not included in the book, and warned that Howard might include booksellers as a party to any defamation proceedings that might be started against the publisher.

Guardian Australia contacted a number of bookstores on Tuesday and was told that most were yet to receive their shipment of the book, but had not received a notice not to sell.

“The official release date is today but we haven’t received stock yet,” said David May of Sydney’s Gleebooks. “But as far as I know we are planning to stock and sell it.”

“We haven’t been asked to withdraw it. We would be expecting stock any day from a mainstream supplier. And we would be expecting to put it on shelves.”

Other stores said it was normal for deliveries to be delayed for a day or two until after the official release date.

The publisher, Hachette Australia, confirmed that “the book is out as planned”.

“There wasn’t any reason for delay – it’s just people unpacking stock,” a spokeswoman said. “It’s available from today.”

Another independent retailer said that unless it was told to withdraw the book by the publisher it would not remove it from the shelves.

In response to questions from Guardian Australia, the legal firm acting for Howard, McLachlan Thorpe, said Howard had not “warned” booksellers not to stock the book, “but rather he has put distributors on notice that they all are exposed to actions in defamation by our client if the book’s demonstrably false claims about Mr Howard are published”.

If the book included defamatory imputations, the author, publisher and booksellers would all be open to legal action, the lawyers said.

The book contains extensive references to Howard, who it alleges frequently met Weinstein and who was investigating Weinstein’s accusers as editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer.

Farrow told the ABC’s 7.30 on Tuesday that he was blocked from publishing his initial investigation about Weinstein by his then employer, NBC, and that news networks could be influenced by their own history of payouts and cover-ups for sexual harassment.

“It’s my hope that the product of this careful multi-year investigation is at least an incisive conversation about what needs to change in the media, to make sure that it is the instrument of truth telling and accountability that it can and should be, and not an instrument of suppression,” Farrow said.

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In 2017 Farrow named Howard as one of several individuals who had allegedly acted to protect Weinstein’s reputation.

Farrow’s New Yorker article quoted an email exchange between Howard and Weinstein in December 2016 in which Howard allegedly told Weinstein about information obtained by one of AMI’s reporters that cast the actor Rose McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of rape, in a negative light.

It was reported that Howard was overseeing a television production agreement between AMI and the Weinstein company, which has since been terminated. He said in a response included in the New Yorker article that he had “an obligation to protect AMI’s interests by seeking out – but not publishing – truthful information about people who Mr. Weinstein insisted were making false claims against him”.

He said he was careful to separate the corporate partnership from his journalistic obligations and that any off the record information that may have been provided to Weinstein would never have been allowed to be published, according to the New Yorker.

Howard began his journalism career at the Geelong Advertiser and moved to the US in 2009. His contract with Channel Seven in Australia was not renewed in 2008 after he was cleared by a police investigation into the publication of the private medical records of Australian rules footballers.

In 2018 Howard sued Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes program to prevent the release of footage of him obtained in the lobby of his New York office, Nine Newspapers reported.