Weinstein’s web of undercover agents
Movie mogul hired private detectives, lawyers and others to try to stop articles outlining charges of sexual harassment
The disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein used a web of private detectives, lawyers and even undercover former Mossad agents in a failed effort to stop The New York Times and The New Yorker from publishing their October investigations into allegations of sexual harassment and assault against him.
The cloak-and-dagger undertaking, detailed in a new report on The New Yorker’s website Monday, included the use of an agent who posed as a women’s rights advocate to befriend and spy on one accuser, the actress Rose McGowan.
The same agent posed as a woman with a possible allegation against Weinstein in an attempt to lure journalists into sharing information about other possible accusers, according to the magazine’s report, which relied heavily on internal Weinstein documents and emails.
A contract with one of at least three private investigation firms that Weinstein employed, Black Cube, listed its “primary objectives” as providing “intelligence which will help the client’s efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY Newspaper” and obtaining content from a book that was to include “harmful, negative information on and about the client.”
The magazine identified the newspaper as The New York Times and the book author as Rose McGowan, who has stepped forward to allege that Weinstein raped her. (He has denied forcing women into “nonconsensual sex.”)
The contract, which the magazine published on its website, had as its signatory a Weinstein lawyer, David Boies, a Democratic Party stalwart who argued for marriage equality at the Supreme Court and represented Al Gore in the disputed 2000 presidential election.
Boies’ firm, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, has provided The Times with outside legal counsel in three legal matters over the past 10 years, including one libel case.
On Tuesday, Boies issued a statement saying he believed the investigators had been hired solely to determine the facts related to the allegations against Weinstein, which he believed would be to The Times’ benefit. He denied there was any conflict of interest with his work for the paper.
But late in the day, the paper said it was ending its relationship with his firm.
“We never contemplated that the law firm would contract with an intelligence firm to conduct a secret spying operation aimed at our reporting and our reporters,” The Times said in a statement. “Such an operation is reprehensible.”
Boies said neither he nor his firm had any role in initially hiring the private investigative firm Black Cube.
But he said he had made a mistake in helping out Weinstein, whom Boies described as a longtime client and who has denied any allegations of nonconsensual sex, in forging a new contract with the firm.
“It was not thought through, and that was my mistake,” he said in the statement. He pointed out that he had never been disciplined for his work.
Black Cube promotes itself as “a select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units.”
One of its agents posed as a potential Weinstein accuser to secure two meetings with Ben Wallace, a New York magazine reporter who was pursuing a Weinstein article that never came to be. She also reached out to one of the two lead New York Times reporters on the Weinstein story, Jodi Kantor, The New Yorker reported, an attempt that went nowhere.
Kantor was also investigated, along with the New Yorker reporter on the Weinstein story, Ronan Farrow, by another firm Weinstein hired, PSOPS.
The firm had been used, as well, to dig up dirt on accusers like McGowan, producing one long briefing that included a subheading that read, “Past Lovers,” The New Yorker reported.
Weinstein’s habit of using investigators to undermine accusers and reporters dates back more than a decade, according to the New Yorker article published on Monday, which was also written by Farrow.
The magazine reported that Weinstein had used Kroll “to dig up unflattering information” about the former New York Times media columnist David Carr, who died in 2015, when Carr was working on an article about Weinstein in the early 2000s for New York magazine.
The article quotes from a report about Carr that Weinstein’s investigators produced, noting that he had learned of McGowan’s allegations.
A spokeswoman for Weinstein, Sallie Hofmeister, denied Weinstein had assigned a private eye to look into Carr when The Times asked her about it last month.
Hofmeister did not respond to emails.