Catch and Kill Read online

  “Have you seen any of the nondisclosure agreements?”

  I paused again. “I’m aware of some specific agreements, yes.”

  “How many women are you talking to? Can you tell me who they are?” she asked. “I may be able to help get you information, if you can share who you’re talking to.”

  “I can’t talk about specific sources,” I said. “But there’s a group, and it’s growing. And if you have any advice on what I should be doing to insulate them from liability, I welcome it.”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  When I checked my phone after we hung up, I saw I’d missed another volley of Instagram messages from the same mysterious handle. This time, the final message was a photograph of a pistol. One of the messages read, “Sometimes you have to hurt the things you love.” I took a handful of screenshots and made a note to myself to find out whom to talk to at NBC about security.

  CHAPTER 16:

  F.O.H.

  The next time my phone chimed, it was happier news. Ben Wallace, from New York magazine, was following up. The former assistant he hadn’t quite managed to get on the record would talk to me.

  The following week, in the closing days of May, I walked into the lobby of a Beverly Hills hotel. I hadn’t looked up what the source looked like, but I recognized her quickly. She was slender and blond and striking. She cracked a nervous grin. “Hey!” she said. “I’m Emily.”

  Emily Nestor was in her late twenties and held law and business degrees from Pepperdine. She was working for a tech startup but seemed to be searching for something more purposeful. She talked about wanting to work in education, maybe something with underprivileged kids. A few years earlier, she’d harbored ambitions in the film business, hoping to produce and perhaps someday run a studio. But an experience she’d had as a temporary assistant had shaken her belief in the business. The casual, practiced nature of the harassment had made her worry it was a pattern. And the response when she reported it had left her disillusioned.

  I laid out what we had: McGowan and Gutierrez named in the story, and the audio, and the growing number of executives on camera. I was transparent about how precarious it all was, too.

  Nestor still looked scared as she told me she’d think about it. She was frightened of retaliation. But I could tell that she was too fierce in her convictions to shy away.

  A few days later, she was in. She’d go on camera, though she wanted to be unnamed and in shadow to start out, then see how she felt about going further. And she had evidence: messages from Irwin Reiter, a senior executive who had worked for Weinstein for almost three decades, acknowledging the incident and alluding to its being part of a pattern of predation inside the company. A third woman, and more hard evidence: it felt like the threshold we’d been waiting for.

  “Once we bring him this,” I told McHugh, “Noah will make sure it gets on air. He’ll have to.”

  Back home in New York, at a gala dinner at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York media elites assembled to honor Lester Holt and Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios. Jeffrey Tambor, the actor, who was at the time appearing in Amazon’s Transparent, toasted Price. Noah Oppenheim did the honors for Holt, praising his unflinching coverage of tough stories. Then he returned to his seat at NBC’s table alongside David Corvo, the Dateline producer. Nearby, at Amazon’s table, Harvey Weinstein applauded.

  Not long after, Nestor, McHugh, and I sat in a hotel room overlooking a glittering marina in Santa Monica. We were still tiptoeing around our shoots on the story, making the case bulletproof before we triggered a conversation with our bosses. We had set the date for Nestor’s interview around the margins of a trip to California’s Central Valley for the pollutants story.

  As we backlit her and her face deepened into shadow, Nestor said she anticipated a “personal and vengeful” response from Weinstein when he saw the story. In December 2014, when she was twenty-five, Nestor had worked as a temporary front desk assistant at the Weinstein Company in Los Angeles. She was overqualified, but took the job on a lark to get a firsthand view of the entertainment industry. On her first day, Nestor said, two employees told her that she was Weinstein’s “type” physically. When Weinstein arrived at the office, he made comments about her appearance, referring to her as “the pretty girl.” He asked how old she was, and then sent his assistants out of the room and made her write down her telephone number.

  Weinstein told her to meet him for drinks that night. Nestor invented an excuse. When he insisted, she suggested an early-morning coffee the next day, assuming that he wouldn’t accept. He told her to meet him at the Peninsula hotel, one of his favorite haunts. Friends in the entertainment industry and employees in the company had by then warned her about Weinstein’s reputation. “I dressed very frumpy,” she recalled.

  At the meeting, Weinstein offered her career help, then began to boast about his sexual liaisons with other women, including famous actresses. “He said, ‘You know, we could have a lot of fun,’” Nestor recalled. “‘I could put you in my London office, and you could work there and you could be my girlfriend.’” She declined. He asked to hold her hand; she said no. She recalled Weinstein remarking, “Oh, the girls always say no. You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman. “Textbook sexual harassment” was how Nestor described Weinstein’s behavior. She recalled refusing his advances at least a dozen times. “‘No’ did not mean ‘no’ to him,” she said.

  Throughout the meeting, Weinstein interrupted their conversation to yell into his cell phone, screaming at, of all people, Today show management, enraged that they’d canceled a segment with Amy Adams, a star in the Weinstein movie Big Eyes, when she refused to answer questions about a recent hack targeting Sony executives. Afterward, Weinstein told Nestor to keep an eye on the news cycle, which he promised would be spun in his favor and against NBC. Later in the day, items critical of NBC’s role in the spat surfaced as promised. Weinstein stopped by Nestor’s desk to make sure that she’d seen them.

  Nestor found the ferocity with which Weinstein moved to intimidate a news organization unsettling. By that point, she recalled, “I was very afraid of him. And I knew how well-connected he was. And how if I pissed him off then I could never have a career in that industry.” Still, she told a friend about the incident, and he alerted the company’s office of human resources. Nestor had a conversation with company officials about the matter but didn’t pursue it further after they told her that Weinstein would be informed of anything she told them. Later, employee after employee would tell me the human resources office at the company was a sham, a place where complaints went to die.

  Irwin Reiter, the Weinstein Company’s executive vice president of accounting and financial reporting, had reached out to Nestor via LinkedIn. “We view this very seriously and I personally am very sorry your first day was like this,” Reiter wrote. “Also if there are further unwanted advances, please let us know.” In late 2016, just before the presidential election, he’d reached out again, writing, “All this Trump stuff made me think of you.” He described Nestor’s experience as part of Weinstein’s serial misconduct. “I’ve fought him about mistreatment of women 3 weeks before the incident with you. I even wrote him an email that got me labelled by him as sex police,” he wrote. “The fight I had with him about you was epic. I told him if you were my daughter he would have not made out so well.” Nestor gave me the messages and, eventually, permission to air them.

  Nestor left after completing her temporary placement, feeling traumatized. “I actually decided not to go into entertainment because of this incident,” she told me. Behind her, the sun was setting over the marina. “Is this the way the world works?” she wondered. “That men get away with this?”

  As McHugh and I sweated our way th
rough interviews with toxicologists, local officials, and residents exposed to toxic waste in the Central Valley, the number of Miramax and Weinstein Company sources willing to talk grew. At a bar in West Hollywood, I met with one former employee who’d worked with Weinstein closely. She said that Weinstein’s predation had become enmeshed with his professional life. He would ask her to join for the beginning of meetings with young women that, in many cases, had already been moved from day to night and from hotel lobbies to hotel rooms. She said that Weinstein’s conduct was brazen. During a meeting with a model, he’d demanded, “Tell her how good of a boyfriend I am.” She said that when she refused to join the meetings with women, Weinstein would sometimes fly into a terrifying rage. Once, they’d been in a limo, and he’d opened the door and slammed it shut again and again, face contorted and beet-red, shouting, “Fuck you! You were my cover!”

  Weinstein had assistants keep track of the women. The former employee had them all filed under the same label in her phone: “F.O.H.,” which stood for “Friend of Harvey.” “He’s been systematically doing this for a very long time,” she told me.

  She took out an iPhone and navigated to a sentence she’d jotted down in her Notes app a few years earlier. It was something Weinstein whispered—to himself, as far as she could tell—after one of his many shouting sprees. It so unnerved her that she pulled out her phone and tapped it into a memo, word for word: “There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.”

  That former employee put me on the trail of a handful of others. As June turned into July, they began to go on camera. “There was a large volume of these types of meetings that Harvey would have with aspiring actresses and models,” a former executive named Abby Ex told me, her face in shadow, as cameras rolled in a Beverly Hills hotel room. “He would have them late at night, usually at hotel bars or in hotel rooms. And, in order to make these women feel more comfortable, he would ask a female executive or assistant to start those meetings with him.” She said she refused Weinstein’s demands that she join such meetings, but watched some of them play out, and witnessed, first-hand, a wider pattern of physical and verbal abuse.

  Ex told me that her lawyer advised her that she could be liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for violating the nondisclosure agreement attached to her employment contract. But, she said, “I believe this is more important than keeping a confidentiality agreement.”

  After the interviews, I arrived back at Jonathan’s place and sat at his kitchen table, poring over transcripts. He padded out in a science-themed tee shirt with an astronaut on it.

  “Did you eat?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied, still staring at the screen.

  “Let’s go somewhere healthy or disgusting.”

  “Can’t,” I said. It occurred to me that it had been a while since we’d done anything together. I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes. “Sorry. I’m a lot to deal with right now, I know.”

  He took a seat at the table next to me. “Yeah, all of our conversations are about sexual harassment now. It’s a blast.”

  My phone pinged. It was a text notification. Type “Yes” to receive weather alerts, it said. I stared at it, confused. This was Los Angeles, weather didn’t exist here.

  “You’re texting!” Jonathan was saying. “Hope he’s worth it! Hope he’s worth saying goodbye to all of this!”

  “Definitely,” I said, and swiped the message away.

  CHAPTER 17:

  666

  As Harvey Weinstein’s former employees talked to me, Harvey Weinstein talked to Black Cube. On June 6, its operatives met with Weinstein and his lawyers at Boies Schiller in New York and delivered an exuberant update. After the meeting, Yanus, the director, checked in with Christopher Boies. “It’s been a great pleasure meeting with you and your client today and to present you with our final report,” Yanus wrote. “We have been able to successfully achieve the project’s objectives and meet all three success fee clauses… the most important of which is to identify who stands behind the negative campaign against the client.” He attached an invoice for $600,000. The contract with Black Cube stipulated that the “success fees” Yanus mentioned be paid in the event that Weinstein used the fruit of Black Cube’s labors in litigation or in the media; or should Black Cube “succeed in putting a stop to the negative campaign” against Weinstein; or should its operatives discover the “individual or entity behind” that campaign.

  A week later, Yanus checked in again: “Good morning Chris, I was wondering if you could give us an update about the status of the payment.” This didn’t get a response, either. On June 18, Weinstein met with Black Cube in London and, by Yanus’s description in a peevish email sent to Boies shortly afterward, “thoroughly reviewed our findings again and discussed possible future steps to support your client’s case, who has again spoken very highly of our work.”

  As Weinstein sat on the invoice, his rapport with Black Cube strained. Yanus would call and delicately say, “You haven’t paid us.” On a good day, Weinstein would feign ignorance, and get the Weinstein Company’s general counsel on the line. “I didn’t know that,” he’d shout at his company’s lawyer. “Get them paid!” But mostly Weinstein would just shout at Black Cube. “Why am I paying you? You’re supposed to be on this!” he’d say.

  Things came to a head in conversations in late June. Weinstein questioned if Black Cube’s work might have broken the law, leaving him exposed to problems down the road. He insisted that the operation “hasn’t solved his problem completely,” as a summary email sent by the working-level project manager under Yanus explained. Weinstein reminded Black Cube that “other intelligence firms are involved in solving this crisis—and BC is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.”

  Finally, in early July, Boies and Black Cube signed a revised agreement. Weinstein agreed to pay a $190,000 settlement to square away the unpleasantness about the success fees. And Black Cube signed on to a new schedule of work, through November of that year, with a new, more targeted set of goals.

  Internally, privately, the project manager conceded that his operatives “came short-handed on certain issues.” In the contentious conversations with Weinstein, they’d promised to do more. They could still solve the problem. They just had to get more aggressive.

  Each time McHugh and I acknowledged to our bosses at NBC that we were still keeping an eye on the Weinstein story, a new round of warnings about our lack of productivity on other fronts surfaced. Soon McHugh was getting new assignments to work with other correspondents. Steve Chung, the NBC lawyer who had tempered Greenberg’s hesitations about viewing nondisclosure agreements with, at least, a concession that there were shades of gray in the case law that might permit a news organization to do so, called to say he was departing the company. “You’ll be in good hands with the rest of the legal team,” he said.

  There were signs that we were at risk of getting scooped. As I made a last, desperate attempt to get to Ashley Judd, I called the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who had worked on a documentary that featured both me and Judd. I had great respect for Kristof, who wrote about difficult human rights issues. I thought if anyone had a chance of persuading Judd to talk, it would be him.

  When I told him I was working on a story about the kinds of women’s rights and human rights issues Judd cared about, he said immediately, “The person this story is about, does his name begin with an H?” When I said yes, Kristof fell silent for a moment and then replied, speaking slowly: “I’m not at liberty to continue this conversation.” He got off the phone quickly.

  McHugh and I figured the only possible explanation was a competing New York Times story. I was glad to learn we weren’t alone, but anxious to keep moving. When we told Greenberg, he seemed happy, too, but for different reasons. “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s best to let someone else go first.”

  There were signs that not all of the reporting would hold indefinitely. For months, Rose McGowan had been all-in. In me
ssages since our interview, she’d written, “I can give you more” and “This needs to be a nighttime special. Or a long form morning piece. You need to come film more I think.”

  But that July, her patience seemed to waver. “I’ve thought about it and I’ve decided I don’t want to go forward with the NBC piece,” she told me. My stomach lurched. She wasn’t the only woman named in the story, but her interview was significant. I asked her to hear out what I’d uncovered before she made a decision. We agreed to meet again.

  I made the trek to her house in the Hollywood Hills one more time. She came to the door wearing a tee shirt, face makeup-free. She looked tired. As we sat in her kitchen and she made coffee, McGowan told me she’d already begun to experience the costs of speaking out. She said she’d told Price, the Amazon Studios head, that Weinstein had raped her. Not long after, her deal with the studio was terminated.

  Meanwhile, she suspected she was being followed. She didn’t know whom she could trust. I asked if she had friends and family around. McGowan shrugged. She said she had some support. She and Diana Filip, the wealth manager with the women’s rights project, had been drawing close. And there had been other supportive journalists, like Freedman, the former writer for the Guardian.

  McGowan told me she’d grown leery of NBC, uncomfortable with the delays, concerned about—she paused here—things she’d heard about the people there. I asked her what she meant and she shook her head and said only, “I just don’t want to be morning TV fodder.” I said that wasn’t the plan; that I did stories for Nightly News as well, that this was the kind of story that would go everywhere, not just in the morning.

  I told McGowan there were good people at NBC, like Oppenheim, who had a career as a screenwriter and wouldn’t feel bound by the traditional reticence of network news. But I said I needed to bring him everything, in the strongest shape it could be, and for that, I needed her. Then I told McGowan about what we had. I said I’d encountered others with stories about Weinstein—not just rumor or innuendo—and that they’d agreed to speak, partly because they knew she’d come forward. At this, her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve felt alone for such a long time,” she said.