Catch and Kill Read online

  McGowan said she’d been thinking a lot, writing music. She and I had bonded, the first time we met, over songs we’d written. In her house that day, we each played a few demos. As one of hers called “Lonely House” played, she shut her eyes and listened to herself sing:

  I stand for mind

  For women who can’t

  And men too scared

  To beat that beast

  To watch him drown

  McGowan regained her nerve. She told me we could air the interview. She said she’d go on camera again, naming Weinstein more explicitly. And she volunteered, before then, to get on the phone with NBC’s legal department and make it clear to them that she’d named him on the record.

  A few minutes later, I was on the phone with Oppenheim’s assistant. I told her I’d had a break in the story and would be flying back on a red-eye to see him the next day. I’d take any opening he had on his calendar.

  “We have it,” McHugh said. “The clock is ticking.”

  In New York the next morning, I took a winding staircase down into the basement underneath a Bank of America. It was a rare old-fashioned vault, with a circular door with bolts around its periphery, and, inside, a corridor of safe-deposit boxes. A bank manager pulled out a shallow metal box. It was numbered “666.”

  We stared at the numbers for a moment.

  “You know what,” he said, “I’m gonna find us something else.”

  In a less ominous box, I placed a list of our dozens of sources, and transcripts of the conversations with them, and a description of the patterns of predation and settlements. I included a flash drive containing the audio from the police sting. On top, I left the note of a person who was tired and genuinely unsure what was paranoid and what was practical anymore but, anyway, here it is:

  If you’re reading this, it’s because I can’t make this information public myself. This is the blueprint to assembling a story that could bring a serial predator to justice. Multiple reporters who have attempted to break this story have faced intimidation and threats. I have already received threatening calls from intermediaries. Noah Oppenheim at NBC News should be able to access the associated video footage. Should anything happen to me, please make sure this information is released.

  CHAPTER 18:

  QUIDDITCH

  Noah Oppenheim seemed speechless. I’d handed him a printed list of the reporting elements. “Wow,” he said. “This is a lot to digest.” It was July 12. Outside of Oppenheim’s office window, sunlight fell across Rockefeller Plaza. I explained that we had layers of hard evidence and credible sources. Some even knew Oppenheim. Abby Ex, one of the former executives who’d gone on camera, had recruited him to do an uncredited punch-up on the script for the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Self/less.

  “We’re going to take it to Greenberg, run it through the normal channels,” I said quickly. “I just wanted you to be aware.”

  He lifted the top page again, looked at the one underneath. “Of course I’ll defer to Rich, but—” He put the paper down on his lap, sighed. “We’re going to have to make some decisions.”

  “Decisions?” I said.

  “Like, is this really worth it?”

  He was sitting on a beige couch. On a wall next to him, an array of screens flickered, news tickers racing by. Nearby, a framed diptych showed a game of Quidditch, rendered in brown and green Magic Marker and signed by Oppenheim’s eight-year-old son.

  “It’s a big story,” I said. “It’s a prominent guy, admitting to serious misconduct, on tape.”

  “Well, first of all,” he said, “I don’t know if that’s, you know, a crime.”

  “It’s a misdemeanor,” I said. “It’s months in jail, potentially.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “But we’ve gotta decide if it’s newsworthy.”

  I stared at him.

  “Look,” he said. “You know who Harvey Weinstein is. I know who Harvey Weinstein is. But I’m in the industry. I don’t know that normal Americans do.”

  “Roger Ailes wasn’t a household name, either,” I pointed out. “Weinstein’s more famous than that. And it’s a system, you know—it’s bigger than him.”

  “I get it,” he said. “I’m just saying we’re going to have to make the case to the lawyers that this is worth it. There’s gonna be a lot thrown at us if we do this.” From Wallace’s paranoiac recollections, I knew that much was true.

  On my way out, I thanked him and said, “And if an ‘accident’ befalls me…”

  He laughed, tapped the paper I’d handed him. “I’ll make sure this gets out.”

  “Thanks. Oh, and don’t do Self/less 2.”

  “I don’t know,” he deadpanned. “I might need career options after this.”

  That afternoon, I received another volley of strange Instagram messages, with another image of a gun. I sent a text to Oppenheim’s assistant, Anna. “Hey, don’t want to elevate this to Noah’s level,” I wrote, “but do we have a good security person at NBC I could talk to?” I was dealing with some “stalker issues.” Things that felt “a little more alarming than the usual.”

  She told me she’d look into it.

  A few hours later, I got another call from Matthew Hiltzik, the public relations operative. “Just catching up with people,” he said perkily. “You were on my list.” Hiltzik had texted a few times since his last call, suggesting we get a meal, asking for updates. It was an uncharacteristic level of interest. On the phone that day, I told him I was still on book deadline and working on several NBC stories.

  “So you’re still on the Harvey story?”

  I looked into the studio nearby. Behind glass frosted with peacock logos, a midday anchor silently mouthed headlines. “I’m working on a few stories,” I repeated.

  “Alright!” he said, laughing a little. “I’m here to give you information whenever you need it. And I think it’s really good that you’re busy with other things.”

  I got home that evening a little on edge. In the elevator, I started at a greeting from the boyish neighbor the superintendent always said kind of looked like me. Soon after, Jonathan called from a Bank of America on the West Coast, where he was finalizing the paperwork that made him a co-owner of the safe-deposit box I’d just filled. “Don’t. Lose. The key,” I told him. As we spoke, there was a soft “ping”: another automated message about weather updates. I swiped it away.

  As I got into bed, a text from Lisa Bloom came in. “Hey Ronan are you still writing about NDAs? I have a new issue on my Kardashian case (you may have heard I rep Blac Chyna and K family is raising NDA issue). Anyway I’m coming to NYC tomorrow to do The View. Coffee/lunch Thursday or Friday?”

  I pushed the phone away and failed to sleep.

  McHugh and I had agreed to meet Greenberg at 8:30 a.m. I was at my cubicle, exhausted, when McHugh arrived.

  “You look awful,” he said.

  “Thanks, nice to see you, too.”

  A few minutes later we were in Greenberg’s cramped office. “You have a lot,” he said, paging through the same printed list of elements I’d handed Oppenheim the day before. Then he looked up and asked, “Can I hear the tape?”

  I slid my phone onto the desk in front of him and hit Play, and we listened as Weinstein said, again, that he was used to that.

  As Greenberg listened, a determined smile spread across his lips. “Fuck it, let him sue,” he said, when the audio was done. “If this airs, he’s toast.”

  We said we were going to proceed with on-camera interviews with a few more sources from Weinstein’s company and draft both a script and a written story for the web. Greenberg, still seeming a little excited, told us to prepare for a meeting with the legal department. McHugh and I left Greenberg’s office feeling triumphant.

  Later, Anna, Oppenheim’s assistant, followed up about the stalkers. “Passing this along to HR, they deal with this for talent,” she wrote. “Unfortunately these things happen more often than you think.” HR, in turn, put me in touch with Thomas McFadden,
a grizzled ex-cop. “Pretty typical stuff,” he said, scrolling through my phone in his tiny office. “Seen it a million times.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “We’ll look into it,” he said. “Mostly, we figure out who’s hassling you, maybe we give ’em a little call, they stop what they’re doing. Once in a blue moon maybe we call up our friends in law enforcement.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I feel like there’s maybe other things happening than just the crazies. Weird spam texts, this sense like—”

  “Like you’re being followed?”

  I laughed. “Well…,” I said.

  He leaned back, seemed to chew this over. Then he eyed me sympathetically. “You’re under a lot of pressure. Leave it to me and get some rest.”

  All that month, McGowan and her new friend, Diana Filip of Reuben Capital Partners, exchanged emails and calls. Whatever coast McGowan was on, Filip always seemed to be there. A few days after my meeting with Oppenheim, they had a girls’ night out, at the Peninsula in New York. Prompted by Filip’s gentle questioning, McGowan spoke frankly about her efforts to go public with her rape allegation. She even revealed that she’d been talking to a reporter from NBC News. All the while, Filip sat close, listening intently, sympathy etched on her face.

  The same day, Sara Ness, the investigator at Jack Palladino’s firm in San Francisco, sent another email to Harvey Weinstein. It contained another, more detailed dossier. Across fifteen pages, the investigators exhaustively retraced my steps in the preceding months, identifying many of my sources. The dossier concluded that I’d been in touch with Sciorra, who “HW confirmed” was “a potential adverse source.”

  The list of reporters, too, had expanded: the dossier mentioned Kim Masters, the pugnacious writer from the Hollywood Reporter, and Nicholas Kristof, and Ben Wallace. It concluded that Wallace was “possibly helping to direct Farrow.” There was a final new area of focus: a writer for the New York Times named Jodi Kantor.

  The dossier identified several of Weinstein’s double agents, who had spoken to me, then reported back to him on my activities. The producer in Australia with the strain in her voice was one of them. She had “alerted HW to Farrow’s contact,” the document said. “Did not offer any negative info about HW to Farrow.”

  And there were other, more veiled references to collaborators. The dossier noted that someone identified only as “LB” had been involved in Weinstein’s effort to ferret out information, quietly talking to at least one lawyer an accuser consulted.

  “Investigation is continuing,” the dossier concluded.

  We kept encountering sources who threw us off the scent or reported back to Weinstein. But we were also finding more and more who were willing to stand up to him. A former assistant who had been assigned to Weinstein part-time during his trips to London, and told me he’d sexually harassed her, initially felt talking wasn’t worth the risk of retribution. Her fears deepened as Weinstein’s associates began calling her “quite ferociously,” after twenty years of radio silence. “It’s very unsettling,” she told me. “He is on your tail.” But, paradoxically, the calls had made her want to help. “I didn’t want to talk,” she said. “But then, hearing from him, it made me angry. Angry that he still thinks he can silence people.”

  The part-time assistant also knew about Zelda Perkins, the woman who had spoken with Auletta, and about the joint sexual harassment settlement Perkins had secured alongside her colleague Rowena Chiu. So did Katrina Wolfe, a former assistant at Miramax who later became an executive. Wolfe went on camera that month, with her face in shadow. “While working at Miramax I became directly aware of two female employees of the company who had accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, and whose cases were settled,” Wolfe told me. It wasn’t hearsay: she’d directly witnessed the planning and execution of the transaction.

  One night in 1998, Weinstein had barreled into the office, looking for Steve Hutensky, a Miramax lawyer dubbed “the Cleaner-Upper” among Weinstein’s underlings. For forty-five minutes, the two men had huddled, Weinstein’s anxious voice audible to staffers nearby. Afterward, Hutensky had ordered assistants to pull the personnel files of Perkins, who was then an assistant to Donna Gigliotti, the Shakespeare in Love producer, and Chiu.

  In the following days and weeks, Weinstein exchanged frantic calls with his advisors, including elite New York lawyer Herb Wachtell. (When I was a law student, Wachtell’s firm was the holy grail of summer associateships. I’d been devastated, in the way only students can be, when it rejected my application. I had to slum it at Davis Polk, like an ambulance chaser or President Grover Cleveland.) Wachtell and Hutensky had sought an English lawyer for Weinstein—Hutensky requested “the best criminal defense attorney in England”—and then Weinstein had gotten on a Concorde flight to London to deal with the problem personally.

  I was edging closer to rendering the London settlements reportable.

  The circle of on-camera interviews kept widening. A few days after the interview with Wolfe, I conducted another with a former assistant and producer at the Weinstein Company. He made it clear that the pattern of harassment complaints hadn’t stopped after the nineties. In more recent years, he’d been tasked with bringing young women into the honeypot meetings described by the other former employees. Some of the women seemed “not aware of the nature of those meetings” and “were definitely scared,” he said.

  He was also sometimes troubled by the aftermath of such meetings. “You’d see women who would come out of the room and all of a sudden there would be a giant need to—I don’t wanna say handle the situation, but make sure they felt that they were rewarded or compensated professionally for what had just happened,” he recalled. “And those women seemed pretty freaked out.” Weinstein, he said, was “predatory,” and “above the law that applies to most of us and should apply to all of us.”

  We shot the interview at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, with McHugh and me and a freelance shooter named Jean-Bernard Rutagarama crammed into a small room alongside our lights and tripods and cameras.

  That month, Black Cube circulated the latest version of a list of names. A project manager reviewed the list at Black Cube’s satellite office in London—half a floor in a glass tower on Ropemaker Street, where the art on the walls featured silhouetted operatives looming over bustling cityscapes. Then the project manager forwarded the list to a network of contacts around the world.

  The list contained many of the same names—and in some cases, the same language—from the dossiers generated by Jack Palladino’s firm. But the research had grown deeper, too. Now, secondary sources who had corroborated McGowan’s or Nestor’s or Gutierrez’s stories were also targets.

  As the summer wore on, the list grew, with highlights appearing in yellow and then red to indicate urgency. Some of the names on it were spun out into separate profiles. Soon after the interview at the Four Seasons, one such profile, marked “JB Rutagarama,” landed in the same in-boxes. A subhead explained, “Relevance: Cameraman that is working with Ronan Farrow and Rich McHugh on the HW report.” The profile covered Rutagarama’s upbringing in Rwanda and explored “ways to approach him.” Its formatting was distinctive, with headers in blue italic Times New Roman and English-as-a-second-language malapropisms.

  Among the contacts to whom the Black Cube project manager sent the list, and the profile of Rutagarama, was Seth Freedman, the former writer for the Guardian.

  CHAPTER 19:

  SPIRAL

  That July, I called back Auletta and told him I had more information about the settlements in London. I asked if there was anything else he could show me to help shore up my reporting. To my surprise, he said, “Actually, yes.” He’d given all his reporters’ notebooks, printed documents, and tapes to the New York Public Library. The collection remained closed to the public. But he said I could take a look.

  The Auletta files were housed in the Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts, beyond the great hall. It was a dim ch
amber with sealed glass shelves and rows of low desks that glowed under reading lights. The library possessed more than sixty large cardboard boxes of Auletta’s papers all told. McHugh and I signed in and a librarian brought out the boxes.

  McHugh and I each took a box and began poring over their contents. Auletta didn’t have nearly as much as we did. But he had grasped at essential pieces of the puzzle. It was strange, seeing notes from fifteen years earlier that covered such similar ground. Even then, Auletta was encountering abandoned reporting jobs. On one page of notes, he had scrawled in doctor-illegible blue cursive: “David Carr: believes sexual harassment.”

  In Auletta’s spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks, I found clues that led me to other clues, and which synced up with my emerging picture of what had happened between Weinstein and the two assistants in London.

  In the late nineties, Perkins had started working as an assistant to Gigliotti. In practice, this meant working for Weinstein much of the time. “From my very first time left alone with Harvey,” she told me later, “I had to deal with him being present either in his underpants or totally naked.” He’d try to pull her into bed. Perkins was petite and blond and looked younger than her years. But she also had a sharp personality and was, even then, defiantly assertive. Weinstein never succeeded in his physical advances. The unending fusillade of attempts, though, exhausted her. And soon, he was wearing her down in other ways. Like so many of Weinstein’s former employees, she found herself cast as a facilitator of sexual liaisons with aspiring actresses and models. “We had to bring girls to him,” she said. “Though I wasn’t aware of it at first, I was a honeypot.” Weinstein would ask her to buy condoms for him and clean up after hotel-room meetings with the young women.