Catch and Kill Page 15

  “Noah has asked us to pause our reporting while we see what we have and the legal review takes place,” Greenberg told him.

  “I just don’t understand that,” McHugh said.

  Greenberg hadn’t offered any explanations on the phone with me, and he didn’t offer any to McHugh. He rattled off a list of Weinstein’s lawyers—Charles Harder, David Boies, and, a new name McHugh hadn’t heard in connection with Weinstein before, Lanny Davis. “Not that we’re afraid of any of them,” Greenberg added. “But for the time being you have to stop any calls about this.” As I had, McHugh said he couldn’t stop incoming calls, and left it at that.

  As I arrived at JFK, Canosa called. She sounded nervous. “You’re still coming to town?” she asked. I stopped for a moment, anxious travelers dragging heavy luggage coursing around me. I thought how easy it would be to tell her no, to take the order from our bosses, to safeguard the relationships with Greenberg and Oppenheim.

  “Ronan?” she asked again.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I’m coming.”

  From the plane, I put the finishing touches on the script, trading notes with McHugh about a word choice in my narration or an edit on a sound bite. Even pared down to the elements the legal department had reviewed and sanctioned, it was explosive. “I’m used to that,” said Weinstein near the top, as Gutierrez, panicked, tried to escape. “NBC NEWS HAS EXCLUSIVELY OBTAINED AUDIO COLLECTED DURING THE NYPD STING,” I narrated. Gutierrez was named, her story told in detail, followed by a summary paragraph: “NBC NEWS HAS SPOKEN TO FOUR OTHER WOMEN WHO HAVE WORKED FOR WEINSTEIN AND WHO ALLEGE SEXUAL MISCONDUCT… ALLEGATIONS DATING FROM THE LATE 1990S TO JUST THREE YEARS AGO.” Nestor’s interview was included, and the messages from Reiter corroborating her claim, and sound bites from the executives, describing firsthand recollections of misconduct.

  I attached to the script a note that I hoped would put our bosses at NBC on notice about Canosa:

  Rich,

  Attached please find the script, revised according to Kim and Susan’s enumerated concerns, and your subsequent suggestions, which have been followed very precisely.

  Please note that one additional former assistant has raised a credible first hand allegation of sexual abuse and claims to have a paper trail relevant to our reporting. She has expressed a willingness to participate in this story and is deciding in what capacity.

  Ronan

  After the email went out to Greenberg and Weiner, I felt antsy. I depressed the button on my seat and tested the limits of its recline a few times. It felt like we were standing still while the outside world accelerated. While I was on the flight, HuffPost ran a story about claims that the Fox News host Eric Bolling had sent lewd texts to coworkers. The story had used entirely anonymous sourcing—something that had never been the case in any draft of ours. The same afternoon, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Harvey Weinstein, for his “contributions to public discourse and the cultural enlightenment of society,” would be receiving the LA Press Club’s inaugural Truthteller Award.

  CHAPTER 25:

  PUNDIT

  I met Ally Canosa at a restaurant way out on the east end of Sunset Boulevard. She sat perfectly upright, every muscle in her body tensed. Like many of the sources in the Weinstein story, she was pretty in a way that would have been striking in most settings, but was just a criterion for employment in Hollywood.

  Canosa wasn’t sure what to do. She had signed a nondisclosure agreement as a condition of her employment with Weinstein. She was still trying to make it as a producer, and was terrified of retaliation. Weinstein could render her unemployable. And then there were the hesitations of any survivor of sexual violence. She’d allowed her wounds to calcify and learned to carry on. She hadn’t told her father, or her boyfriend. “I don’t want to suffer more. You know?” she told me. Once, as she’d worked up the nerve to raise the matter with a therapist, “I saw her at a premier for a Weinstein movie,” Canosa told me. “I found out she was a producer on one of Harvey’s movies.”

  Canosa had met Weinstein the better part of a decade earlier, when she was working as an event planner at the West Hollywood branch of the members-only club Soho House. She’d organized an event for the Weinstein Company, and he’d spotted her, stared, and then handed her his business card. At first, Weinstein almost stalked Canosa, demanding to meet again and again. When she was “creeped out” and didn’t respond, he forced her hand, demanding a formal meeting through Soho House, ostensibly to discuss another event.

  At the Montage hotel, their midday meeting was moved to a hotel suite, and Weinstein laid into her with his familiar promises of career advancement followed by sexual overtures. “You should be an actress,” she remembered him saying. “You have a face.” When he asked, “You’re not gonna kiss me?” she said no and left, flustered.

  She kept trying to ignore him, but he was persistent, and she was fearful of the impact he might have on her career if she spurned him. She agreed to meet again. During dinner at a hotel restaurant, Eva Cassidy’s cover of “Autumn Leaves” drifted over the stereo system. Canosa talked about Cassidy’s life story, and Weinstein proposed developing a biopic about her, with Canosa’s help. After the meal, he grabbed her by the arm, pressed her against a railing on the steps outside, and kissed her hard. She was horrified.

  But afterward, Weinstein “made a big show of being apologetic,” she said. “We can just be friends,” she remembered him telling her. “I really wanna make this movie with you.” He set up a call with a veteran producer of his, and pretty soon they were meeting with rights holders and exchanging script notes.

  “I called my parents and was like, ‘Oh my God. You would not believe what just happened. Harvey Weinstein wants me to help him produce a movie about an idea I gave him,’” she recalled. “So naïve. Look, it’s embarrassing just talking about it. But at the time I was like, ‘This is all I ever wanted.’”

  Canosa took time to get to these points. After our meeting at the restaurant, she said she’d be more comfortable in private, and came to Jonathan’s place in West Hollywood. It was the start of a trend that would soon see more and more distraught sources traipsing through his doors. Pundit, the Goldendoodle my mother had given Jonathan, curled up next to Canosa as she continued the story.

  The first year they’d worked together, Canosa had tried repeatedly to brush off Weinstein’s advances. During one meeting about the Cassidy film, he casually told her he needed to go up to his hotel room to get something. “It was like midafternoon or something. So, I just didn’t think,” she said. When they got there, he told her he was going to take a shower. “Would you get in the shower with me?” he asked.

  “No,” Canosa told him.

  “Just get in the shower with me. I don’t even need to—I don’t want to have sex with you. I just want you to be in the shower with me.”

  “No,” she said again, and went into the living room. Weinstein announced, from the bathroom, that he was going to masturbate anyway, and started doing so through the open door as she averted her gaze. She left Weinstein’s hotel room, upset.

  Another time, Weinstein left a jacket behind at one of their meetings and asked her to hold onto it. In its pockets, she found a pack of syringes that googling revealed were a treatment for erectile dysfunction. She reeled at the implications of him arming himself for sex ahead of their meetings.

  By then she was working on the film for Weinstein; her professional life had come to revolve around him. And they had developed a friendship that was real, if twisted by imbalances of power and by Weinstein’s overtures. At one work dinner with a number of colleagues that summer, he wept over news that Disney would be selling Miramax. He asked her, yet again, to come to his hotel room. When she refused, he roared at her, “Don’t fucking refuse me when I’m crying.” She relented, and nothing happened. He just sobbed. “I’ve never been happy,” she remembered him saying. “You’re one of my best friends. You’re so loyal.” She hoped the declarations
of friendship meant he understood her boundaries. She was wrong.

  “What came next,” she said, beginning to cry, “was he raped me.” The first time had been after another meeting in a hotel. As they discussed the Cassidy project, he said a scene in the script reminded him of a classic film, and asked her to come up to his room to watch a clip. Weinstein had by then apologized for his advances profusely and he was, after all, her boss. “I was like, I can handle myself,” she said. The only television in Weinstein’s hotel room was in the bedroom. She sat on the bed and watched the clip, feeling uncomfortable. “He made a move, and I told him, ‘No.’ And he made another move, and I told him, ‘No,’” she recalled. Weinstein got angry, aggressive. “Don’t be a fucking idiot,” she remembered him saying. He departed for the restroom and returned a few minutes later wearing only a robe. Then he pushed her onto the bed. “I said no more than once, and he forced himself on me,” she said. “It wasn’t like I was screaming. But I was definitely like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ And his full body weight was on top of me.”

  Canosa lingered on what she could have done differently. “In my head at the time, it was like I didn’t put up enough of a fight.” Eventually, she stopped saying no. “I was just numb. I wasn’t crying. I was just staring at the ceiling.” It was only after she left that she started sobbing and couldn’t stop. Weinstein hadn’t used protection. He had told her, to her great discomfort, months earlier, how he’d gotten a vasectomy. But she was terrified he might have given her an STD. She thought of telling her boyfriend but felt too ashamed. “Looking back, I would drag myself kicking and screaming straight to the police if I could.”

  As she broke down telling the story, Pundit leapt up, concerned, trying to lick Canosa’s face. She laughed, relieved to have the tension of the moment punctured. “This is the sweetest dog I think I’ve ever met,” she said.

  Canosa kept working for Weinstein. “I was in a vulnerable position and I needed my job,” she told me. Later, when she lost her job at a different production company, she signed a formal contract with the Weinstein Company, working on awards campaigns for The Artist and The Iron Lady.

  Weinstein’s misconduct continued. Once, he ordered her to accompany him to an appointment with an osteopath and to remain in the room as he stripped naked and received treatment for a worsening case of sciatica. Another time, during an attack of the same condition, he demanded that she massage his thighs. She remembered him screaming at her when she refused. “What the fuck? Why aren’t you gonna? Why?”

  “Because I don’t feel comfortable,” she told him. “I’m your employee.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Ally!” he shouted. “For fuck’s sake, you can massage my thighs!”

  “I’m just not going to.”

  “Then fucking get out of here! Fuck you! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  When she was working on the production of the Netflix series Marco Polo, Weinstein arrived on set in Malaysia and wreaked havoc. At a dinner for the directors and producers, he demanded, in front of her coworkers, that she go to his hotel room. When she tried to go instead to her own room, the barrage of texts from his assistants started up: “Harvey wants to see you, Harvey wants to see you.” Sometimes her efforts to evade him failed, and more assaults followed. Later, court documents would itemize “oral sexual conduct or anal sexual conduct with plaintiff by forcible compulsion and/or when plaintiff was incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless.”

  All around Canosa, there were signs that she wasn’t alone. During that same visit to the set of Marco Polo, Weinstein went into the dressing room of one actress for fifteen minutes, “and then she was a ghost of herself for a week afterwards.” Canosa felt a moral obligation to do something but was terrified by Weinstein’s displays of vindictiveness. “The number of times I’ve seen people have their lives threatened, or their wives threatened, or their reputation threatened,” she said, shaking her head.

  I tried to be honest with Canosa about the precariousness of the story, and the importance of her participation to its future. I said, as I had so many times that summer, that the decision was hers; that all I could do was tell her how sincerely I believed talking would make a difference for a lot of people. By the end of our conversations, she was edging tantalizingly close to saying yes to going on camera.

  CHAPTER 26:

  BOY

  It was early evening and the shadows were lengthening in Harvey Weinstein’s offices on Greenwich Street when the call came in. “Can you get Harvey?” said George Pataki, the former New York governor. An assistant made the connection. “Hey, Harvey, it’s George. I just want to let you know, Ronan Farrow’s still working on the story.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” Weinstein said.

  Pataki insisted that multiple women were talking to me. “He’s ready to go with it. It’s supposed to get aired—”

  “When?” Weinstein asked. “When is it supposed to get aired?”

  “Two to three weeks,” Pataki said.

  Nowhere was Weinstein more deeply enmeshed in politics than in New York. Between 1999 and that summer in 2017, he and his company had given to at least thirteen New York politicians or their PACs. He’d covered his bases, mostly with Democrats but also occasionally with Republicans like Pataki. He’d been generous with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and Governor Andrew Cuomo.

  For Weinstein and Pataki, as had been the case with Hillary Clinton, campaign contributions had helped foster friendship. The former governor was often photographed at the movie mogul’s events. Weinstein helped boost the career of Pataki’s daughter, Allison, an historical novelist. A year before Pataki’s call, Weinstein hosted a book party for her. The year before that, when her husband suffered a stroke, Weinstein helped secure the right specialists. Allison Pataki’s book agent, Lacy Lynch, also worked with McGowan. As the summer wore on, Lynch’s name began showing up on Weinstein’s email and call lists.

  Weinstein had kept up his calls to Boies about the NBC problem. After his conversation with Lack, he’d continued to reach out to NBC executives, and had confidently reported back to people around him that the story was dead. But it wasn’t long before he called Boies back, sounding less certain. “I think NBC is still working on a story,” he said. He sounded angry. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

  After hearing from Pataki, Weinstein placed a fresh round of calls to Phil Griffin, Andy Lack, and Noah Oppenheim. He’d shouted the names so often—“Get me Phil, get me Andy, get me Noah”—the assistants had taken to calling them “the triumvirate.” By that August, Weinstein’s attention was increasingly turning to Oppenheim. But Griffin, whom Weinstein told his staff he knew best, had been an object of early and intense focus, and continued to be a mainstay.

  Griffin’s carefree qualities contributed to his considerable charm. They could also, however, be a source of discomfort for colleagues. He had a temper, and cursed like a sailor. He was notorious for his hard drinking after work. While he was a senior producer at Nightly News in the nineties, he’d often retire after work to Hurley’s, a Midtown bar. After a few drinks one night, he told three women producers with him that he wanted to go to Times Square.

  “I want to go see the lights at Times Square! I love to see the lights!” one recalled Griffin saying.

  Griffin moved the drinking to a Times Square hotel. Then the group stumbled over to Eighth Avenue, where Griffin urged the women to come with him to see a peep show. Two of them exchanged uncomfortable glances. He told them to lighten up. In they went, to a circle of darkened booths upstairs, where a window opened and a woman, naked but for her heels, squatted in front of them and asked Griffin for some cash to continue the show.

  Griffin looked at the women with what one described as “a flicker of shame.” He told the stripper no thanks. The window closed, and the group headed out to exchange awkward goodbyes. For the women, the incident had been gross, but unremarkable: they’d all
come up in the business with this kind of behavior from men.

  Four colleagues said Griffin was known for making lewd or crass remarks in work emails. In one meeting I’d been in after the television personality Maria Menounos’s vagina had been photographed in a bathing suit wardrobe malfunction, Griffin waved around a printed page bearing a zoomed-in image, smirking. “Would you look at that?” he said, and exhaled hard. “Not bad, not bad.” On a couch nearby, the female employee in the room with us rolled her eyes.

  Griffin seemed to see the news purely as a business, and evinced for journalism little of the fervor he held for sports. When the winds of the industry blew in favor of partisanship, he pushed his anchors toward opinion; when partisanship wore thin, he was the first to turn to straight news. And when you subjected him to any kind of rigorous discussion of reporting, he’d squint at you and look confused.

  But Griffin did become passionate when a business interest was on the line. Once, while I was co-hosting a charity concert called the Global Citizen Festival—a big, earnest, low-rent Live Aid—I interviewed the concert’s headline act, No Doubt. One of the festival’s goals that year was promoting vaccination, even as the anti-vaxxer movement in the United States was producing adherents and measles outbreaks. I asked Gwen Stefani if she vaccinated her kids, and how she felt about the anti-vaxxers. She said she supported vaccines and advised people to talk to their doctors. Mike Wallace at your door this was not. But back at Rockefeller Plaza, assembling the spot in edit, I got a call from an MSNBC producer working on the concert.

  “Stefani’s people have reviewed the transcript, and they’d like some edits,” she said.

  “Who sent them a transcript?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  In my in-box was a redlined script, with Stefani’s sound bites rearranged and trimmed to make it sound like she was ambivalent to negative on the vaccine front. I told the producer I wouldn’t air it.