Catch and Kill Read online

  Weinstein was six feet tall and big. His face was lopsided, one small eye in a habitual squint. He often wore oversize tee shirts over drooping jeans that gave him a billowing profile. The son of a diamond cutter, Weinstein was raised in Queens. As a teenager he and his younger brother, Bob, had snuck off to see The 400 Blows at an arthouse theater, hoping it was a “sex movie.” Instead, they stumbled into François Truffaut and a burgeoning love of highbrow cinema. Weinstein enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo partly because the city had multiple movie theaters. When he was eighteen, he and a friend named Corky Burger produced a column for the student newspaper, the Spectrum, featuring a character they called “Denny the Hustler,” who menaced women into submission. “‘Denny the Hustler’ did not take no for an answer,” the column read. “His whole approach employs a psychology of command, or in layman’s terms—‘Look, baby, I’m probably the best-looking and most exciting person you’ll ever want to meet—and if you refuse to dance with me, I’ll probably crack this bottle of Schmidt’s over your skull.’”

  Weinstein dropped out of college to start a business with his brother, Bob, and Burger, at first under the banner of Harvey and Corky Productions, which specialized in concert promotion. But at a Buffalo theater he acquired, Weinstein also screened the independent and foreign films he’d come to love. Eventually, he and Bob Weinstein started Miramax, named after their parents, Miriam and Max, and began acquiring small foreign films. Weinstein turned out to have a flair for making the movies into events. They received awards, like the surprise Palme d’Or win at Cannes for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. In the early nineties, Disney acquired Miramax. Weinstein spent a decade as the goose that laid egg after golden egg. And in the 2000s, when the relationship with Disney faltered and the brothers started a new enterprise, the Weinstein Company, they quickly raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. Weinstein hadn’t quite recaptured his glory days, but did win back-to-back Best Picture Oscars for The King’s Speech in 2010 and The Artist in 2011. Over the course of his ascent, he married his assistant, got a divorce, and later wed an aspiring actress he’d begun casting in small roles.

  Weinstein was famous for his bullying, even threatening, style of doing business. He was deimatic, capable of expanding to frighten, like a blowfish inflating itself. He’d draw up to rivals or underlings, nose-to-nose, red-faced. “I was sitting at my desk one day and thought we were hit by an earthquake,” Donna Gigliotti, who shared an Oscar with Weinstein for producing Shakespeare in Love, once told a reporter. “The wall just shook. I stood up. I learned that he had flung a marble ashtray at the wall.” And then there were stories, mostly whispers, of a darker kind of violence against women, and of efforts to keep his victims quiet. Every few years, a reporter, alerted to the rumors, would sniff around, to see if the smoke might lead to fire.

  For Weinstein, the months before the 2016 presidential election looked like business as usual. There he was, at a cocktail party for William J. Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner. There he was, laughing with Jay-Z, announcing a film and television deal with the rapper. And there he was, deepening his long-standing ties to the Democratic Party politicians for whom he had long been a major fund-raiser.

  All year, he’d been part of the brain trust around Hillary Clinton. “I’m probably telling you what you know already, but that needs to be silenced,” he emailed Clinton’s staff, about messaging from Bernie Sanders’s competing campaign to Latino and African American voters. “This article gives you everything I discussed with you yesterday,” he said in another message, sending a column critical of Sanders and pressing for negative campaigning. “About to forward some creative. Took your idea and ran,” Clinton’s campaign manager responded. By the end of the year, Weinstein had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton.

  A few days after McGowan’s tweets that October, Weinstein was at the St. James Theatre in New York City for a lavish fund-raiser he’d co-produced for Clinton, which put a further $2 million in her campaign’s coffers. The musician Sara Bareilles sat bathed in purple light and sang: “your history of silence won’t do you any good / Did you think it would? / Let your words be anything but empty / Why don’t you tell them the truth?”—which seems too on the nose to be true, but that’s what happened.

  Weinstein’s influence had dwindled somewhat in the preceding years, but it was still sufficient to sustain public embrace from the elites. As the latest awards season kicked off that fall, a Hollywood Reporter movie critic, Stephen Galloway, ran an article headlined “Harvey Weinstein, the Comeback Kid,” with the subhead, “There are a lot of reasons to root for him, especially now.”

  Around the same time, Weinstein sent an email to his lawyers, including David Boies, the high-profile attorney who had represented Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies had represented Weinstein for years. He was in his late seventies by then, still trim, with a face that had creased, with age, into something kind and approachable. “The Black Cube Group from Israel contacted me through Ehud Barak,” Weinstein wrote. “They r strategists and say your firm have used them. Gmail me when u get a chance.”

  Barak was the former prime minister of Israel and chief of the General Staff of the Israeli military. Black Cube, the enterprise he’d recommended to Weinstein, was run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. It had branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, and offered its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.

  Later that month, Boies’s firm and Black Cube signed a confidential contract, and Boies’s colleagues wired 100,000 U.S. dollars for an initial period of work. In the documents around the assignment, Weinstein’s identity was often concealed. He was referred to as “the end client” or “Mr. X.” Naming Weinstein, an operative from Black Cube wrote, “will make him extremely angry.”

  Weinstein seemed excited about the work. During a meeting in late November, he pressed Black Cube to keep going. More money was wired, and the agency put in motion aggressive operations referred to as “Phase 2A” and “Phase 2B.”

  Soon after, a reporter named Ben Wallace got a call from a number he didn’t recognize, with a UK country code. Wallace was in his late forties, and wore narrow, professorial glasses. He had published, a few years earlier, The Billionaire’s Vinegar, a history of the world’s most expensive bottle of wine. More recently, he’d been writing for New York magazine, where he’d spent the preceding weeks talking to people about the rumors swirling around Weinstein.

  “You can call me Anna,” said the voice on the other end of the line, in a refined European accent. After graduating from college, Wallace had lived in the Czech Republic and Hungary for a few years. He had a good ear for accents, but he couldn’t quite place this one. He guessed she might be German.

  “I received your number through a friend,” the woman continued, explaining that she knew he was working on a story about the entertainment industry. Wallace tried to think of what friend could have made such an introduction. Not many people knew about his assignment.

  “I might have something that might be of importance for you,” she continued. When Wallace pressed her for more information, she was coy. The information she had was sensitive, she said. She needed to see him. He hesitated for a moment. Then he thought, What’s the harm? He was looking for a break in the story. Maybe she’d be it.

  The following Monday morning, Wallace sat in a coffee shop in SoHo and tried to get a read on the mystery woman. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, with long blond hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a Roman nose. She wore Converse Chucks and gold jewelry. Anna said she wasn’t comfortable giving her real name yet. Frightened, she was grappling with whether to come forward. Wallace had been picking up on this theme in his exchanges with other sources. He told he
r she could take her time.

  For their next meeting, not long after, she chose a hotel bar in the same neighborhood. When Wallace arrived, she smiled at him invitingly, even seductively. She had already ordered a glass of wine. “I won’t bite,” she said, patting the seat next to her. “Come sit next to me.” Wallace said he had a cold and ordered tea. If they were going to work together, he told her, he needed to know more. At this, Anna broke down, her face twisting in anguish. She seemed to hold back tears as she began to describe her experiences with Weinstein. That she’d gone through something intimate and upsetting was clear, but she was cagey about details. She wanted to learn more before she answered all of Wallace’s questions. She asked what had motivated him to take on the assignment and what kind of impact he sought. As he replied, Anna leaned in, conspicuously extending her wrist toward him.

  For Wallace, working on the story was becoming a strange, charged experience. There was a level of noise, of keen outside interest, to which he was unaccustomed. He was hearing from other journalists, even: Seth Freedman, an Englishman who’d written for the Guardian, got in touch soon after, suggesting he’d heard the rumors about what Wallace was working on and wanted to help.

  CHAPTER 3:

  DIRT

  In the first week of November 2016, just before the election, Dylan Howard, editor in chief of the National Enquirer, issued an unusual order to a member of his staff. “I need to get everything out of the safe,” he said. “And then we need to get a shredder down there.” Howard was from southeastern Australia. He had a troll-doll tuft of ginger hair over a round face, and wore Coke-bottle glasses and loud ties. That day, he appeared to be in a panic. The Wall Street Journal had just called the Enquirer for comment about a story involving Howard and David Pecker, the CEO of the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc. The story alleged that AMI had taken on a sensitive assignment at Donald Trump’s behest, chasing a lead with the objective not of publishing it, but of making it go away.

  The staffer opened the safe, removed a set of documents, and tried to wrest it shut. Later, reporters would discuss the safe like it was the warehouse where they stored the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, but it was small and cheap and old. It sat in an office that had belonged, for years, to the magazine’s veteran executive editor, Barry Levine. It had a tendency to get jammed.

  It took several tries and a FaceTime video call to the staffer’s significant other for advice to get the safe properly closed. Later that day, one employee said, a disposal crew collected and carried away a larger than customary volume of refuse. A Trump-related document from the safe, along with others in the Enquirer’s possession, had been shredded.

  In June 2016, Howard had compiled a list of the dirt about Trump accumulated in AMI’s archives, dating back decades. After the election, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen requested all the tabloid empire’s materials about the new president. There was an internal debate: some were starting to realize that surrendering it all would create a legally problematic paper trail, and resisted. Nevertheless, Howard and senior staff ordered the reporting material that wasn’t already in the small safe exhumed from storage bins in Florida and sent to AMI headquarters. When the reporting material arrived, it was placed first in the little safe and then, as the political temperature around the magazine’s relationship with the president turned white-hot, in a bigger one in the office of human resources head Daniel Rotstein. (The HR offices of the Enquirer’s parent company, one person familiar with the company cracked with mock surprise, were not, in fact, in a strip bar.) It was only later, when one of the employees who had been skeptical started getting jumpy and went to check, that they found something amiss: the list of Trump dirt didn’t match up with the physical files. Some of the material had gone missing. Howard began swearing to colleagues that nothing had ever been destroyed, an assertion he maintains to this day.

  In one sense, destroying documents would be consistent with a baseline of malfeasance that had, for years, defined the Enquirer and its parent company. “We are always at the edge of what’s legally permissible,” a senior AMI staffer told me. “It’s very exciting.” Illicitly obtaining medical records was one standard maneuver. At major hospitals, the Enquirer cultivated moles. One such mole, who had spirited the records of Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett, and others out of UCLA Medical Center, ultimately pleaded guilty to a felony charge.

  AMI routinely engaged in what employee after employee called “blackmail”—withholding the publication of damaging information in exchange for tips or exclusives. And the employees whispered about an even darker side of AMI’s operations, including a network of subcontractors who were sometimes paid through creative channels to avoid scrutiny, and who sometimes relied on tactics that were hands-on and intrusive.

  In another sense, however, something new seemed to be happening in AMI’s offices in Manhattan’s Financial District. Pecker had known Donald Trump for decades. When a reporter said to Pecker, after the election, that criticism of Trump was not synonymous with criticism of AMI, he’d replied, “To me it is. The guy’s a personal friend of mine.” Over the years, the two had enjoyed an alliance, to their mutual benefit. Pecker, a graying former accountant from the Bronx with a broad mustache, got proximity to power and Trump’s many perquisites. “Pecker got to fly on his private jet,” said Maxine Page, who worked at AMI on and off from 2002 to 2012, including as an executive editor at one of the company’s websites. Howard, too, enjoyed Trump’s favors. On the eve of the 2017 inauguration, he sent excited texts to friends and colleagues, with pictures of his access to the festivities.

  The fruit of the relationship, for Trump, was more consequential. Another former editor, Jerry George, estimated that Pecker killed perhaps ten fully reported stories about Trump, and nixed many more potential leads during George’s twenty-eight years at the Enquirer.

  As Trump mounted his run for office, the alliance appeared to deepen and change. Suddenly, the Enquirer was formally endorsing Trump, and it and other AMI outlets were blaring sycophantic headlines. “DON’T MESS WITH DONALD TRUMP!” one issue of the Globe declared. “HOW TRUMP WILL WIN!” added the Enquirer. When the Enquirer tallied the “Twisted Secrets of the Candidates!,” the tabloid’s revelation about Trump was: “he has greater support and popularity than even he’s admitted to!” Screaming covers about Hillary Clinton’s supposed treachery and flagging health became a mainstay. “‘SOCIOPATH’ HILLARY CLINTON’S SECRET PSYCH FILES EXPOSED!” they howled, and “HILLARY: CORRUPT! RACIST! CRIMINAL!” The exclamation points made the headlines look like budget musical titles. A favorite subplot was Clinton’s impending death. (She miraculously defied the tabloid’s prognoses and kept right on almost-dying all the way through the election.) Not long before voters went to the polls, Howard had colleagues pull a stack of the covers for Pecker to present to Trump.

  During the campaign, Trump associates, including Michael Cohen, called Pecker and Howard. A series of covers about Trump’s competitor in the Republican primary, Ted Cruz, which chronicled a wild conspiracy theory about Cruz’s father being linked to the assassination of JFK, were planted by another Trump associate, the political consultant Roger Stone. Howard even made contact with Alex Jones, a maniacal radio personality whose conspiracy theories had helped lift Trump’s candidacy, and later appeared on Jones’s show. And sometimes, AMI staffers were told not merely to kill unflattering leads about the magazine’s favored candidate but to seek out information and lock it up tight in the company’s vaults. “This is fucking nonsense,” one of them later told me. “The operation became like Pravda.”

  The pact with Trump wasn’t the only alliance Howard and Pecker nurtured. In 2015, AMI had struck a production deal with Harvey Weinstein. Nominally, the deal empowered AMI, amid declining circulation numbers, to spin off its Radar Online website into a television show. But the relationship had another dimension. That year, Howard and Weinstein drew close. When a model went to the police with a claim that Wei
nstein had groped her, Howard told his staff to stop reporting on the matter—and then, later, explored buying the rights to the model’s story, in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement. When the actress Ashley Judd claimed a studio head had sexually harassed her, almost but not quite identifying Weinstein, AMI reporters were asked to pursue negative items about her going to rehab. After McGowan’s claim surfaced, one colleague of Howard’s remembered him saying, “I want dirt on that bitch.”

  In late 2016, the relationship deepened. In one email, Howard proudly forwarded to Weinstein the latest handiwork of one of AMI’s subcontractors: a secret recording of a woman whom the subcontractor had enticed to make statements damaging to McGowan. “I have something AMAZING,” Howard wrote. The woman had “laid into Rose pretty hard.”

  “This is the killer,” Weinstein replied. “Especially if my fingerprints r not on this.”

  “They are not,” Howard wrote. “And the conversation—between you and I—is RECORDED.” In another email, Howard sent a list of other contacts to be targeted in a similar manner. “Let’s discuss next steps on each,” he wrote.

  The National Enquirer was a tabloid sewer, a place to which much of America’s ugly gossip eventually flowed. When stories were abandoned or successfully buried at the behest of AMI’s friends in high places, they came to rest in the Enquirer’s archives, in what some staff called “kill files.” As his collaboration with Weinstein deepened, Howard had been scrutinizing this historical repository. One day that fall, colleagues recalled, he requested that a specific file be pulled, related to an anchor at a TV network.