Catch and Kill Page 4

  So I decided to interview my sister about what happened, in detail, for the first time. And I dove into the court records and any other documents I could find. By the account Dylan gave when she was seven years old and has repeated precisely ever since, Allen took her to a crawl space in our family’s home in Connecticut and penetrated her with a finger. She’d already complained to a therapist about Allen touching her inappropriately. (The therapist, hired by Allen, did not disclose the complaints until later, in court.) Immediately before the alleged assault, a babysitter had seen Allen with his face in Dylan’s lap. When a pediatrician finally did report the allegation to the authorities, Allen hired what one of his lawyers estimated to be ten or more private detectives through a network of attorneys and subcontractors. They trailed law enforcement officials, looking for evidence of drinking or gambling problems. A prosecutor in Connecticut, Frank Maco, later described a “campaign to disrupt the investigators,” and colleagues said he was rattled. Maco dropped the effort to charge Allen, attributing the decision to his desire to spare Dylan the trauma of trial, taking pains to state that he’d had “probable cause” to proceed.

  I told Min I would write an op-ed. I made no claim to be an impartial arbiter of my sister’s story—I cared about her and supported her. But I argued that her claim fell into a category of credible sexual abuse allegations that were too often ignored by both the Hollywood trade outlets and the wider news media. “That kind of silence isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous,” I wrote. “It sends a message to victims that it’s not worth the anguish of coming forward. It sends a message about who we are as a society, what we’ll overlook, who we’ll ignore, who matters and who doesn’t.” I hoped it would be my one and only statement on the matter.

  “I was asked to say something. I did,” I told McGowan, trying to get off the subject. “That’s the end of it.”

  She laughed bitterly. “There’s no end to it.”

  I wasn’t the only journalist trying to get to McGowan. Seth Freedman, the same English writer for the Guardian who’d called Ben Wallace offering to help with his reporting, had been emailing HarperCollins, the publisher of McGowan’s book. Freedman was persistent, reaching out repeatedly to express support and lobby for an interview. When he got on the phone with Lacy Lynch, a literary agent advising McGowan, he was vague about his reporting. He said he was working with a group of journalists on a story about Hollywood. He wouldn’t say whether there was a specific publication attached. But Lynch told McGowan she thought the writer was benign, and that it seemed like an interesting opportunity.

  Not long after my conversation with McGowan, she and Freedman were on the phone. He told her he was outside the farm his family owned in the English countryside, speaking quietly to avoid waking anyone. “What did you want to talk to me about?” McGowan asked.

  “We’re looking to do a snapshot of what life is like in 2016/17 for people in Hollywood,” he explained. He broached McGowan’s sharp criticism of Donald Trump, suggesting that there might be an opportunity for “a kind of spinoff piece,” about her activism. It sounded like a lot of resources were being put into his efforts. He repeatedly mentioned other, unnamed journalists who were helping him gather information.

  McGowan had seen more than her share of betrayal and abuse, and she was usually guarded. But Freedman was warm, candid, even confessional. Several times, he referenced his wife and their growing family. Slowly, McGowan warmed to him, talked about her life story, at one point cried. As she heaved off plates of armor, he grew more specific. “Obviously everything we say is off the record, but I’ve spoken to people who’ve worked at, you know, say, Miramax, who’ve told me ‘I’m NDA’d’ and they can’t talk about anything that’s happened to them but they’re desperate to say ‘X person abused me or X person made my life hell.’”

  “My book is gonna address a lot of these things,” McGowan said.

  Freedman seemed very interested in her book, and what she planned to say in it. “How can you get the publisher to publish it?” he asked, referring to her allegation.

  “I actually have a signed document,” she said. “A signed document from the time of the attack.”

  But what would the consequences be, he wondered, if she said too much? “Most people I talk to in Hollywood, they say, you know, I’m not allowed to talk about it on record,” he said.

  “Because they’re all too scared,” McGowan replied.

  “And if they do say it,” Freedman continued, “then they’ll never work again or they’ll never—” But he didn’t get to say what else. McGowan was talkative by now, on to her next point.

  One, two, three times, Freedman wondered who in the media she planned to talk to before the book, and how much she planned to tell them. “Who would your ideal platform be right now to tell that message?” he asked. “Does that mean you keep the name out of the press because you would suffer,” he said, alluding again to those consequences, “if you put the name out there and then someone came back at you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel,” McGowan said.

  Freedman sounded full of empathy, an ally. “So,” he asked, “what would make you kind of call it quits?”

  CHAPTER 6:

  CONTINENTAL

  “They have been fighting for years on this,” I said. A week after my call with McGowan, I sat at the anchor’s table in Studio 1A, Today show cameras rolling. I’d just wrapped a segment on the battle between safety advocates and the trucking industry over whether to require side guards on tractor-trailers, to stop cars from slipping under them. The safety advocates said the move would save lives. The lobbyists said it would be too expensive. “Ronan, great job,” Matt Lauer said, and turned briskly to the next segment. “Really strong,” he added, as he filed off set during the next commercial break, production assistants swarming, handing him his coat, gloves, script pages. “And good engagement afterwards, got people talking.”

  “Thanks,” I said. He stepped closer.

  “Hey, how are those other stories coming along?”

  I wasn’t sure which ones he meant. “There’s the big one on the contaminated California farmlands. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. There was a beat of silence.

  “And I’ll be on around the Oscars for the Hollywood one I mentioned,” I tried, tentative.

  He frowned a little. Then his smile snapped back on. “Great,” he said, clapping me on the back. Over his shoulder as he walked toward the exit, he added: “Anything you need, you come to me, okay?”

  I watched him step into the cold air of the plaza, a burst of shrieks from the fans sounding as he passed through the revolving door.

  It was early February 2017. McHugh and I were ensconced in meetings with the network’s legal and standards departments as they scrutinized every element of the upcoming Hollywood stories. Editorial oversight fell to an NBC veteran named Richard Greenberg, who had recently been appointed interim head of the network’s investigative unit. Greenberg wore crumpled tweeds and reading glasses. He had spent nearly seventeen years at NBC, ten of them as a Dateline producer, several more vetting pieces for the standards department. He was quiet, bureaucratic. But he also professed strong moral convictions. In his Dateline producer’s blog, he called sexual abusers “perverts” and “monsters.” After working with Chris Hansen of To Catch a Predator on a story in a Cambodian brothel, Greenberg wrote: “often, when I lie awake in bed at night, I am haunted by the faces of the girls we saw who were not rescued and who are still being violated.” The lawyer vetting the series was a Harvard Law alumnus named Steve Chung, who was studiously serious.

  That week in February, McHugh and I sat with Greenberg in his office near the fourth-floor newsroom and outlined our shooting schedule for the following week, including some interviews to be conducted with the subjects obscured in shadow, as was frequent practice in my investigative work and so many Dateline stories Greenberg had worked on. He nodded app
rovingly. “And you’ve talked all this through with Chung?” he asked. I had. Greenberg then swiveled to his computer monitor and pulled up a browser. “I just want to double-check—”

  He typed in both of my parents’ names and Weinstein’s. “Good idea,” I said. “Hadn’t thought of that.” The results were what we’d expected: like most studio heads, Weinstein had touched movies both of my parents worked on. He’d distributed several Woody Allen movies in the nineties, and, more recently, a few my mother appeared in during the 2000s. Movie distribution tends to be an arm’s length business: I’d never heard Weinstein’s name from either of them.

  “Looks good,” Greenberg said, after scrolling through several articles. “Just double-checking to make sure there’s no secret axe to grind there. Clearly not.”

  “Other than caring about the issue, no,” I said. I’d liked Weinstein the one time I’d met him, at an event hosted by the CBS News anchor Charlie Rose.

  A few days later, I sat in a Santa Monica hotel room. Dennis Rice, a veteran marketing executive, perspired heavily. Studio lights with cube-shaped shades threw him into shadow. Initially, we had planned only to discuss the story on rigged awards campaigns. Then I’d asked him about his time as Harvey Weinstein’s president of marketing at Miramax in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and he’d grown nervous. “You have no idea how tough this gets for me if I say anything,” he told me. But Rice sensed there was an opportunity to help with something important, and agreed to come back for the follow-on interview in front of the harsh lights.

  “There was money available in the event that there was an indiscretion that needed to be taken care of,” he said of his time at Miramax.

  “What kinds of indiscretions?” I asked.

  “Bullying, physical abuse, sexual harassment.”

  He said he’d witnessed, firsthand, his boss “inappropriately touching” young women, and regretted not saying more. “They were paid off,” he said of the women. “They were encouraged to not make this a big deal, otherwise their career may end.” He said he knew of specific cases of retaliation and, when the cameras stopped rolling, glanced around and said, “Find Rosanna Arquette.” The actress had come to prominence with her leading role in Desperately Seeking Susan. In Pulp Fiction, which Weinstein distributed, she’d had a small but memorable part as the heavily pierced wife of a drug dealer. “I don’t know,” Rice said, wiping the accumulated sweat from his forehead. “Maybe she’ll talk.”

  Reviewing the footage later, I rewound to an exchange about the culture around Weinstein and hit Play again.

  “And for all of the people around this man who saw this sort of thing going on,” I asked, “did anyone speak up against it?”

  “No,” he said.

  That evening and in the days that followed, I worked the phones. I was assembling a growing list of women, often actresses and models but sometimes producers or assistants, who were rumored to have voiced complaints about Weinstein. Certain names kept recurring, like McGowan’s, and that of an Italian actress and director, Asia Argento.

  I called back Nickerson, the producer who’d been hesitant to talk about Weinstein before.

  “I’m so tired of what happens to women in this industry. I want to help, I do,” she said. “I saw things. And then they paid me off and I signed a piece of paper.”

  “What did you see?”

  A pause. “He couldn’t control himself. It’s who he is. He’s a predator.”

  “And you can speak to having witnessed that?”

  “Yes.”

  She agreed to go on camera, too. Sitting in shadow at the Encino estate where she was staying, she independently recalled a pattern of predation eerily similar to the one described by Rice.

  “I think that happened all the time, the groping,” she said in the interview. “This wasn’t a one-off. This wasn’t a period of time. This was ongoing predatorial behavior towards women—whether they consented or not.” She said that it was almost ludicrously embedded in the corporate culture; that there was essentially a pimp on company payroll with only the thinnest job description to cover for his role procuring women for their boss.

  “Was it common knowledge that he was being, to use a term you used, ‘predatory’ around women?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Everybody knew.”

  “FYI, that story is evolving into a pretty serious reporting job on HW,” I texted Oppenheim. “Both execs are naming him on cam, but one is asking me not to show actual footage of him saying the name,” I wrote, referring to Rice. “People are pretty freaked out about reprisals.” Oppenheim wrote back: “I can imagine.”

  The more people I called, the more Rice and Nickerson’s claims were borne out. I was also looking for defenses of Weinstein. But those I found rang hollow. Nickerson had named a producer whom she believed to be a victim. I finally tracked her down in Australia, where she’d gone to start a new life. When she told me that she had nothing to say about Weinstein, there was strain and sadness in her voice that suggested I’d placed her in a difficult situation.

  A conversation with Donna Gigliotti, the Shakespeare in Love producer, went much the same way.

  “I mean, have I heard things? Maybe. But have I seen things?” she asked.

  “What did you hear?”

  An exasperated sigh, as if the question were ludicrous.

  “The man is not a saint. Trust me, there is no love lost between us. But he isn’t guilty of anything worse than what a million other men in this business do.”

  “Are you saying there’s not a story there?”

  “I’m saying,” Gigliotti said, “that your time is better spent elsewhere. Others have looked at this, you know. They all come up empty.”

  I did not know. But soon enough I was encountering references to other outlets that had circled the story. Two years earlier, a New York magazine writer, Jennifer Senior, had tweeted: “At some pt, all the women who’ve been afraid to speak out abt Harvey Weinstein are gonna have to hold hands and jump.” And then later: “It’s a despicable open secret.” The comments had generated a few blog items, then faded away. I sent her a message asking to talk. “I wasn’t reporting on it,” she told me. “David Carr, my office spouse when he was at NYMag, did a feature about him and came back with story after story about what a pig he was.” Carr, the essayist and media reporter, who died in 2015, had recounted to Senior anecdotes about Weinstein flashing and groping women, but never got enough to render them publishable. “Lots of people have been trying to get this story,” Senior told me, and wished me luck, like she was encouraging Don Quixote about a windmill.

  I called other people close to Carr who added something else: he had become paranoid while working on the story. His widow, Jill Rooney Carr, told me that her husband believed that he was being surveilled, though he didn’t know by whom. “He thought he was being followed,” she recalled. Other than that, Carr appeared to have taken his secrets to the grave.

  After the interviews with Rice and Nickerson, I met with a friend who worked as an assistant to a prominent NBCUniversal executive and who passed me contact information for another round of potential sources. “My question is,” she texted, “would Today run something like this? Seems kind of heavy for them.”

  “Noah, the new head of the show,” I wrote back, “he’ll champion it.”

  The next week, on the morning of February 14, Igor Ostrovskiy, the pudgy Ukrainian who’d met with Roman Khaykin, the bald Russian, at Nargis Cafe, sat in a hotel lobby in Midtown Manhattan. Khaykin had dispatched him there, on one of the jobs for the mysterious new client. Ostrovskiy pretended to be engrossed in his phone, while discreetly capturing video of a graying middle-aged man in a trench coat shaking hands with a tall, dark man in a suit. Then he followed the two men to the hotel restaurant and sat at a table nearby.

  The last few days had been busy with these assignments in fancy hotel lobbies and restaurants, surveilling meetings between operatives sent by the myster
ious client and what appeared to be unsuspecting marks. Ostrovskiy’s task was “countersurveillance”: he was supposed to make sure the client’s operatives weren’t followed.

  That day in the hotel restaurant, Ostrovskiy texted a picture of the proceedings to Khaykin, then ordered a continental breakfast. The food was a perk of the assignment. “Enjoy yourself,” his boss had said. “Have a nice meal.” As juice and rolls arrived, Ostrovskiy strained to hear the conversation at the next table. The men had accents he couldn’t quite place. Eastern European, maybe. He overheard snatches of dialogue about far-flung locations: Cyprus; a bank in Luxembourg; something about men in Russia.

  Mostly, Ostrovskiy spent his days hunting collectors of worker’s compensation with fake limps or trying to catch straying spouses violating their prenuptial agreements. The suited operatives involved in these new assignments, some of whom seemed to have a military bearing, were something else. He swiped through the footage of the men and wondered who it was he was watching, and for whom.

  CHAPTER 7:

  PHANTOMS

  I was in a car, threading my way through West Hollywood toward my next shoot, when the announcement came over the wires: Noah Oppenheim had been promoted to president of NBC News. He was taking on a slate of make-or-break projects alongside his boss, Andy Lack, who oversaw both NBC News and MSNBC. Their first order of business: launching Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, in a new role at NBC. Several positive profiles highlighted Oppenheim’s Ivy League luster and screenwriting career and rapid ascent through the cutthroat world of television. Oppenheim’s and Lack’s predecessors had both been women. Deborah Turness, who preceded Oppenheim, was described in lightly sexist profiles as having “rock-chick swagger,” which as far as I could tell just meant she sometimes chose to wear pants. Patricia Fili-Krushel, whom Lack replaced, was an executive with a background in human resources and daytime television. The chain of command was now all male, all white: Noah Oppenheim, and above him Andy Lack, and above him Steve Burke, the CEO of NBCUniversal, and Brian Roberts, the CEO of its parent company, Comcast. “I am pretty, pretty, pretty into this announcement. Congrats, my friend!” I texted Oppenheim, sucking up a little but also sincerely meaning it. “Hah—thanks,” he wrote back.