Catch and Kill Page 5

  I flicked through my contacts, hovered over my sister Dylan’s name, then called her for the first time in months. “I’m headed into an interview,” I told her. “It’s with a well-known actress. She’s accusing a very powerful person of a very serious crime.”

  In family photographs, Dylan, two and a half years my senior, often sheltered behind me: there we were, in Huggies on the ugly brown couch in the living room; before my first kindergarten play, her in a rabbit onesie, knuckles mid-noogie, grinding into my head; in front of various tourist attractions, laughing, usually hugging.

  I was surprised she’d picked up. She usually didn’t keep her cell on her. In frank moments, she’d confessed that ringing phones made her heart race. Men’s voices on the other end of the line, especially, were a challenge. She’d never held a job that involved lots of phone calls. Dylan was a talented writer and visual artist. Her work was rooted in worlds as far from this one as she could manage. As kids, we’d invented an elaborate fantasy kingdom, populated with pewter figurines of dragons and fairies. Fantasy remained her escape. She wrote hundreds of pages of minutely described fiction and painted faraway landscapes. These sat in drawers. When I suggested that she build a portfolio or submit a manuscript, she’d freeze, get defensive. I didn’t understand, she’d say.

  On the phone that day in February, she paused. “And you want my advice?” she asked, eventually. Her allegation, and the questions that swirled between us as to whether I’d done enough, soon enough, to acknowledge it, had introduced a space between us that hadn’t been there in the childhood photos.

  “Yes, I want your advice,” I said.

  “Well, this is the worst part. The considering. The waiting for the story. But once you put your voice out there, it gets a lot easier.” She sighed. “Just tell her to hang tough. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid.” I thanked her. Another pause. “If you get this,” she said, “don’t let it go, okay?”

  Rose McGowan lived in the quintessential movie star’s house: a stack of tan midcentury modern boxes tucked into a grove of cypress trees high in the Hollywood Hills. Outside, there was a wide terrace with a hot tub overlooking a sweep of Los Angeles. Inside, it was staged as if for resale: no family photos, just art. By the front door there was a salvaged neon sign in the shape of a bowler hat that read “THE DERBY: LADIES ENTRANCE.” Just beyond, atop a set of stairs to the living room, there was a painting of a woman in a cage, engulfed in light. By a white brick fireplace in the living room, a bronze model of McGowan’s character from Planet Terror aimed its machine-gun leg.

  The woman who sat opposite me was not the one I’d met seven years before. McGowan looked tired, a hard tension across her face. She wore a loose beige sweater and little makeup. Her head was shaved, military-style. She’d mostly abandoned acting in favor of music, sometimes accompanied by surreal performance-art footage of herself. She’d tried her hand at directing, with a short film, Dawn, that screened at Sundance in 2014. In the film, a repressed teenage girl circa 1961 is lured by two young men into a secluded area, brained with a rock, then shot dead.

  McGowan had a rough childhood. She’d grown up in the Children of God cult in the Italian countryside, where women had been harsh and men brutal—one, she later told me, sliced a wart off her finger, without warning, at age four, leaving her stunned and bleeding. For a period of time, as a teenager, she was homeless. When she made it in Hollywood, she thought she had put the risk of exploitation behind her. She told me that shortly before Weinstein assaulted her, during the Sundance Film Festival in 1997, she’d turned to a camera crew following her and said, “I think my life is finally getting easier.”

  In the living room, as cameras rolled, she described how her business manager set the meeting where the alleged assault happened and how it had been abruptly moved from a hotel restaurant to a hotel suite. She recalled the routine first hour with the man she then considered only her boss, and his praise for her performance in one film he’d produced, Scream, and in another she was still working on, Phantoms. Then she relived the part that still visibly shook her. “On the way out, it turned into not a meeting,” she said. “It all happens very fast and very slow. I think any survivor can tell you that… all of a sudden, your life is like ninety degrees in the other direction. It’s—it’s a shock to the system. And your brain is trying to keep up with what’s going on. All of a sudden, you have no clothes on.” McGowan tried to stay composed. “I started to cry. And I didn’t know what was happening,” she recalled. “And I’m very small. This person’s very big. So do that math.”

  “Was this a sexual assault?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “Was this a rape?”

  “Yes.”

  McGowan said she contacted a criminal attorney and considered pressing charges. The attorney told her to shut up. “I’d done a sex scene,” she remembered the lawyer pointing out. “No one was ever gonna believe me.” McGowan decided not to press charges, and brokered a financial settlement instead, signing away her right to sue Weinstein. “That was very painful,” she said. “I thought $100,000 was a lot of money at the time because I was a kid.” She considered it, on his part, “an admission of guilt.”

  McGowan described a system—of assistants and managers and industry power brokers—that she furiously accused of complicity. She said staffers averted their eyes as she walked into the meeting, and out of it. “They wouldn’t look at me,” she said. “They looked down, these men. They wouldn’t look at me in the eyes.” And she remembered her costar in Phantoms, Ben Affleck, seeing her visibly distraught immediately after the incident, and hearing where she’d just come from, and replying, “God damn it, I told him to stop doing this.”

  McGowan believed she’d been “blacklisted” after the incident. “I barely worked in movies ever again. And I was on a great trajectory. And then when I did do another movie—it got sold to him for distribution,” she said, referring to Planet Terror.

  For any survivor, memories haunt. For those with high-profile perpetrators, there’s an added quality of inescapability. “I would open the newspaper,” McGowan told me. “And there’s Gwyneth Paltrow giving him [an] award.” He was “omnipresent.” And then there were the red carpets and press junkets where she’d have to pose with him, smiling. “I just left my body again,” she said. “I pasted the smile on my face.” The first time she saw him again after the alleged assault, she threw up in a trash can.

  On camera, McGowan wasn’t yet saying Weinstein’s name. She was steeling herself, getting ready. But she referred to him during the interview again and again, urging viewers to “connect the dots.”

  “Did Harvey Weinstein rape you?” I asked. The room went pin-drop silent. McGowan paused.

  “I’ve never liked that name,” she said. “I have a hard time saying it.”

  Off camera, she’d already used his name with me. Partly, she’d said, her concern was making sure she had a news organization that would go all the way with the story if she exposed herself to legal jeopardy. I was frank with her: this would be a delicate legal process at NBC. I’d need to be armed with every detail she could give me.

  “Have the lawyers watch this,” she said.

  “Oh, they will be,” I said, with a grim laugh.

  “Watch it,” she said, looking into the camera, tears in her eyes. “Not just read it. And I hope they’re brave, too. Because I tell you what, it’s happened to their daughter, their mother, their sister.”

  CHAPTER 8:

  GUN

  “The Rose interview is shocking,” I texted Oppenheim.

  “Wow,” he replied.

  “Felt like a bomb going off. Plus two Miramax execs on cam saying they saw pattern of sexual harassment. This’ll be fun for legal.”

  “Geez,” he wrote. “It sure will be.”

  As we finished our shooting for the Hollywood stories, McHugh and I traded calls with Greenberg, the head of the investigative unit, and Chung, the attorney. B
y then, I’d spoken to two people on McGowan’s management team with whom she’d raised her complaint immediately after the meeting with Weinstein. If she was lying, she’d been doing so since that day in 1997.

  “She does sound a little… flighty,” Greenberg said.

  McHugh and I were back in the same hotel in Santa Monica, on a sunny day, preparing to interview a Chinese filmmaker. “Well, that’s why we line up a lot of corroboration,” I told Greenberg. “And she said she’ll give us the contract she has with Weinstein—”

  “Careful about that,” Greenberg said.

  “What do you mean?” McHugh asked.

  “I don’t know that we can be interfering with contracts,” Greenberg said. “Let’s just be careful if those are being handed over.”

  McHugh looked frustrated. “We should run this,” he said. “It’s explosive. It’s news.”

  “I just don’t see it being ready in time for this series,” Greenberg replied. The stories were due to run a week later, just before the Oscars.

  “I think I can get other women to talk in time for air,” I said.

  “Give it the time it needs,” Greenberg said. “The other stories can go now, and you can expand the reporting here.” I got along well with the network’s legal and standards staff. I defended my stories in a, shall we say, caffeinated way. But I was a lawyer myself, and I admired the old-fashioned care that went into producing a piece for programs like Nightly News. NBC was a serious place that valued the truth, an institution that had leapt from radio, to broadcast, to cable, to the internet—that mattered when it was one of three networks half a century ago and, in our fractured and fractious era, mattered still. As long as we were using the time to strengthen the reporting, I didn’t mind a delay.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll hold it.”

  The reporting expanded like an inkblot. The day after the shoot with McGowan, we were at the offices of the Hollywood Reporter for an interview with their journalist on the awards beat, Scott Feinberg. Harvey Weinstein was inescapable in that conversation, too: he had essentially invented the modern Oscar campaign. Weinstein ran his campaigns like guerrilla wars. A Miramax publicist once ghostwrote an op-ed praising the company’s movie Gangs of New York and passed it off as the work of Robert Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, who was, at the time, eighty-eight. Weinstein orchestrated an elaborate smear campaign against rival film A Beautiful Mind, planting press items claiming the protagonist, mathematician John Nash, was gay (and, when that didn’t work, that he was anti-Semitic). When Pulp Fiction lost a Best Picture Oscar to Forrest Gump, he’d publicly threatened to arrive on director Robert Zemeckis’s lawn and “get medieval.”

  Before leaving the Hollywood Reporter, I met its new editor, Matt Belloni. I’d heard rumors that Janice Min, his predecessor who persuaded me to write the op-ed about the need for tougher coverage of sexual assault allegations, had pursued the Weinstein allegations for years. When I asked whether the outlet had come up with anything, Belloni shook his head. “No one will talk.”

  But he did have ideas about industry figures who might know of other women with allegations. He suggested I call Gavin Polone, the former agent and manager—a “Ferrari-driving tenpercenter,” as Variety had described him. He’d since become a successful producer, and developed a reputation as a firebrand. In 2014, he’d written a column for the Hollywood Reporter entitled “Bill Cosby and Hollywood’s Culture of Payoffs, Rape and Secrecy.” In it, he’d referenced a set of allegations against an unnamed studio head who “used his power and money to keep it all quiet.” He accused journalists of avoiding the story because they were “afraid of being sued and more afraid of losing advertising.” No one, it seemed, had taken him up on the challenge.

  Polone had appeared as an occasional commentator on my MSNBC show. By the end of the day, I was on the phone with him. “It needs to be exposed,” he told me. He’d heard about a number of allegations against Weinstein. Some he’d heard directly from accusers, others he’d become aware of secondhand. “The most egregious example, the holy grail of this story, is Annabella Sciorra,” he said. “This wasn’t harassment. It was rape.” I asked him to see if the women who’d told their stories to him would talk to me. He promised he would.

  “One more thing,” he said, after I thanked him for his time. “Watch your back. This guy, the people protecting him. They’ve got a lot at stake.”

  “I’m being careful.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m saying be ready, in case. I’m saying get a gun.”

  I laughed. He didn’t.

  Sources were scared. Many refused to talk. But others seemed willing. I reached the agent of an English actress who McGowan and others had suggested might have a complaint. “She told me the story in detail, as soon as we started working together,” the agent told me. “He took out his penis and chased her around a desk during the shoot. He jumped on top of her, he pinned her down, but she got away.” I asked if the actress would talk. “She was very open about it at the time,” the agent replied. “I don’t see why not.” A day later, he called back with her phone number and email address: she’d be happy to discuss sitting for an interview.

  An agent who worked with Rosanna Arquette appeared to know what the request was about immediately. “Hard topic for her,” that agent said. “But I know she cares about the issue. I’m sure she’ll talk.”

  I had reached Annabella Sciorra on Twitter. I told her it was about something sensitive. She seemed apprehensive, a little guarded. But we set a time for a call.

  I was also chasing the only allegation against Weinstein that had entered the criminal justice system. In March 2015, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a Filipina-Italian model and onetime finalist in the Miss Italy pageant, had emerged from a meeting with Weinstein at his Tribeca offices and gone straight to the police to claim she’d been groped. New York law enforcement had brought Weinstein in for questioning. The tabloids set about fevered coverage.

  Then something curious happened: the items about Weinstein were replaced with derogatory ones about Gutierrez. The tabloids reported that, in 2010, when Gutierrez was a young contestant in the Miss Italy pageant, she had attended a “Bunga Bunga” party hosted by Silvio Berlusconi, who was then the Italian prime minister, where he was accused of having sex with prostitutes. The items claimed that Gutierrez herself was a hooker, with wealthy sugar daddies back in Italy. The day after the alleged incident, she’d attended Finding Neverland, a Broadway musical Weinstein produced, the Daily Mail observed. Later, she’d demanded a movie role, Page Six reported. Gutierrez said she’d never been a prostitute, that she’d been brought to Berlusconi’s party as a professional obligation and extricated herself as soon as its seedier dimensions became apparent, and that she’d made no demand for a movie role. But her denials were printed as an afterthought, or not at all. The pictures of Gutierrez shifted: there she was, day after day, in lingerie and bikinis. Increasingly, the tabloids seemed to suggest that she was the predator, ensnaring Weinstein with her feminine wiles. And then, all at once, the charges went away. So did Ambra Gutierrez.

  But the name of a lawyer who represented Gutierrez had made it into public reports, and lawyers have phones. “I’m not at liberty to talk about that,” he told me. “Okay,” I said, having paid just enough attention in law school and more than enough in real life to know an allusion to a nondisclosure agreement when I ran into one. “But can you pass on a message?”

  Gutierrez texted almost immediately. “Hello, my lawyer said you wanted to contact me. Just wanted to ask about what,” she wrote.

  “I’m a reporter with NBC News, and this is for a Today show story I am working on. I think it’s probably easiest to talk through on the phone, if you’re comfortable with that,” I replied.

  “Could you be a little more precise on what is about ‘I am working on’?” she wrote.

  Ambra Gutierrez, it was immediately apparent, was no fool.

  “It involves a claim being m
ade by another individual—and potentially several of them—that may have some similarities to the one you brought, in the NYPD investigation in 2015. It could be a great service to others with claims if I could talk to you.”

  She agreed to meet the next day.

  Before meeting with Gutierrez, I started methodically calling people who’d been involved in the case. One of my contacts in the district attorney’s office called to say staff there had found Gutierrez credible. “There were… certain things presented about her past,” the contact said.

  “What kind of things?”

  “I can’t get into that. But none of it made anyone here think she was lying. And I heard we had some evidence.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Can you look into it?”

  “Sure. And I’ll just hand in my resignation right after.”

  CHAPTER 9:

  MINIONS

  When I arrived at Gramercy Tavern, Gutierrez was already sitting in a back corner, ramrod straight and perfectly still. “I’m always early,” she said. That wasn’t the half of it. She was, I came to find, a formidably organized and strategic person. Gutierrez was born in Turin, Italy. She’d grown up watching her Italian father, whom she described as a “Dr. Jekyll–and–Mr. Hyde person,” beat her Filipina mother. When Gutierrez tried to intervene, she was beaten as well. As an adolescent, she became the caretaker, supporting her mother and distracting her younger brother from the violence. She had an exaggerated beauty, like an anime character: vanishingly slender with improbably large eyes. That day at the restaurant, she seemed nervous. “I want to help,” she said, a tremor in her Italian accent. “It’s just I’m in difficult situation.” It was only when I said that another woman had gone on camera with a complaint about Weinstein, and that still more were considering doing so, that she began to tell her story.