Catch and Kill Page 7

  Earlier in the day, she’d sent me a picture of an ancient MacBook and explained that she’d lost the charging cable. I had found a cable of the right vintage and, as we talked, the laptop charged on a nearby chair. I kept glancing over at it nervously. Finally I asked, as nonchalantly as possible, if she thought it had enough juice. The restaurant was noisy, so we left and walked around the corner to a Barnes & Noble. She opened the laptop again. Glancing from one side to the other, she navigated through a series of subfolders, past modeling photos and innocuous-looking Word documents.

  “Before the order to give all my phone, my computer,” she said, as she delved deeper into her hard drive, “I sent recording to myself, to all my emails.” She’d agreed to give Kroll the passwords to all those accounts, and knew they’d find any she didn’t disclose. But, in order to buy herself a brief window of opportunity, she’d told them she couldn’t recall one password. Then, as Kroll wiped the other accounts, one by one, she’d logged into the one for which she was supposedly recovering the password, forwarded the audio to a temporary “burner” email, then cleared her sent mail. Finally, she downloaded the files to this old laptop, which she stuffed in the back of a closet. “I was not sure it works,” she said. “It was like—” She made a gasping noise and held her breath, as if bracing for the worst. But Kroll didn’t come knocking, and the laptop collected dust, uncharged, for two years.

  On the screen in front of her, Gutierrez came to a folder labeled “Mama.” Inside were audio files titled Mama1, Mama2, and Mama3: the recordings she’d had to frantically start each time her phone issued a push alert about its dwindling battery life during the police sting. She passed me a pair of headphones, and I listened. It was all there: the promises of career advancement, the list of other actresses he had helped, the encounter with the officer Weinstein thought was a TMZ photographer. In the recording, Gutierrez’s panic was palpable. “I don’t want to,” she said, standing in the hallway outside his room, refusing to go farther as Weinstein’s tone turned menacing. “I want to leave,” she added. “I want to go downstairs.” At one point, she asked him why he had groped her breasts the day before.

  “Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in,” Weinstein replied. “I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”

  “You’re used to that?” Gutierrez asked, incredulous.

  “Yes,” Weinstein said. He added, “I won’t do it again.”

  After almost two minutes of back-and-forth in the hallway, he finally agreed to return to the bar.

  Weinstein wheedled and menaced and bullied and didn’t take no for an answer. But more than that, it was a smoking gun. It was inarguable. There he was, admitting not just to a crime but to a pattern. “I’m used to that.”

  “Ambra,” I said, slipping off the headphones. “We need to make this public.”

  I produced a USB drive from my pocket and slid it toward her across the countertop.

  “I can’t tell you what to do,” I said. “The decision is yours.”

  “I know that,” she replied. She closed her eyes, seemed to sway for a moment. “I will,” she said. “But not yet.”

  CHAPTER 11:

  BLOOM

  The second meeting with Gutierrez made me late for drinks with a former assistant to Phil Griffin, my old boss at MSNBC. “This is the most important story I’ve ever been on,” I texted her. “If I am late it’s because I have absolutely no choice.” After journalism, drama and being late were my great passions.

  “No worries hope it’s going well,” she replied tolerantly.

  I was still apologizing when I arrived at the little French bistro where we’d agreed to meet. When I asked how Griffin was, she said it was funny I should mention it—that he’d asked after me, too.

  Griffin was the one who took a chance on me and brought me inside NBC. He was a talented producer who’d worked his way up through roles at CNN and, later, the Today show and Nightly News. At CNN, he’d focused on sports. He was passionate about baseball, and gracious about my incomprehension during his impassioned monologues about it. He talked about a lifelong dream of working for the New York Mets, and you got the sense he was only mostly joking. At the helm of MSNBC, he’d overseen the cable channel’s periods of greatest success, and survived its brutal low points. Griffin was the son of a Macy’s executive and grew up in wealthy suburbs outside New York City and Toledo. Trim and bald and excitable, he had the carefree bearing of a man who’d mostly gotten his way.

  In the two years since my show was canceled, our contact had been limited to cordial office run-ins. I wondered if the former assistant was just being polite with the comment about Griffin mentioning me, and why I’d be on his radar if he had.

  Harvey Weinstein had been calling Boies, his attorney, about Rose McGowan since shortly after she tweeted the previous fall. But it wasn’t until that spring that Weinstein mentioned NBC.

  “I’ve heard they’re doing a story,” Weinstein said. He wanted to know if Boies had heard anything. Boies said he hadn’t. Within days, Weinstein was on the phone again, repeating the question.

  By the second call with Boies, Weinstein seemed unsatisfied with the lawyer’s answers. “I know people at NBC,” Weinstein reminded Boies. “I’m gonna find out about it.”

  Weinstein had been apprehensively calling his attorneys about news outlets pursuing troublesome stories for years. But there was something different this time: he began telling people around him that he was getting information directly from NBC. Soon, he was relating claims about exactly how much the network had—and the name of the reporter who was working on the story.

  Over the following weeks, I kept meeting with Gutierrez at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. She told me she’d meet with me and Greenberg and NBC’s legal department to play them the audio and show them the contract. But she was still grappling with whether to actually hand over the evidence.

  After one of the meetings, I hesitated again before calling my sister Dylan. “So, you need my advice again,” she said, a teasing note in her voice.

  I explained the situation: a source, a tape, a contract. Everyone I spoke with was a potential informant who might relay information back to Weinstein. If I ever fully assembled the story, I’d be laying out the reporting for him and seeking comment. But for now, I was vulnerable, and warnings from sources about Weinstein’s tactics had put me on edge. “Who do I turn to on this?” I asked her. “Who do I trust?”

  She thought for a moment. “You should call Lisa Bloom.”

  Lisa Bloom was the kind of lawyer who also plays one on television, but she appeared to use the platform to defend not just her clients but also the ideal of protecting survivors of sexual violence who confronted the rich and powerful. She had written and spoken repeatedly in defense of my sister, when few others did. “You, your sister and mother have comported yourself with grace and dignity through the storm, empowering sexual abuse survivors everywhere,” she’d written to me once. “The very least I could do was to speak out about Dylan’s obvious credibility.”

  Bloom had appeared often on my show, representing accusers of Bill O’Reilly and of Bill Cosby. “Rich and powerful people get a pass. I see this every day in my own practice,” she said in one segment about Cosby. “I represent many victims of wealthy and successful predators. The first thing they do is go on the attack against the victim, try to dredge up anything from her life that they can find to embarrass her.” She’d seen how “women are smeared, or they are threatened that they will be smeared.”

  When Bloom picked up, I offered to keep our conversation off the record. She waved this away. “Please,” she said. She had a warm voice with a slight rasp. “Most of the time, I’ll want to comment, you know that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I’d appreciate your confidence, anyway.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “I know we’re not under attorney-client privilege, but as a fellow lawyer, I trust you. If I ask you about a sensitive story, do you fee
l comfortable promising not to mention it to anyone until it comes out?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  I said I was working on a story involving heavy-duty nondisclosure agreements and asked her view of their enforceability. She said the agreements usually held up: that they often stipulated financially devastating liquidated damages as a penalty for breach, and contained arbitration clauses that allowed them to be enforced secretly, rather than in court. (Curiously, Gutierrez’s otherwise draconian agreement had lacked such an arbitration clause.)

  Some entities, like Fox News, had of late declined to enforce the nondisclosure agreements signed by former employees with sexual harassment complaints. Bloom said it all depended on who was doing the enforcing.

  “It would help if I knew who this was about, Ronan.” She said this very slowly.

  “And you promise I have your word this will be kept in confidence?”

  “You have my word,” she said.

  “It’s about Harvey Weinstein.”

  I was standing in my apartment, looking out at a wall of warehouse-style windows. Through one, a sliver of a ballet studio was visible. A leotard-clad back strained in and out of frame.

  “I’m going to go to him for comment if it progresses to that point,” I continued. “But in the meantime it’s important, for these women, that it not get back to his people.”

  Another pause. Then Lisa Bloom said, “I understand completely.”

  Gutierrez and McGowan had both said they needed attorneys. As a reporter, I had to maintain distance from sources’ legal cases. I’d told both that I couldn’t give legal advice or directly recommend lawyers. But I could point them to publicly available information about experts in the field. I asked Bloom for advice on attorneys with experience in cases involving nondisclosure agreements. McGowan would later reach out to one of them.

  Harvey Weinstein’s standard approach to getting people on the phone was to bark their names at the assistants stationed in the anteroom outside his office. Not long after the calls with Boies about NBC, he shouted two new names: “Get me Andy Lack, now,” he said. “And Phil Griffin.”

  When Weinstein reached Lack, the studio head and the network head exchanged brief pleasantries. But Weinstein, sounding anxious, got to the point quickly. “Hey,” he said, “your boy Ronan is doing a story on me. About the nineties and stuff.”

  My name seemed to register only dimly. Lack suggested Weinstein try Griffin, my old boss at MSNBC. To this, Weinstein launched into an argument about his innocence and the folly of the story.

  “Andy, it was the nineties. You know? Did I go out with an assistant or two that I shouldn’t have, did I sleep with one or two of them, sure.”

  Lack said nothing to this.

  “It was the nineties, Andy,” Weinstein repeated. This seemed, for Weinstein, an important point of exculpation. And then, with a note of menace: “We all did that.”

  There was a pause before Andy Lack said, “Harvey, say no more. We’ll look into it.”

  It was evening when Bloom called again. I was heading home, emerging from a subway stop. “How’s it going?!” she asked. “I was thinking. You know, I actually know David Boies a little. And—and even Harvey a little.”

  “You didn’t mention this to anyone, did you?” I asked Bloom.

  “Of course I didn’t! I’m just, you know, I had this idea I could maybe help connect you to them.”

  “Lisa, this is very sensitive, and very early. I promise you, I’ll get in touch with him when the time comes. Just please, don’t say anything yet. You gave your word.”

  “I just think it’s worth considering,” she said.

  “I’ll let you know if things develop further,” I replied.

  I was passing by St. Paul the Apostle, the fortress-like Gothic Revival church near my apartment. I looked up, then hurried out of its shadow.

  “I’m here if you need anything, okay?” Bloom said. “Anything at all.”

  CHAPTER 12:

  FUNNY

  That week, McHugh and I sat in Greenberg’s office, updating him on the conversations with Gutierrez. I told him about her offer to meet with our legal department and show them the evidence. “Let’s get this scheduled, before she gets cold feet,” I said.

  Greenberg wouldn’t commit to the meeting. He said we needed the audio in hand, not just played for us. I agreed but said Gutierrez was getting closer to sharing it and argued that the meeting with NBC might help persuade her. Greenberg again raised his concern that looking at contracts might incur liability. “You need to be running all of this by legal,” he said. He kept fiddling with a pen in front of him on the desk.

  I was reminding him that I’d run every step of the reporting by legal when the phone on his desk rang. He looked at the caller ID, paused.

  “It’s Harvey Weinstein,” Greenberg said. “He called earlier today.” McHugh and I looked at each other. This was news to us. Greenberg said Weinstein had pressed for details about the story. He’d led with flattery, saying he was a fan of mine, a fan of the network. Then he’d turned to saber-rattling.

  “He mentioned he’s retained some lawyers, ” Greenberg said.

  He flipped through some notes in front of him.

  “David Boies?” I asked.

  “He mentioned Boies, but there was someone else as well. Here it is, Charles Harder.” Harder was the pitbull attorney who, in an invasion of privacy case bankrolled by the billionaire Peter Thiel, had recently prevailed in shutting down the gossip news site Gawker.

  “I told him we couldn’t discuss specifics, of course,” Greenberg continued. “We do this by the book. Let him call all he wants.”

  Our reporting was in limbo. Gutierrez was still deliberating about handing over the audio. Rosanna Arquette’s agent had stopped returning my calls. The English actress confirmed the story her agent had told me, then got cold feet and fell silent. Ashley Judd, whose comments about an unnamed studio executive had featured echoes of McGowan’s and Gutierrez’s claims—a meeting moved from a hotel restaurant to a hotel room, a request that she watch him take a shower—hadn’t responded to my inquiries.

  One afternoon that March, I found a quiet stretch of cubicles vacated for renovations and called Annabella Sciorra. In the preceding weeks, others had mentioned she might have a story. Sciorra, who was raised in Brooklyn by Italian parents, had made a name for herself in movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and later received an Emmy nomination for a guest role on The Sopranos. She had a reputation for playing steely, tough characters, but when she picked up the phone, her voice sounded small and tired. “It was so strange hearing from you,” she said of my Twitter inquiry that had prompted the call. “I wasn’t sure what it was about. But I’m an MSNBC viewer, you know, so I was happy to talk.”

  I told her I was working on a story about allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, and that two people had suggested she might have something to say.

  “Oh, that,” she said, managing a tinny laugh. “It’s weird, I’ve heard that before. Who told you that?”

  I told her I couldn’t reveal other sources without their permission. “It could help a lot of people, if you do know anything,” I said. “Even if you can only talk anonymously.”

  On the other end of the call, Sciorra was in her living room in Brooklyn, staring out at the East River. She hesitated, then said, “No. Nothing happened.” Another thin laugh. “I don’t know. I guess I just wasn’t his type.” I thanked her and told her to call me if she remembered anything. “I wish I could help,” she replied. “I’m sorry.”

  Early that April, I sat at my desk and looked at a text that had just come in. “Hey…,” it read. “It’s Matthew Hiltzik have a quick question for you.” Hiltzik was a prominent publicist. He was a reliable choice for news personalities and had, for years, handled Katie Couric’s communications. When I’d despaired at the flood of tabloid items about me and my family several years earlier, I’d briefly retaine
d his services at MSNBC’s suggestion, and he’d been compassionate. Hiltzik was an equal-opportunity spin doctor. He was closely entwined with both the Clinton and Trump families. Ivanka Trump was a client of his firm, and two of his underlings, Hope Hicks and Josh Raffel, had found roles in Trump’s White House.

  Soon, Hiltzik was calling. “Hey, how are you doing?” he said brightly. There was a hum of voices in the background, like he was stepping out of a party. “I’m at this event,” he explained. “Hillary’s speaking.”

  Hiltzik never called without a reason. I stayed vague about how I was. “Juggling a few shoots,” I told him. “Dealing with a book deadline.” I’d been spending my nights furiously assembling a long-gestating book about the declining role of diplomacy in America’s foreign policy.

  “So it sounds like your other stories are on the back burner a little,” Hiltzik was saying. “Like I said, Hillary’s here, and Harvey’s here, who I’ve worked with over the years.”

  I said nothing.

  “He just walked in, actually,” Hiltzik continued. “He said to me, ‘Who’s this Ronan guy? He’s asking questions about me? Is he investigating me?’”

  “Are you representing him?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. We have a long relationship. He knows I know you, I said I’d do him a little favor. I told him, ‘Look, calm down, Harvey, Ronan is a good guy.’ I said you and I would have a little chat.”

  “I investigate a lot of leads and I really can’t talk about any of them until they’re ready to go.”

  “Is this for NBC?” Hiltzik asked.

  “I mean—I’m an investigative correspondent at NBC.”