Catch and Kill Page 8

  “Is this about Rose McGowan?” he pressed. “Because he says he can clear that up.” Choosing my words carefully, I told him I always welcomed information. There was muffled shouting in the background. “He’s so funny,” Hiltzik said. “He’s saying all kinds of”—he paused for effect—“ funny things.”

  Two hours later, Hiltzik texted, “He is sort of hilarious. Gave your message. He asked me to call u back.” Then Hiltzik was on the phone again, saying of Weinstein, “He doesn’t always have a normal reaction,” and, “He’s agitated. He’s upset.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “At times people can be aggressive and try to mess with him by suggesting there’s even a story here. He says the same stories keep coming back, and the conclusion is always that it’s not true, or not true to the degree people think.” He mentioned that The New Yorker and New York magazine had pursued the story. One of the reporters had “just called everyone in Harvey’s world. It freaked him out.” Weinstein had “gotten more sensitive about it.”

  “What does ‘sensitive’ mean?” I asked.

  “He’s older now. He’s mellowed a bit. I don’t think he’s going to be taking action immediately, but—”

  “Taking action?” I said.

  “Well, he’s not dumb. He’s going to do something. Look, you have your book to finish, right? So this is on the back burner for you,” he said. I glanced at the notes I’d been taking throughout the call. My eyebrows went up when I saw it: Hiltzik had let slip a small but useful lead.

  Applause sounded on Hiltzik’s end of the line. “What event are you at?” I asked.

  Hiltzik explained that Hillary Clinton had finished a greenroom conversation with Weinstein, her old friend and fund-raiser, then stepped onstage to give a speech at Women in the World.

  I texted Greenberg about Hiltzik immediately. The next day, Greenberg called. He led with strained small talk about my foreign policy book that suggested he was ramping up to something. Then, he said, “By the way, I met with Noah today, and you know—we were talking about ten different things, it wasn’t that we met about this topic, but he asked about your favorite story.” He chuckled. “I told him there’s smoke but I don’t know that there’s fire. We don’t really have a smoking gun. I said, ‘Noah, if you ask me right now, you know, I don’t think we have it.’”

  I reminded him that I’d heard audio of Weinstein admitting to an assault and seen his signature on a million-dollar nondisclosure agreement. I pressed on whether we could schedule that meeting between Gutierrez and our lawyers. “It’s not in the news. I don’t think there’s any rush here,” Greenberg said. “I think where we stand now is, we give it a rest.”

  “What does ‘give it a rest’ mean?” I asked.

  “You know, just—just keep it on the back burner,” Greenberg said. That phrase again, I thought. “Ronan, you have so many promising things going on. You’ve got a lot of stories in progress, the series is doing well. You know, you don’t have to necessarily focus on this.”

  A few minutes later, I was on the phone with McHugh. He was as puzzled as I was. “This feels like somebody called them,” he said. “You hear from Hiltzik and Harvey, then this? It doesn’t feel like a coincidence.”

  “I’m sure they got calls, and I’m sure they’re standing up to them. Noah will back this.”

  “Well, our immediate boss doesn’t want you reporting. You’re gonna have to decide if you go along with that.”

  “We’ll bring them more evidence, they’ll come around,” I said.

  But when McHugh told Greenberg he was setting aside an afternoon to make calls on the Weinstein story, Greenberg said, simply, “I think that can wait.” The situation was creating a Catch-22. We needed more evidence, but continuing to gather it openly was, suddenly, a liability. “What happens when we need to shoot more interviews?” McHugh asked.

  “We’re in fantastic shape here,” Alan Berger, of Creative Artists Agency—CAA—was saying. The San Andreas fault could split open and Los Angeles could slip right into the Pacific and agents would still be running around reassuring clients how fantastic everything was. “Your Nightly story about the prisons. Phew!” Berger continued. He had a warm, avuncular voice, with an accent that knew its way around the Long Island Expressway. He was regarded in the business as a steady dealmaker.

  “You know your contract’s up this fall.”

  “I know,” I said. I was in my apartment. In the ballet studio across the street, someone was buffing the floor. As the Weinstein story expanded, it crowded out other reporting and career considerations. I’d missed so many deadlines on my foreign policy book that my publisher had finally given up and canceled it, that very week.

  “They love you there,” Berger said, of NBC. “Noah loves you. Everyone sees a bigger role for you.”

  “Well, I’m working on some stories that are making things a little—”

  “A little what, Ronan?”

  “I can’t talk about it, Alan. Just let me know if anything seems weird.”

  “Ronan, you’re killing me,” Berger said, laughing. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. And don’t piss anyone off.”

  CHAPTER 13:

  DICK

  I flipped through my notes from the call with Hiltzik and looked at his comment about New York and The New Yorker magazines. At New York, Carr, with his suspicions of surveillance and intimidation, had chased the story, but that was in the early 2000s. Something in Hiltzik’s observation about Weinstein’s sensitivity suggested someone else had tried more recently.

  I sent another message to Jennifer Senior, the writer who’d worked with Carr. “Can you find out if anyone else at New York was working on the story we discussed, potentially more recently than David?” I asked. “I keep hearing that this might have been the case.”

  “Yr right,” she wrote back. “Just looked at my email. But I feel uncomfortable, in this case, saying who.” The attempt at the story, it seemed, had ended poorly. I asked her to pass on a message to the mystery writer.

  At The New Yorker, Ken Auletta, a writer known for his thorough appraisals of business and media executives, had profiled Weinstein in 2002. Entitled “Beauty and the Beast,” the piece made no explicit mention of sexual predation, but dwelled on Weinstein’s brutality. He was, Auletta wrote, “spectacularly coarse, and even threatening.” And there was a curious, overheated passage that hinted that there was more to the story. Auletta noted that Weinstein’s business partners “feel ‘raped’—a word often invoked by those dealing with him.” I sent a message to an acquaintance who worked at The New Yorker and asked for Auletta’s email address.

  Auletta was seventy-five. He grew up on Coney Island, raised by a Jewish mother and an Italian father. There was something elegant and old-world about his carriage and speech. And he was a careful, experienced reporter. “Of course, there was more to it than we were able to print,” he told me when I called him, from an empty office near the investigative newsroom. Back in 2002, Auletta had pursued the claims that Weinstein was preying on women, and even asked about the allegations in an on-the-record interview. The two had been sitting in Weinstein’s Tribeca offices. Weinstein stood up, face red, and shouted at Auletta, “Are you trying to get my fucking wife to divorce me?” Auletta stood, too, “fully prepared to beat the shit out of him.” But then Weinstein crumpled, sitting back down and beginning to sob. “He basically said to me, ‘Look I don’t always behave well, but I love my wife.’” Weinstein hadn’t denied the allegations.

  Auletta hadn’t been able to secure an on-the-record claim like McGowan’s, or a piece of hard evidence like Gutierrez’s tape and contract. But he had spoken to Zelda Perkins, an employee of Miramax in London who, alongside a colleague named Rowena Chiu, was involved in a joint sexual harassment settlement with Weinstein. Though Perkins had been too frightened to go on the record, Auletta was able to use her account as leverage, compelling Weinstein to concede there had been some kind of
settlement in London with her and Chiu. Weinstein even presented to The New Yorker the voided check used in the transaction, to establish that it had been underwritten not by Miramax’s parent company, Disney, but with private money from an account belonging to Weinstein’s brother, Bob.

  But the checks had been shown to him off the record. When the brothers, along with David Boies, met with Auletta and New Yorker editor David Remnick, Weinstein had provided none of the further information they’d hoped might render the claims publishable. He’d evinced only furious denials and a barely checked temper.

  Years later, Auletta’s frustration was still palpable. He was like a homicide detective kept awake at night by the case that got away. “I had a fixation,” he told me. By the end of his reporting, he said, “I came to believe that he’s a predator, a serial rapist, and to see exposing him as a public service.” He had tried reviving the story twice over the years, most recently after the Gutierrez incident. But he’d gotten no traction. “If you have any chance of succeeding where I failed,” he told me, “keep at it.”

  Rose McGowan had stayed in touch, urging us to come shoot more with her. She mentioned, in our conversations, that she was finding more support. Lacy Lynch, the literary agent who had passed along the inquiry from Seth Freedman, the empathetic former Guardian writer, was also forwarding other expressions of solidarity. The day I spoke to Auletta, one such email arrived, from Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth management firm seeking to enlist McGowan in a charitable project called Women in Focus. The firm was planning a gala dinner at the end of the year and hoped McGowan would give a keynote speech: “We have taken a keen interest in the work Ms Rose McGowan does for the advocacy of women’s rights and we believe that the ideals she strives towards align closely with those upheld by our new initiative.”

  “I think it sounds good,” Lynch wrote to McGowan. “Would love to set up a call to learn more.”

  The email from Reuben Capital Partners was signed by Diana Filip, deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments.

  The following morning, an email that I obtained many months later appeared in Harvey Weinstein’s private Gmail account. “RF Info,” the subject line read. “LEGALLY PRIVILEGED.”

  “Harvey,” the email read, “Here is a rough overview of the info I have compiled so far on Ronan Farrow.” Several dozen exhibits were attached. In a section of the email titled “persons of interest that Farrow is following” was a list of some accusers I’d found, and some I hadn’t. The email noted that McHugh and I had followed, on social media, a cluster of McGowan’s associates around the date of our interview, “out of the blue,” and speculated that I’d gotten her to talk. It observed that I was “a fan” of Lisa Bloom, appearing to assess her level of access to me. And it described my attempts to get in touch with Judd, Sciorra, and Arquette. The email analyzed the likelihood that each of them would talk. It flagged any public statements the women had made about sexual violence as a warning sign.

  A section titled “Farrow Employment” contained an exhaustive list of coworkers who might provide access or information. There were the obvious on-air investigative correspondents with whom I’d worked, like Cynthia McFadden and Stephanie Gosk. But the list also included coworkers who wouldn’t be publicly identifiable, like an NBC intern whose desk was adjacent to mine.

  A biographical section appeared to search for pressure points. It noted what it described as “family drama,” stirred by “his sister Dylan Farrow in her accusations of rape against their father Woody Allen.” The topic I’d spent years trying to outrun was coming back to haunt me.

  The email was sent by Sara Ness, a private investigator at a firm called PSOPS. Jack Palladino and Sandra Sutherland, a husband-and-wife team, operated the firm. A rare profile of the two in People magazine compared them to Nick and Nora Charles, the detective couple from The Thin Man, minus the glamour. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton hired Palladino to “discredit stories about women claiming to have had relationships with the Arkansas governor,” per the Washington Post. By the late nineties, Palladino had earned the nickname “the President’s Dick.” He said he never broke the law. But, he proudly noted, “I go right to the boundaries of the envelope.”

  “Jack is overseas, but I have kept him up to speed on this investigation and will confer with him this week on the issues/potential strategies you and I discussed yesterday,” Ness wrote Weinstein that day in April. She promised that a fuller and more formal dossier was forthcoming. The message made two things clear: that the research was meant to complement a larger effort, involving players other than Palladino’s firm; and that the dossier was just an opening salvo.

  Rich McHugh and I kept raising the idea of doing further reporting on the Weinstein story, and Greenberg kept telling us to focus on other things. Greenberg was our boss. The conversations were becoming awkward. But after the call with Auletta, it was becoming clear that we had secured more hard evidence than anyone had before, about a story that had stayed buried for decades.

  “What do we do?” I asked McHugh. We were huddled on the margins of the newsroom.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I think if you go to Greenberg—he told you to put the story on the back burner…”

  “He didn’t order us to stop,” I said, wearily. “He said we could meet again about it.”

  “Okay,” McHugh said, skeptical.

  “But maybe it’s strategic to be armed with as much as possible before that meeting,” I conceded.

  “That’s my inclination,” he said. “Let’s just get on with it.”

  We agreed to shore up our reporting. We’d return with a bulletproof body of evidence, and ask for forgiveness, not permission. Calls could be done quietly. But we debated how to keep our on-camera interviews going without running afoul of Greenberg.

  The next day, McHugh motioned me over to his computer. “We have a green light on shooting for, what, three, four stories?” We were working on several about addiction, and the one about Dow Chemical and Shell seeding California farmlands with toxic waste. “You think you can schedule these Weinstein interviews around those shoots?” he asked.

  “Well, yeah. But they’d be marked as Weinstein interviews anyway,” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “We add interviews that come up suddenly onto existing travel all the time. And we can label them anything we want.”

  There were limits to how much we could hide the work. The subject of any new interviews would still be revealed on detailed expense reports. But we could avoid calling attention to the matter with leadership.

  On his monitor, McHugh navigated to a networked drive on an NBC server. He scrolled through a list of directories containing our stories. Then he took the Weinstein files out of a folder titled “MEDIA MOGUL” and dropped them into a different one. I looked at the screen and laughed. The folder he’d chosen, named after the California waste story, was labeled “POISON VALLEY.”

  CHAPTER 14:

  ROOKIE

  The men sat at Harvey Weinstein’s usual table near the kitchen in the back of the Tribeca Grill. It was April 24. Weinstein was there, and Dylan Howard, of the National Enquirer, and an operative from Black Cube. The operative looked young, with dark hair and a heavy accent.

  Lanny Davis walked in and surveyed the room. Davis was by then in his early seventies, a thin man with graying hair and bags under his eyes. He was raised in Jersey City, his father a dentist, his mother a manager in the dental office. At Yale Law School, Davis had become friends with Hillary Rodham and, later, Bill Clinton. After a failed run for Congress and a few years of legal practice, he’d spun this friendship into a professional role as their most ardent defender in times of scandal and political peril.

  Then Davis cashed in, taking on jobs that earned him $1 million to lobby his way around Equatorial Guinea’s human rights abuses, or $100,000 a month to downplay a patently rigged election in Ivory Coast. If a passenger disappeared a
nd left a smear of blood on the deck of your cruise ship, or the President criticized your football team’s racist name, Davis was there. Trying to get ahold of Davis later on, I asked Jonathan, “Who would have Lanny Davis’s number?” He replied, “I don’t know, Pol Pot?”

  Weinstein—who had met Davis at an event honoring Hillary Clinton and knew of the crisis manager’s familiarity with the sexual misconduct allegations against Bill Clinton—had called that spring to enlist him.

  At the Tribeca Grill that morning, Davis said they couldn’t talk in front of the Black Cube operative if Weinstein wanted to maintain attorney-client privilege. “I can’t talk in front of people who aren’t attorneys,” Davis said. “If I’m subpoenaed, I have to tell if someone else is in the room.”

  Weinstein seemed annoyed by this.

  “Oh, yes, you can,” he said. “You can maintain privilege if he works for me.” This was an oversimplification of the law. But Weinstein was insistent, and Davis relented.

  Weinstein ranted. McGowan, he said, was crazy, a liar. He wanted to discredit all the women making what he described as false claims about him.

  “My advice is don’t do that,” Davis told Weinstein. “Even if you think you’re right.”

  Weinstein began to bellow. “Why? Why? Why? Why?”

  “Because it looks awful,” Davis said.

  Dylan Howard grinned, which he did a lot. The man from Black Cube did not. A few hours after the meeting at the Tribeca Grill, Dr. Avi Yanus, Black Cube’s director and CFO, sent an email to Weinstein’s attorneys at Boies Schiller Flexner, calling the meeting “productive.” He wrote that Weinstein had agreed to a ten-week extension of Black Cube’s operation on his behalf. An invoice was attached. The email continued: “We are committed as ever to bring you with game-changing intelligence in this case, and to successfully reach all of our main objectives.”