Catch and Kill Page 9

  I scoured Auletta’s old profile of Weinstein for sources that might lead me to the two settlements in London, calling one after another. Donna Gigliotti, the Shakespeare in Love producer, had discouraged me when we first spoke. But when I called her again, she revealed more. “There are documents out there,” she said. “Where he’s never admitting guilt, but large sums of money are paid. You need those documents. But the victims are never allowed to keep them.” I asked her if she meant, for example, documents related to two women with complaints in London. “If you find them,” she said, “maybe I can talk. Until then, I’m afraid I can’t.” She did, however, give me the names of several other former employees who had been in the London offices in the same era and might help.

  I thanked her. She was not optimistic. “Nothing’s stopping Harvey,” she told me. “He will squash this story.”

  Celebrities hurried out of SUVs, bowed their heads into heavy rain, and filed into Time magazine’s annual gala dinner celebrating its “100 most influential people” list. I was not on the list. I was, however, soaked.

  “I’m an aquarium,” I said, walking into the Time Warner Center. “I’m the plot of Chinatown.”

  My mother shrugged. “Wet’s always in. It’s classic.”

  The event was heavy on television news figures. I blundered through awkward conversations with them. Megyn Kelly, tony and sequined and charismatic in a way that made you feel you were the only person in the room, mentioned her forthcoming NBC show. I congratulated her, then said I was sorry about “the Twitter thing.” I quickly realized my gaffe. Kelly had departed Fox News tailed by supercut videos of her saying things that were, depending on whom you asked, either clumsy or malicious about people of color. “The Twitter thing” was that I’d called a comment of hers racist. A tendon stood out on Kelly’s neck. “I made a lot of mistakes when I was at your point in my career, too,” she said, smiling tightly. “You’re kind of a rookie reporter.”

  I stalked off, moistly, to find a bathroom or a drink or anything but more conversation, and instead found Andy Lack. As we shook hands, he looked at me like he was processing something. Lack had tufts of graying hair and an affable but appraising smile. At almost seventy, he had enjoyed an eclectic career, with a through line of creative showmanship. Like Oppenheim, he’d dreamed of Hollywood. He’d studied acting at Boston University and, after graduating, landed roles in a Broadway production of Inquest, a play about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and in a few commercials. “He was charming, charismatic,” one person close to Lack later told me. “His background in theater makes him a unique creative mind.” At CBS News in the eighties, his signature achievement was West 57th, an edgy and stylish spin on the classic newsmagazine format. During his first stint as an NBC News executive in the nineties, he’d been credited with a turnaround in a time of disarray and declining ratings. Positions at Sony Music and Bloomberg Television had followed. In 2015, NBC had brought him back to right the ship again.

  Lack was still giving me that searching look.

  “Ronan,” I said quickly.

  “Yes,” he said, finally, as if dredging something heavy up from the bottom of a deep body of water. “Yes, of course.”

  He said Oppenheim talked about me a lot. I thanked him for getting behind investigative stories. I reached for a personal connection. My brother had recently purchased Lack’s home in Bronxville, New York.

  “Apparently you left behind a giant safe they still haven’t drilled open,” I said.

  Lack laughed. “That’s true. There is an old safe.” He said the safe had preceded him, and he hadn’t opened it, either. He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better to leave things be.”

  The room began to thin, guests filtering into an adjacent amphitheater for dinner. I found my mother, headed in the same direction. Oppenheim approached us. “That’s Noah,” I whispered to my mother. “Tell him you liked Jackie.”

  “But I didn’t like Jackie,” she said.

  I shot her a withering look.

  They said their hellos and then Oppenheim pulled me aside.

  “So Harvey’s here,” he said. “He’s sitting with me at dinner.”

  I stared at him. I’d been keeping him apprised of every element of the reporting. “You do know I’ve heard a recording of him admitting to a sexual assault,” I said.

  Oppenheim raised both hands in a defensive gesture. “I believe you!” he said.

  “It’s not about believing…,” I trailed off. “Don’t mention anything, obviously.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  A moment later, I watched as Oppenheim stood at the entrance to the amphitheater, talking to a hulking figure in a baggy black tuxedo. Harvey Weinstein was recovering from knee surgery, leaning on a cane.

  The first week of May, Black Cube called Weinstein with a promising update. “We informed the client that following our intense efforts, we scheduled a meeting in LA next week, which we believe will lead to the disclosure of high quality intelligence and hard evidence for the purposes of our work,” Yanus, the Black Cube director, wrote to Weinstein’s lawyers at Boies Schiller. This new phase of the project would require a new cash injection as well. A few days later, on May 12, Christopher Boies, David Boies’s son and a partner at his firm, oversaw the wiring of another $50,000 to Black Cube.

  In the preceding days, Lynch, the agent advising Rose McGowan, had brokered the proposed introduction between McGowan and Diana Filip of Reuben Capital Partners, who had reached out to enlist McGowan in her Women in Focus campaign.

  “Rose, it’s a great pleasure to connect with you,” Filip wrote.

  “It is my great pleasure to connect with you as well,” McGowan replied.

  The day Boies Schiller’s latest payment appeared in Black Cube’s account, Filip and McGowan finally met face-to-face, at the Belvedere, the airy, pastel-colored Mediterranean restaurant at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills. Filip had high cheekbones, a prominent nose, and dirty-blond hair. She had an elegant accent McGowan couldn’t place. McGowan was skeptical of strangers. But Filip seemed to know everything about her, and, more than that, to understand her. The actress let her guard down, just a little.

  CHAPTER 15:

  STATIC

  Jennifer Senior made good on her promise and introduced me to Ben Wallace, the New York magazine writer behind that publication’s most recent attempt at the Weinstein story. One afternoon that May, I called him as I left Rockefeller Plaza. Wallace told me how frustrating the assignment had been. Anything he learned seemed immediately, inexplicably, to get back to Weinstein. “Everyone was a double agent,” Wallace told me.

  This seemed to be especially true of several sources who had offered to help. He’d suspected that Anna, the European woman who told him she had a story about Weinstein, was hiding something. Some of her questions had felt strange. Anna wanted to know not just how many other sources he was working with but who they were. The information she seemed bent on extracting was out of proportion to what she was giving. At times, she appeared to press him to make statements that betrayed bias. At the hotel bar, when she eventually broke down and recounted her story about Weinstein, it was mild and generalized. She said she and Weinstein had an affair that ended poorly. She wanted revenge. The performance had a soap-operatic quality. As she dangled her wrist in front of him, Wallace had a prickly suspicion that she might be secretly recording. He told Anna that he sympathized but considered consensual affairs to be Weinstein’s own business. Then he left the hotel bar and stopped taking her calls.

  Wallace had the same feeling that something was off when he received the email from Seth Freedman, the former writer for the Guardian who wanted to help. Freedman wrote that he was “working with a group of international journalists on a large story about the film industry, giving a sense of the present-day culture of Hollywood and other film capitals.” He claimed to have “come across a great deal of information that we can’t include in our pieces, which might be of use to you.
I would be very happy to share it with you if you are interested.” But after several conversations with Freedman, Wallace still hadn’t gotten any meaningful information out of him. “He was pumping me for what I had heard and learned,” Wallace recalled. Suspicious, he cut ties there, too.

  Weinstein’s associates started calling New York magazine, sometimes threatening to deliver unspecified personal information about Wallace. Weinstein demanded a meeting between his legal team, investigators from Kroll, and the magazine. The intention, Wallace assumed, was to “come in with dossiers slagging various women and me.” The magazine declined the meeting. In January of 2017, after three months of reporting, Wallace and his editor, Adam Moss, decided to stand down. “At a certain point,” Wallace told me, “the magazine just couldn’t afford to spend indefinite time.”

  The experience had clearly put him on edge. As Weinstein and his team began calling New York with an uncanny knowledge of his leads, Wallace purchased a paper shredder and destroyed his notes. “I was more paranoid than ever before,” he told me. “There was much more static and distraction than I’ve encountered on any other story.”

  Wallace hadn’t gotten any sources on the record or discovered dispositive documents or recordings. But he had assembled a list of women with allegations. He rattled off a few names I had heard myself, including that of Asia Argento, the Italian actress whom several former Weinstein colleagues had suggested I find. There were also a few sources he had gotten to speak on background, telling their full stories but with their identities obscured—including a former assistant who had been harassed by Weinstein and complained to HR at his company.

  “Please,” I said. “Just ask her if she’d talk.”

  In the glass that separated the investigative bullpen and the fourth-floor studio, I sometimes caught glimpses of my reflection. That spring, I’d filled out a little, and gotten some color from all the shooting in Los Angeles. There was a feeling of momentum around McHugh and me and our little investigative series. We were receiving the kind of television journalism awards you never hear of in the outside world and enthusiastic appraisals in outlets that cover media. The head of communications at NBC News, Mark Kornblau, had also worked at the State Department during my time there. Over coffee as I transitioned from my role at MSNBC to the network, and in our encounters since, he’d been supportive. Kornblau and his team nurtured the positive coverage, giving quotes or allowing me to do so.

  The mood seemed to extend to others. An NBC veteran named David Corvo stopped me in the hall. Corvo was the executive producer of Dateline. A small, animated man with a bushy beard, he’d been working at NBC since the mid-nineties. He was close with Lack. “Let’s get together,” Corvo said. “You’re doing exactly the kind of stories we want.”

  It was early evening when Ambra Gutierrez and I sat down at a quiet restaurant in the theater district called Brazil Brazil. I’d spent the previous month trying to find another way to obtain the recording. Police sources told me that they believed Gutierrez. They were convinced they’d had the evidence they needed to charge Weinstein, despite the DA’s decision not to. But none of the conversations had gotten me any closer to the recording.

  With Gutierrez, I had tried on for size every possible approach that might allow her to pass me her copy. What if she left and went to the bathroom, and I just happened to have access to the computer? No, she said. She stood to lose too much. She was worried about her brother. “I have to get him here, from Philippines,” she said. Gutierrez was sounding increasingly skittish.

  It was Jonathan who, the night before, had suggested another feint toward plausible deniability.

  “What if you record her recording. Literally hold a microphone to a speaker. You make something new. She never transfers anything.”

  “What does that do?”

  “It just feels like a step removed, no files ever change hands. Forget it. It’s dumb.”

  “Wait, it might be good.”

  “It’s so good.”

  I laughed.

  Besides, I didn’t have a better idea. In the restaurant with Gutierrez, I leaned in and made the last-ditch proposal. “There’s no digital paper trail. There’s no flash drive to uncover. And I have a file that didn’t come from your hard drive.”

  She drew a deep breath. I sat back, watching her, thinking there was no way on earth this would work.

  “Maybe,” she said. She pulled the old MacBook from her bag. “Okay, maybe is worth a try.”

  I felt a wash of adrenaline. We both knew the cover would be thin. She was taking a risk.

  I thanked her. She nodded and opened the laptop, and I pulled out my phone.

  “Wait,” she said. “We have problem.”

  The old MacBook, it came to pass, had no working speakers. I leaned in again, speaking fast. “Ambra, if I go get us an external speaker, will you be here when I get back?”

  She glanced around, gave me an uncertain look.

  “Just give me twenty minutes,” I said.

  I sprinted from the restaurant and into the crush of West Forty-Sixth Street. Where to go? There would probably be a place with electronics among the small tourist shops that sell “I Love New York” hats on Broadway, but I didn’t know exactly where to look. I took out my phone, found the nearest big-box electronics store. It was farther, but a surer thing. I shoved through the pre-theater crowd, got to the corner, waved a hand frantically at oncoming cabs.

  By the time I limped into the store, I was drenched in sweat. I hurried down an escalator and all but screeched to a halt in front of a shelf of what looked like several thousand speakers.

  “Hi, can I help you?” a clerk asked.

  “I need a speaker,” I gasped.

  “Well, sir, we’ve got you covered,” he said brightly. “We’ve got your Bluetooth, your Wi-Fi, your USB. You looking for something Alexa-activated? This one’s got a little LED light show.” I stared at him crazily. Fifteen minutes later I was running back into the restaurant, four different overpriced speakers jangling against one another. Gutierrez was still there. She shot me a nervous smile.

  In a garden behind the restaurant, I unboxed one of the speakers. The Bluetooth on the old Mac, mercifully, worked. We agreed that she would play the middle of the three files: anything that replicated the breaks between sections would betray that it had derived from her phone copy rather than the presumably unbroken one taken from her police wire. She drew a deep breath and said, “I hope the other girls get justice.” We huddled over the laptop. She hit Play and I captured two minutes of a terrified woman struggling to get away from a hotel suite, and a brutal man not taking no for an answer. “Just come on in,” I heard him say again. “I’m used to that.”

  I needed advice. The next day, I knocked on Tom Brokaw’s office door on the fifth floor of 30 Rock. In my earliest months at NBC, Brokaw had approached me as we stood on line for coffee at a shop in the building’s basement concourse. He’d seen my show, he said. He thought I was trying to do something smarter than usual for the format.

  “Thank you, sir,” I’d said. “Means a lot coming from you.”

  “Tom, please,” he’d responded. “We’re not headmaster and head boy here.”

  He accepted my invitations to appear on air with me more often than he had to, and his commentary was always eloquent and full of historical insight.

  Brokaw was in his late seventies then. A few years earlier, he’d been diagnosed with blood cancer. That day in May, he pottered around his office, showed me pictures of Meredith, his wife of more than fifty years, and told a few stories about old Hollywood.

  “So what can I do for you?” he said finally.

  I told him I was working on a sensitive story, and that I was concerned that it wasn’t being elevated in the way it needed to be. I mentioned Greenberg’s “back burner” comments.

  “I know Noah will get behind it,” I said. “I’m just worried about interference before it gets there.”

  “Well, yo
u have to stick to your guns, Ronan,” he said. “If you back down, you’ll fuck your credibility.” I laughed. Brokaw said he thought it was a good idea to shore up all the additional leads I could before taking it back to the powers that be. He said he’d call Andy Lack and Noah Oppenheim when I did so.

  “Who’s it about, by the way?” he said finally.

  I hesitated for a moment then told him it was Weinstein. The warmth drained out of the room. “I see,” he said. “Well, I have to disclose, Ronan, that Harvey Weinstein is a friend.”

  The two had connected when Brokaw was soliciting advice on a documentary about veterans, he said. Weinstein had been good to him.

  Shit, I thought. Is anyone not friends with this guy?

  “I assume I can still count on your confidence,” I said to Brokaw.

  “You can,” he said. He showed me out of the office, seeming troubled.

  As I stepped out, my phone rang. It was Lisa Bloom. “Hey!” she said brightly, and then proceeded to make small talk about a model she was representing who had been a victim of revenge porn. “We should get together and talk,” Bloom said. “I could get you an interview with her.”

  “Sure,” I said, distracted.

  “By the way, are you still working on that story about NDAs?”

  Bloom had said she was acquainted with Weinstein and his team—and, sure, she was attentive to her brand, and didn’t hate a press conference—but she had moral fiber I felt I could trust. Besides, she was a lawyer. Respecting confidences was the bedrock of our profession.

  “I am,” I said, after a beat.

  “So it’s going forward,” she said.

  “I—I’m working on it.”