Harvey Weinstein allegedly hired private security agencies to silence sexual assault allegations, according to a new exposé from the New Yorker.
The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow reports that Weinstein used a team of lawyers, private investigators and former Israeli intelligence officers.
According to the report released on Monday evening, the goal was to subvert and intimidate Weinstein’s accusers, specifically Rose McGowan and Asia Argento, and journalists in attempts to stop the allegations from going public.
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Former employees from Weinstein’s film companies were also enlisted as well as a high-ranking media editor.
Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, denied the report in a statement to the New Yorker: “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”
According to the latest report, “The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and the New Yorker.”
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Black Cube and Kroll, the agencies that were hired, allegedly used agents with aliases and false backgrounds to “target” McGowan and more women, in addition to putting together “psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories,” the New Yorker reports.
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According to the report, one of the investigators posed as a women’s rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The woman was a former officer in the Israeli Defense Force, the report claims.
Weinstein’s former lawyer, David Boies, confirmed that his firm previously paid Black Cube and Kroll on behalf of the disgraced Hollywood producer.
In a contract between Boies’ law firm and Black Cube, the report claims it directed Black Cube to help expose “information that would stop the publication of a Times story about Weinstein’s abuses.”
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“We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct,” Boies told Farrow in a statement.
The newspaper reports that on Oct. 28, 2016, Boies’s law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, wired Black Cube $100,000 toward what would ultimately be a $600,000 invoice.
Black Cube declined to comment on the specifics of any work the company did for Weinstein. In a statement, the agency said: “It is Black Cube’s policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s work.”
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Weinstein also enlisted journalists to retrieve information against the women with allegations against him, according to Farrow’s report.
One of the journalists was Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of American Media Inc., who also oversaw a television-production agreement with Weinstein, which has since been terminated.
In a statement to Farrow, Howard said he split the two roles. “I always separated those two roles carefully and completely — and resisted Mr. Weinstein’s repeated efforts to have AMI titles publish favourable stories about him or negative articles about his accusers.”
Howard continued: “I had an obligation to protect AMI’s interests by seeking out — but not publishing — truthful information about people who Mr. Weinstein insisted were making false claims against him. To the extent I provided ‘off the record’ information to Mr. Weinstein about one of his accusers — at a time when Mr. Weinstein was denying any harassment of any woman — it was information which I would never have allowed AMI to publish on the internet or in its magazines.”
Farrow also spoke to Pamela Lubell, a producer who previously worked for Weinstein during his days running Mirmax. Lubell revealed she and another employee were “manipulated” to make calls to several actresses who may have alleged sexual misconduct.
READ MORE: Harvey Weinstein now has 93 accusers, 13 of them alleging rape
McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of raping her, said, “Everyone lied to me all the time. I’ve lived inside a mirrored fun house.”
Weeks after accusations against Weinstein were first reported by the New York Times, the number of women who’ve alleged sexual harassment and assault has ballooned to 93.
Weinstein, through his spokesperson, has denied “any allegations of non-consensual sex.”
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