Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 06, 2017 9:35 pm

Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies

The film executive hired private investigators, including ex-Mossad agents, to track actresses and journalists.

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In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.
Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.
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. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.
In some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers, including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Times story about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times, including in a libel case.
Boies confirmed that his firm contracted with and paid two of the agencies and that investigators from one of them sent him reports, which were then passed on to Weinstein. He said that he did not select the firms or direct the investigators’ work. He also denied that the work regarding the Times story represented a conflict of interest. Boies said that his firm’s involvement with the investigators was a mistake. “We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct,” he told me. “At the time, it seemed a reasonable accommodation for a client, but it was not thought through, and that was my mistake. It was a mistake at the time.”
Techniques like the ones used by the agencies on Weinstein’s behalf are almost always kept secret, and, because such relationships are often run through law firms, the investigations are theoretically protected by attorney-client privilege, which could prevent them from being disclosed in court. The documents and sources reveal the tools and tactics available to powerful individuals to suppress negative stories and, in some cases, forestall criminal investigations.
In a statement, Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, said, “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”
In May, 2017, McGowan received an e-mail from a literary agency introducing her to a woman who identified herself as Diana Filip, the deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Filip told McGowan that she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace, and asked McGowan, a vocal women’s-rights advocate, to speak at a gala kickoff event later that year. Filip offered McGowan a fee of sixty thousand dollars. “I understand that we have a lot in common,” Filip wrote to McGowan before their first meeting, in May, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Filip had a U.K. cell-phone number, and she spoke with what McGowan took to be a German accent. Over the following months, the two women met at least three more times at hotel bars in Los Angeles and New York and other locations. “I took her to the Venice boardwalk and we had ice cream while we strolled,” McGowan told me, adding that Filip was “very kind.” The two talked at length about issues relating to women’s empowerment. Filip also repeatedly told McGowan that she wanted to make a significant investment in McGowan’s production company.
Filip was persistent. In one e-mail, she suggested meeting in Los Angeles and then, when McGowan said she would be in New York, Filip said she could meet there just as easily. She also began pressing McGowan for information. In a conversation in July, McGowan revealed to Filip that she had spoken to me as part of my reporting on Weinstein. A week later, I received an e-mail from Filip asking for a meeting and suggesting that I join her campaign to end professional discrimination against women. “I am very impressed with your work as a male advocate for gender equality, and believe that you would make an invaluable addition to our activities,” she wrote, using her wealth-management firm’s e-mail address. Unsure of who she was, I did not respond.
Filip continued to meet with McGowan. In one meeting in September, Filip was joined by another Black Cube operative, who used the name Paul and claimed to be a colleague at Reuben Capital Partners. The goal, according to two sources with knowledge of the effort, was to pass McGowan to another operative to extract more information. On October 10th, the day The New Yorker published my story about Weinstein, Filip reached out to McGowan in an e-mail. “Hi Love,” she wrote. “How are you feeling? . . . Just wanted to tell you how brave I think you are.” She signed off with an “xx.” Filip e-mailed McGowan as recently as October 23rd.
In fact, “Diana Filip” was an alias for a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who originally hailed from Eastern Europe and was working for Black Cube, according to three individuals with knowledge of the situation. When I sent McGowan photos of the Black Cube agent, she recognized her instantly. “Oh my God,” she wrote back. “Reuben Capital. Diana Filip. No fucking way.”
Ben Wallace, a reporter at New York who was pursuing a story on Weinstein, said that the same woman met with him twice last fall. She identified herself only as Anna and suggested that she had an allegation against Weinstein. When I presented Wallace with the same photographs of Black Cube’s undercover operative, Wallace recalled her vividly. “That’s her,” he said. Like McGowan, Wallace said that the woman had what he assumed to be a German accent, as well as a U.K. cell-phone number. Wallace told me that Anna first contacted him on October 28, 2016, when he had been working on the Weinstein story for about a month and a half. Anna declined to disclose who had given her Wallace’s information. Over the course of the two meetings, Wallace grew increasingly suspicious of her motives. Anna seemed to be pushing him for information, he recalled, “about the status and scope of my inquiry, and about who I might be talking to, without giving me any meaningful help or information.” During their second meeting, Anna requested that they sit close together, leading Wallace to suspect that she might be recording the exchange. When she recounted her experiences with Weinstein, Wallace said, “it seemed like soap-opera acting.” Wallace wasn’t the only journalist the woman contacted. In addition to her e-mails to me, Filip also e-mailed Jodi Kantor, of the Times, according to sources involved in the effort.
The U.K. cell-phone numbers that Filip provided to Wallace and McGowan have been disconnected. Calls to Reuben Capital Partners’ number in London went unanswered. As recently as Friday, the firm had a bare-bones Web site, with stock photos and generic text passages about asset management and an initiative called Women in Focus. The site, which has now been taken down, listed an address near Piccadilly Circus, operated by a company specializing in shared office space. That company said that it had never heard of Reuben Capital Partners. Two sources with knowledge of Weinstein’s work with Black Cube said that the firm creates fictional companies to provide cover for its operatives, and that Filip’s firm was one of them.
Black Cube declined to comment on the specifics of any work it did for Weinstein. The agency said in a statement, “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. Black Cube supports the work of many leading law firms around the world, especially in the US, gathering evidence for complex legal processes, involving commercial disputes, among them uncovering negative campaigns. . . . It should be highlighted that Black Cube applies high moral standards to its work, and operates in full compliance with the law of any jurisdiction in which it operates—strictly following the guidance and legal opinions provided by leading law firms from around the world.” The contract with the firm also specified that all of its work would be obtained “by legal means and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.”
Last fall, Weinstein began mentioning Black Cube by name in conversations with his associates and attorneys. The agency had made a name for itself digging up information for companies in Israel, Europe, and the U.S. that led to successful legal judgments against business rivals. But the firm has also faced legal questions about its employees’ use of fake identities and other tactics. Last year, two of its investigators were arrested in Romania on hacking charges. In the end, the company reached an agreement with the Romanian authorities, under which the operatives admitted to hacking and were released. Two sources familiar with the agency defended its decision to work for Weinstein, saying that they originally believed that the assignment focussed on his business rivals. But even the earliest lists of names that Weinstein provided to Black Cube included actresses and journalists.
On October 28, 2016, Boies’s law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, wired to Black Cube the first hundred thousand dollars, toward what would ultimately be a six-hundred-thousand-dollar invoice. (The documents do not make clear how much of the invoice was paid.) The law firm and Black Cube signed a contract that month and several others later. One, dated July 11, 2017, and bearing Boies’s signature, states that the project’s “primary objectives” are to “provide intelligence which will help the Client’s efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY newspaper” and to “obtain additional content of a book which currently being written and includes harmful negative information on and about the Client,” who is identified as Weinstein in multiple documents. (In one e-mail, a Black Cube executive asks lawyers retained by the agency to refer to Weinstein as “the end client” or “Mr. X,” noting that referring to him by name “will make him extremely angry.”) The article mentioned in the contract was, according to three sources, the story that ultimately ran in the Times on October 5th. The book was “Brave,” a memoir by McGowan, scheduled for publication by HarperCollins in January. The documents show that, in the end, the agency delivered to Weinstein more than a hundred pages of transcripts and descriptions of the book, based on tens of hours of recorded conversations between McGowan and the female private investigator.
Weinstein’s spokesperson, Hofmeister, called “the assertion that Mr. Weinstein secured any portion of a book . . . false and among the many inaccuracies and wild conspiracy theories promoted in this article.”
The July agreement included several “success fees” if Black Cube met its goals. The firm would receive an additional three hundred thousand dollars if the agency “provides intelligence which will directly contribute to the efforts to completely stop the Article from being published at all in any shape or form.” Black Cube would also be paid fifty thousand dollars if it secured “the other half” of McGowan’s book “in readable book and legally admissible format.”
The contracts also show some of the techniques that Black Cube employs. The agency promised “a dedicated team of expert intelligence officers that will operate in the USA and any other necessary country,” including a project manager, intelligence analysts, linguists, and “Avatar Operators” specifically hired to create fake identities on social media, as well as “operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering.” The agency also said that it would provide “a full time agent by the name of ‘Anna’ (hereinafter ‘the Agent’), who will be based in New York and Los Angeles as per the Client’s instructions and who will be available full time to assist the Client and his attorneys for the next four months.” Four sources with knowledge of Weinstein’s work with Black Cube confirmed that this was the same woman who met with McGowan and Wallace.
Black Cube also agreed to hire “an investigative journalist, as per the Client request,” who would be required to conduct ten interviews a month for four months and be paid forty thousand dollars. Black Cube agreed to “promptly report to the Client the results of such interviews by the Journalist.”
In January, 2017, a freelance journalist called McGowan and had a lengthy conversation with her that he recorded without telling her; he subsequently communicated with Black Cube about the interviews, though he denied he was reporting back to them in a formal capacity. He contacted at least two other women with allegations against Weinstein, including the actress Annabella Sciorra, who later went public in The New Yorker with a rape allegation against Weinstein. Sciorra, whom he called in August, said that she found the conversation suspicious and got off the phone as quickly as possible. “It struck me as B.S.,” she told me. “And it scared me that Harvey was testing to see if I would talk.” The freelancer also placed calls to Wallace, the New York reporter, and to me.
Two sources close to the effort and several documents show that the same freelancer received contact information for actresses, journalists, and business rivals of Weinstein from Black Cube, and that the agency ultimately passed summaries of those interviews to Weinstein’s lawyers. When contacted about his role, the freelancer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that he had been working on his own story about Weinstein, using contact information fed to him by Black Cube. The freelancer said that he reached out to other reporters, one of whom used material from his interviews, in the hopes of helping to expose Weinstein. He denied that he was paid by Black Cube or Weinstein.
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Weinstein also enlisted other journalists to uncover information that he could use to undermine women with allegations. A December, 2016, e-mail exchange between Weinstein and Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer, shows that Howard shared with Weinstein material obtained by one of his reporters, as part of an effort to help Weinstein disprove McGowan’s allegation of rape. In one e-mail, Howard sent Weinstein a list of contacts. “Let’s discuss next steps on each,” he wrote. After Weinstein thanked him, Howard described a call that one of his reporters made to Elizabeth Avellan, the ex-wife of the director Robert Rodriguez, whom Rodriguez left to have a relationship with McGowan.
Avellan told me that she remembered the interview. Howard’s reporter “kept calling and calling and calling,” she said, and also contacted others close to her. Avellan finally called back, because “I was afraid people might start calling my kids.” In a long phone call, the reporter pressed her for unflattering statements about McGowan. She insisted that the call be off the record, and the reporter agreed. The reporter recorded the call, and subsequently passed the audio to Howard.
In subsequent e-mails to Weinstein, Howard said, “I have something AMAZING . . . eventually she laid into Rose pretty hard.” Weinstein replied, “This is the killer. Especially if my fingerprints r not on this.” Howard then reassured Weinstein, “They are not. And the conversation . . . is RECORDED.” The next day, Howard added, in another e-mail, “Audio file to follow.” (Howard denied sending the audio to Weinstein.) Avellan told me that she would not have agreed to coöperate in efforts to discredit McGowan. “I don’t want to shame people,” she said. “I wasn’t interested. Women should stand together.”
In a statement, Howard said that, in addition to his role as the chief content officer at American Media Inc., the National Enquirer’s publisher, he oversaw a television-production agreement with Weinstein, which has since been terminated. He said that, at the time of the e-mails, “absent a corporate decision to terminate the agreement with The Weinstein Company, 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.” Although at least one of Howard’s reporters made calls related to Weinstein’s investigations, Howard insisted that he strictly divided his work with Weinstein from his work as a journalist. “I always separated those two roles carefully and completely—and resisted Mr. Weinstein’s repeated efforts to have AMI titles publish favorable stories about him or negative articles about his accusers,” Howard said. An A.M.I. representative noted that, at the time, Weinstein insisted that the encounter was consensual, and that the allegations were untrue.
Hofmeister, Weinstein’s spokesperson, added, “In regard to Mr. Howard, he has served as the point person for American Media’s long-standing business relationship with The Weinstein Company. Earlier this year, Mr. Weinstein gave Mr. Howard a news tip that Mr. Howard agreed might make a good story. Mr. Howard pursued the tip and followed up with Mr. Weinstein as a courtesy, but declined to publish any story.”
Weinstein’s relationship with Kroll, one of the other agencies he contracted with, dates back years. After Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, an Italian model, accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her, in 2015, she reached a settlement with Weinstein that required her to surrender all her personal devices to Kroll, so that they could be wiped of evidence of a conversation in which Weinstein admitted to groping her. A recording of that exchange, captured during a police sting operation, was released by The New Yorker last month.
During the more recent effort to shut down emerging stories, Kroll again played a central role. E-mails show that Dan Karson, the chairman of Kroll Americas’ Investigations and Disputes practice, contacted Weinstein at his personal e-mail address with information about women with allegations. In one October, 2016, e-mail, Karson sent Weinstein eleven photographs of McGowan and Weinstein together at different events in the years after he allegedly assaulted her. Three hours later, Weinstein forwarded Karson’s e-mail to Boies and Weinstein’s criminal-defense attorney, Blair Berk, and told them to “scroll thru the extra ones.” The next morning, Berk replied that one photo, which showed McGowan warmly talking with Weinstein, “is the money shot.”
Berk defended her actions. “Any criminal defense lawyer worth her salt would investigate unproven allegations to determine if they are credible,” she said. “And it would be dereliction of duty not to conduct a public-records search for photographs of the accuser embracing the accused taken after the time of the alleged assault.”
Another firm, the Los Angeles-based PSOPS, and its lead private investigator, Jack Palladino, as well as another one of its investigators, Sara Ness, produced detailed profiles of various individuals in the saga, sometimes of a personal nature, which included information that could be used to undermine their credibility. One report on McGowan that Ness sent to Weinstein last December ran for more than a hundred pages and featured McGowan’s address and other personal information, along with sections labelled “Lies/Exaggerations/Contradictions,” “Hypocrisy,” and “Potential Negative Character Wits,” an apparent abbreviation of “witnesses.” One subhead read “Past Lovers.” The section included details of acrimonious breakups, mentioning Avellan, and discussed Facebook posts expressing negative sentiments about McGowan. (Palladino and Ness did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Other firms were also involved in assembling such profiles, including ones that focussed on factors that, in theory, might make women likely to speak out against sexual abuse. One of the other firm’s profiles was of Rosanna Arquette, an actress who later, in The New Yorker, accused Weinstein of sexual harassment. The file mentions Arquette’s friendship with McGowan, social-media posts about sexual abuse, and the fact that a family member had gone public with an allegation that she had been molested as a child.
All of the security firms that Weinstein hired were also involved in trying to ferret out reporters’ sources and probe their backgrounds. Wallace, the reporter for New York, said that he was suspicious when he received the call from the Black Cube operative using the pseudonym Anna, because Weinstein had already requested a meeting with Wallace; Adam Moss, the editor-in-chief of New York; David Boies; and a representative from Kroll. The intention, Wallace assumed, was to “come in with dossiers slagging various women and me.” Moss declined the meeting.
In a series of e-mails sent in the weeks before Wallace received the call from Anna, Dan Karson, of Kroll, sent Weinstein preliminary background information on Wallace and Moss. “No adverse information about Adam Moss so far (no libel/defamation cases, no court records or judgments/liens/UCC, etc.),” Karson wrote in one e-mail. Two months later, Palladino, the PSOPS investigator, sent Weinstein a detailed profile of Moss. It stated, “Our research did not yield any promising avenues for the personal impeachment of Moss.”
Similar e-mail exchanges occurred regarding Wallace. Kroll sent Weinstein a list of public criticisms of Wallace’s previous reporting and a detailed description of a U.K. libel suit filed in response to a book he wrote, in 2008, about the rare-wine market. PSOPS also profiled Wallace’s ex-wife, noting that she “might prove relevant to considerations of our response strategy when Wallace’s article on our client is finally published.”
In January, 2017, Wallace, Moss, and other editors at New York decided to shelve the story. Wallace had assembled a detailed list of women with allegations, but he lacked on-the-record statements from any victims. Wallace said that the decision not to run a story was made for legitimate journalistic reasons. Nevertheless, he said, “There was much more static and distraction than I’ve encountered on any other story.”
Other reporters were investigated as well. In April, 2017, Ness, of PSOPS, sent Weinstein an assessment of my own interactions with “persons of interest”—a list largely consisting of women with allegations, or those connected to them. Later, PSOPS submitted a detailed report focussing jointly on me and Jodi Kantor, of the Times. Some of the observations in the report are mundane. “Kantor is NOT following Ronan Farrow,” it notes, referring to relationships on Twitter. At other times, the report reflects a detailed effort to uncover sources. One individual I interviewed, and another whom Kantor spoke to in her separate endeavor, were listed as having reported the details of the conversations back to Weinstein.
For years, Weinstein had used private security agencies to investigate reporters. In the early aughts, as the journalist David Carr, who died in 2015, worked on a report on Weinstein for New York, Weinstein assigned Kroll to dig up unflattering information about him, according to a source close to the matter. Carr’s widow, Jill Rooney Carr, told me that her husband believed that he was being surveilled, though he didn’t know by whom. “He thought he was being followed,” she recalled. In one document, Weinstein’s investigators wrote that Carr had learned of McGowan’s allegation in the course of his reporting. Carr “wrote a number of critical/unflattering articles about HW over the years,” the document says, “none of which touched on the topic of women (due to fear of HW’s retaliation, according to HW).”
Weinstein’s relationships with the private investigators were often routed through law firms that represented him. This is designed to place investigative materials under the aegis of attorney-client privilege, which can prevent the disclosure of communications, even in court.
David Boies, who was involved in the relationships with Black Cube and PSOPS, was initially reluctant to speak with The New Yorker, out of concern that he might be “misinterpreted either as trying to deny or minimize mistakes that were made, or as agreeing with criticisms that I don’t agree are valid.”
But Boies did feel the need to respond to what he considered “fair and important” questions about his hiring of investigators. He said that he did not consider the contractual provisions directing Black Cube to stop the publication of the Times story to be a conflict of interest, because his firm was also representing the newspaper in a libel suit. From the beginning, he said, he advised Weinstein “that the story could not be stopped by threats or influence and that the only way the story could be stopped was by convincing the Times that there was no rape.” Boies told me he never pressured any news outlet. “If evidence could be uncovered to convince the Times the charges should not be published, I did not believe, and do not believe, that that would be averse to the Times’ interest.”
He conceded, however, that any efforts to profile and undermine reporters, at the Times and elsewhere, were problematic. “In general, I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to pressure reporters,” he said. “If that did happen here, it would not have been appropriate.”
Although the agencies paid by his firm focussed on many women with allegations, Boies said that he had only been aware of their work related to McGowan, whose allegations Weinstein denied. “Given what was known at the time, I thought it was entirely appropriate to investigate precisely what he was accused of doing, and to investigate whether there were facts that would rebut those accusations,” he said.
Of his representation of Weinstein in general, he said, “I don’t believe former lawyers should criticize former clients.” But he expressed regrets. “Although he vigorously denies using physical force, Mr. Weinstein has himself recognized that his contact with women was indefensible and incredibly hurtful,” Boies told me. “In retrospect, I knew enough in 2015 that I believe I should have been on notice of a problem, and done something about it. I don’t know what, if anything, happened after 2015, but to the extent it did, I think I have some responsibility. I also think that if people had taken action earlier it would have been better for Mr. Weinstein.”
Weinstein also drafted individuals around him into his efforts—willingly and not. In December, 2016, Weinstein asked the actress Asia Argento, who ultimately went public in The New Yorker with her allegation of rape against Weinstein, to meet in Italy with his private investigators to give testimony on his behalf. Argento, who felt pressure to say yes, declined after her partner, the chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain, advised her to avoid the meeting. Another actress, who declined to be named in this story, said that Weinstein asked her to meet with reporters to extract information about other sources.
Weinstein also enlisted two former employees, Denise Doyle Chambers and Pamela Lubell, in what turned out to be an effort to identify and call people who might speak to the press about their own, or others’, allegations. Weinstein secretly shared the lists they compiled with Black Cube.
Hofmeister, speaking on Weinstein’s behalf, said, “Any ‘lists’ that were prepared included names of former employees and others who were relevant to the research and preparation of a book about Miramax. Former employees conducting interviews for the book reported receiving unwanted contacts from the media.”
Doyle Chambers declined an interview request. But Lubell, a producer who worked for Weinstein at Miramax decades ago, told me that she was manipulated into participating. In July, 2017, Lubell visited Weinstein’s offices to pitch him on an app that she was developing. In the middle of the meeting, Weinstein asked Lubell if they could have a private conversation in his office. Lubell told me that a lawyer working with Weinstein was already there, along with Doyle Chambers. Weinstein asked if Lubell and Doyle Chambers could write a “fun book on the old times, the heyday, of Miramax.” “Pam,” she recalled him saying, “write down all the employees that you know, and can you get in touch with them?”
A few weeks later, in August, after they had made the list, Weinstein “called us back into the office,” Lubell recalled. “And he said, ‘You know what, we’re going to put a hold on the book.’ ” He asked Doyle Chambers and Lubell to “call some of your friends from the list and see if they got calls from the press.” In early September, Weinstein summoned Lubell and Doyle Chambers to his office and asked them to start making calls to people connected to several actresses. “It got kind of intense,” Lubell recalled. “We didn’t know these people, and all of a sudden this was something very different from what we signed up for.” Several of the targeted women said that they felt the calls they received from Lubell and Doyle Chambers, and from Weinstein himself, were frightening.
Lubell told me that hours before the first Times story broke, on October 5th, Weinstein summoned her, Doyle Chambers, and others on his team, including the attorney Lisa Bloom, who has since resigned, to his office. “He was in a panic,” Lubell recalled. “He starts screaming, ‘Get so-and-so on the phone.’ ” After the story was published, the team scrambled to respond to it. Bloom and others pored over pictures that, like the ones featured in the Kroll e-mails, showed ongoing contact between Weinstein and women who made allegations. “He was screaming at us, ‘Send these to the board members,’ ” Lubell recalled. She e-mailed the photographs to the board ahead of the crisis meeting at which Weinstein’s position at his company began unravelling.
Since the allegations against Weinstein became public, Lubell hasn’t slept well. She told me that, although she knew that Weinstein “was a bully and a cheater,” she “never thought he was a predator.” Lubell has wondered if she should have known more, sooner.
After a year of concerted effort, Weinstein’s campaign to track and silence his accusers crumbled. Several of the women targeted, however, said that Weinstein’s use of private security agencies deepened the challenge of speaking out. “It scared me,” Sciorra said, “because I knew what it meant to be threatened by Harvey. I was in fear of him finding me.” McGowan said that the agencies and law firms enabled Weinstein’s behavior. As she was targeted, she felt a growing sense of paranoia. “It was like the movie ‘Gaslight,’ ” she told me. “Everyone lied to me all the time.” For the past year, she said, “I’ve lived inside a mirrored fun house.”
Ronan Farrow, a television and print reporter, is the author of the upcoming book “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... y-of-spies
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 22, 2017 10:29 am

Harvey Weinstein’s Secret Settlements
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The mogul used money from his brother and elaborate legal agreements to hide allegations of predation for decades.

Ronan Farrow
On April 20, 2015, the Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez sat in an office in midtown Manhattan with an eighteen-page legal agreement in front of her. She had been advised by her attorney that signing the agreement was the best thing for her and her family. In exchange for a million-dollar payment from Harvey Weinstein, Gutierrez would agree never to talk publicly about an incident during which Weinstein groped her breasts and tried to stick his hand up her skirt.
“I didn’t even understand almost what I was doing with all those papers,” she told me, in her first interview discussing her settlement. “I was really disoriented. My English was very bad. All of the words in that agreement were super difficult to understand. I guess even now I can’t really comprehend everything.” She recalled that, across the table, Weinstein’s attorney was trembling visibly as she picked up the pen. “I saw him shaking and I realized how big this was. But then I thought I needed to support my mom and brother and how my life was being destroyed, and I did it,” she told me. “The moment I did it, I really felt it was wrong.”
Weinstein used nondisclosure agreements like the one Gutierrez signed to evade accountability for claims of sexual harassment and assault for at least twenty years. He used these kinds of agreements with employees, business partners, and women who made allegations—women who were often much younger and far less powerful than Weinstein, and who signed under pressure from attorneys on both sides.
Weinstein also hid the payments underwriting some of these settlements. In one case, in the nineteen-nineties, Bob Weinstein, who co-founded the film studio Miramax with his brother, paid two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, roughly six hundred thousand dollars today, to be split between two female employees in England who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault. The funds came from Bob Weinstein’s personal bank account—a move that helped conceal the payment from executives at Miramax and its parent company, Disney, as well as from Harvey Weinstein’s spouse.
In an interview, Bob Weinstein acknowledged the personal payout but said that his brother had misled him about the reasons behind it. “Regarding that payment, I only know what Harvey told me, and basically what he said was he was fooling around with two women and they were asking for money,” Bob Weinstein told me. “And he didn’t want his wife to find out, so he asked me if I could write a check, and so I did, but there was nothing to indicate any kind of sexual harassment.” A former senior Miramax executive said that it was implausible that Bob Weinstein did not know about the nature of the allegations, which were reported to the company.
It has become common practice to use nondisclosure agreements to resolve allegations of sexual misconduct. Some legal experts, including the victim’s-rights attorney Gloria Allred, who is representing some of Weinstein’s accusers, stress that victims may actually prefer such agreements. Allred told me that her firm had represented “thousands” of people who have entered into confidential settlements and said, “some people don’t want their parents, their friends, members of their community to know.”
But recent revelations of sexual abuse by powerful men in entertainment, politics, journalism, and other fields have raised questions about whether the use of these agreements should be curtailed, particularly when there is a stark power imbalance between the accuser and the accused. In numerous cases, such agreements have allowed abuses to continue unabated, sometimes for decades. The comedian Bill Cosby and the television personality Bill O’Reilly both repeatedly used secret settlements to resolve allegations of sexual misconduct. Last week, Congresswoman Jackie Speier disclosed that the House of Representatives had paid more than seventeen million dollars to settle two hundred and sixty claims of harassment over the past twenty years (a figure that includes sexual offenses as well as harassment based on race, age, or other factors). Speier is working with a bipartisan group of politicians to introduce federal legislation that would overhaul the way Congress handles harassment claims, including offering better legal counsel to employees with allegations, and removing a long-standing requirement that they sign nondisclosure agreements.
“The category of cases where I think we have a problem is the heavy hitters, the rainmakers,” Samuel Estreicher, a professor of law at New York University whose work focusses on employment issues, told me. In cases like Weinstein’s, Estreicher said, “repeat offenders are able to operate under a cloak of silence with the help of nondisclosure agreements.”
Zelda Perkins, a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, was one of the women involved in the sexual-harassment and assault settlement that was underwritten by Bob Weinstein. Even twenty years ago, when the settlement was signed, Perkins recognized that Weinstein was engaging in a pattern of behavior. She fought for—and obtained—requirements specifically intended to prevent Weinstein from continuing to victimize women. The settlement mandated that Weinstein receive treatment from a psychiatrist of Perkins’s choice and that Disney be notified of future harassment settlements made by him. Nonetheless, Weinstein’s misconduct continued, in secret, for decades. “What I want to talk about at this point is not what Harvey did,” Perkins told me. “It’s more about the system that protected him and that enabled him, because that’s the only thing that we can change. Money and power enabled, and the legal system has enabled. Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture, that’s our fault.”
Harvey Weinstein’s criminal-defense attorneys, Blair Berk and Ben Brafman, said in a statement, “Because of the pending civil litigation and related investigations, it is inappropriate to respond specifically to each of the unsupported and untruthful insinuations contained in this article. Suffice it to say, Mr. Weinstein strongly objects to any suggestion that his conduct at any time has ever been contrary to law. Be assured that we will respond in any appropriate legal forum, where necessary, and fully expect that Mr. Weinstein will prevail against any claim of legal wrongdoing. Mr. Weinstein categorically denies ever engaging in any non-consensual sexual conduct with anyone and any suggestion that he acted improperly to defend himself against such claims is simply wrong.”
Gutierrez told me that she had 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. (Gutierrez’s father could not be reached for comment.) As an adolescent, Gutierrez became the caretaker of her family, supporting her mother and distracting her younger brother from the violence. “Because of trauma in my past, being touched for me was something that was very big,” she said. Her first concern, she said, was protecting other women from violence. She only signed her secret settlement after her options for criminal justice were shut down.
After Gutierrez contacted the police, Weinstein drew upon a network of high-powered defense lawyers, former law-enforcement officials, and private investigators who help the wealthy try to thwart criminal investigations. Unbeknownst to her, Weinstein’s attorneys hired the private intelligence firm K2, founded by the corporate-intelligence magnate Jules Kroll, and tasked its agents with insuring that the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, did not press charges against Weinstein. One of Weinstein’s defense lawyers, Elkan Abramowitz, whose clients include New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and who is a partner at the firm that formerly employed Vance, oversaw K2’s work. The intelligence firm hired Italian private investigators to dig up information on Gutierrez’s sexual history, according to three individuals with knowledge of its work. (A spokesperson for K2 said that the firm’s work in the Gutierrez case involved only online and public-records searches regarding her past.)
The investigators discovered that, as a young contestant in the Miss Italy beauty pageant, in 2010, 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 Italian investigators also claimed that Gutierrez engaged in prostitution. (Asked if she was comfortable with The New Yorker printing those allegations, Gutierrez said, “Absolutely.” She flatly denied ever engaging in prostitution. She said she quickly left Berlusconi’s party and later testified as a witness against him when Berlusconi was charged with abuse of power and having sex with a minor. He was acquitted on both charges but later was found guilty in a separate bribery case.)
Current and former K2 employees, all of whom had previously worked at the District Attorney’s office, relayed the private investigators' information about Gutierrez in calls to prosecutors. Two K2 employees said that those contacts were part of a “revolving door” culture between the D.A. and high-priced private-investigation firms. Lawyers working for Weinstein also presented a dossier of the private investigator’s findings to prosecutors in a face-to-face meeting. (Joan Vollero, a spokesperson for Vance’s office, said that such interactions with defense attorneys are standard procedure.)
When Martha Bashford, the head of the District Attorney’s sex-crimes unit, subsequently questioned Gutierrez, she grilled her about Berlusconi and her personal sexual history with unusual hostility, according to two law-enforcement sources. “They went at her like they were Weinstein’s defense attorneys,” one of the law-enforcement sources told me. (A source from the D.A.’s office who was present for the questioning acknowledged that the meeting focussed on Gutierrez’s past in Italy but said that Bashford was “professional” and not hostile.) Gutierrez remembers being baffled by the line of questioning. She had found the N.Y.P.D. supportive and, at the request of police investigators, had participated in a sting operation in which she met Weinstein and secretly recorded a conversation in which he admitted that he had groped her. “It was weird,” she told me. “I’m, like, ‘What is the connection? I don’t understand. Just listen to the proof.’ ”
On April 10, 2015, two weeks after Gutierrez reported Weinstein to the police, the D.A.’s office announced that it wasn’t going to press charges. Two law-enforcement sources told me that the N.Y.P.D. was troubled by the decision, and, shortly afterward, the department’s Special Victims Division conducted an internal review of the last ten criminal complaints in Manhattan stemming from similar allegations, of groping or forcible touching. “They didn’t have a quarter of the evidence we had,” one law-enforcement official said of the other cases. “There were no controlled meets, and only rarely controlled calls.” Yet, the source said, “All of them resulted in arrests.” (Vollero said that many of the arrests cited in the review involved subway groping, including some that were witnessed by police. “Cases involving sex abuse on the subway typically have many more witnesses than other types of misdemeanor sexual abuse,” she said.)

Before and after the D.A.’s decision not to press charges, several of Weinstein’s attorneys made donations to Cyrus Vance’s campaigns. All told, Abramowitz, who presented the K2 dossier to the D.A.’s office, has contributed $26,450 to Vance since 2008. In an interview, Abramowitz said that the donations were appropriate. “Cy and I were friends and partners long before Harvey Weinstein came into my life,” Abramowitz told me. “My contributions to his campaign were based on my belief that he is a solid choice for District Attorney.”
David Boies, another member of Weinstein’s legal team, donated ten thousand dollars to Vance’s reëlection campaign in the months following Vance’s decision not to press charges. “The idea that my contributions to Cy Vance’s campaign had any relationship to that investigation, I think, is absurd,” Boies told me, adding that he had a close relationship with Vance but never called him about the Gutierrez case. Boies argued that Vance’s office had made a reasonable decision and accused Gutierrez of engaging in prostitution in Italy. “There were transcripts of Italian proceedings where it was described how for years she had performed various sexual acts for various specified amounts of money,” Boies told me.
Gutierrez said that any records of the type Boies referred to were a product of her testimony against Berlusconi, who she said used his power to smear her and others involved in the case. “They said that I was a Bunga Bunga girl, that I was having affairs with sugar daddies,” Gutierrez said. “What the hell else were they going to say, that I killed someone? Anyone who knows me knows those things are completely fake.”
Gutierrez said that the decision not to press charges shocked her. “We had so much proof of everything,” she recalled. “Everyone was telling me, ‘Congratulations, we stopped a monster.’ ” She began to worry about her future. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat,” she told me. New York tabloids, including the New York Post, to which Weinstein had fed stories in the past, had been publishing lurid reports about Gutierrez that mirrored the information in K2’s dossier. “What did I do wrong?” Gutierrez said. “The only thing I did was exposing something bad that happened to me.” The coverage sometimes included photos from Gutierrez’s modelling career. It was as if “just because I am a lingerie model or whatever, I had to be in the wrong,” Gutierrez said. “I had people telling me, ‘Maybe it was how you dressed.’ ” (Gutierrez had dressed in professional office attire to meet Weinstein, with thick tights because of the cold weather.) Gutierrez, who still supports her brother financially, began to worry that she wouldn’t be able to make a living. “My work depends on image, and my image was destroyed,” she said.
Attorneys that Gutierrez consulted advised her to accept a settlement. “I felt pressured,” she told me. “I said no at first.” Eventually, however, she relented. “I was forced by the fact that newspapers completely bashed me, by the fact that I was alone, by the fact that I was twenty-two years old,” Gutierrez told me. “I knew if he could move the press in this way, I couldn’t fight him.” Gutierrez said that she knows that many people will judge her harshly for taking the money. “A lot of people are not empathetic,” she said. “They don’t put themselves in the situation.”
Gutierrez’s settlement, a copy of which I reviewed, bears Weinstein’s signature and orders the destruction of all copies of audio recordings of Weinstein admitting to the groping. Gutierrez agreed to give her phone and any other devices that might have contained copies of the recording to Kroll, another private-security firm retained by Weinstein. She also agreed to surrender the passwords to her e-mail account and other forms of digital communication that could have been used to spirit out copies. A sworn statement, pre-signed by Gutierrez, is attached to the agreement, to be released in the event of any breach. It states that the behavior Weinstein admits to in the audio tape never happened. “The Weinstein confidentiality agreement is perhaps the most usurious one I have seen in decades of practice,” an attorney familiar with the agreement told me.
After the contract was signed, Gutierrez became depressed and developed an eating disorder. Eventually, her brother, who was concerned, came to the United States. “He knew I was really bad,” she said. He took her to Italy and then the Philippines “to start again.” She told me, “I was completely destroyed.”
Harvey Weinstein had been using similar tactics with women for more than twenty years. Zelda Perkins, the assistant who signed a nondisclosure agreement with Weinstein twenty years ago, in the U.K., said that she also regrets her decision. In recent weeks, she has begun talking to the press, flouting an agreement that she now feels is unjust. “I think it’s a really important symbolic thing to do right now,” she said. “To stand up and question its legitimacy publicly.”
Perkins said that while working for Weinstein she experienced nearly constant sexual harassment. “From my very first time left alone with Harvey, I had to deal with him being present either in his underpants or totally naked,” Perkins said. She told me that she had to buy condoms for him and clean up after his hotel-room encounters. “We had to bring girls to him,” she said. “Though I wasn’t aware of it at first, I was a honeypot.” Weinstein, she said, never succeeded in pressuring her into sex or any physical contact, but she called the barrage of advances “exhausting.”
In 1998, Perkins hired an assistant of her own. She warned candidates for the job that Weinstein would make sexual advances, and rejected “very overtly attractive” applicants. In the end, she chose a “prodigiously bright” Oxford graduate, who asked not to be named in this story because she fears legal retaliation. In 1998, during the Venice Film Festival, the new assistant emerged from her first meeting alone with Weinstein distraught, saying that he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room. “She was shaking and she was crying,” Perkins recalled.
Perkins confronted Weinstein immediately. “He stood there and he lied and lied and lied,” Perkins recalled. “I said, ‘Harvey, you are lying,’ and he said, ‘I’m not lying; I swear on the lives of my children.’ ” The assistant was too frightened to go to the police, especially in a foreign country. After returning to England, Perkins notified Donna Gigliotti, a producer who worked with them on the Academy Award-winning film “Shakespeare in Love.” Gigliotti, who recalled Perkins coming to her about the incident, told me that she was an outside contractor and “could not report it internally.”
Perkins and the assistant resigned from Miramax and sent notice of impending legal action to Weinstein. Their letter set in motion frantic meetings at Miramax, according to former employees, and a fusillade of calls directed at Perkins and the assistant. Perkins said that the night after she resigned she received seventeen calls from Weinstein and other executives with “increasing desperation.” Perkins played me some of the messages, recorded on her answering machine and preserved because she thought she “might need them as protection.” In them, Weinstein veers between anxious pleading and terse demands. “Please, please, please, please, please, please call me. I’m begging you,” he says in one.
Perkins and the assistant hired lawyers from the London-based firm Simons Muirhead & Burton. Perkins said that, in hindsight, the attorneys seemed intent on foreclosing any outcome except a settlement. The lawyers told the women that because neither had gone to the police immediately after the incident, reporting the attack at that time was “very clearly not an option.” Perkins said that she asked about reporting the incidents to Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of Disney, which at the time owned Miramax, because she knew that Weinstein’s relationship with Eisner was under strain. The lawyers dissuaded her from that, too. “They just said, ‘No way. Disney will crush you. Miramax will crush you. They will drag you, your family, your friends, your pets through the mud and show that you are unreliable, insane. Whatever they need to do to silence you.’ ” Perkins said that she felt trapped. “I was, like, ‘Right. O.K. So, we can’t go to police because it’s too late. We can’t go to Disney ’cause they don’t give a shit. So who do we tell? Where’s the grownup? Where’s the law?’ ” (Razi Mireskandari, the managing partner at Simons Muirhead & Burton, declined to comment on the negotiations or the final settlement, saying that the terms of the agreement barred him from discussing it.)
Perkins initially pushed back on accepting what she called “blood money,” saying she wanted a donation made to a charity for rape victims. Her attorneys told her that the idea was a nonstarter. “I was a twenty-three- or twenty-four-year-old girl sitting in a room with often up to six men telling me I had no options,” she told me. (She did note that one of her own lawyers was a woman.) “That’s just downright wrong.”
In the end, the women’s attorneys agreed on the settlement of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to be evenly split between the two former employees. Unbeknownst to Perkins, the money came from Bob Weinstein’s personal bank account. While Bob Weinstein said that he had no knowledge of the purpose of the payments and has previously maintained that he and the rest of the board found the allegations against his brother to be an “utter surprise,” several former employees said that they found the idea that he lacked any knowledge of the misconduct implausible. “Bob may not have done the things, but he was complicit in covering it up for years,” one said. (Last month, Variety reported that a female showrunner who worked on the Weinstein Company drama “The Mist” accused Bob Weinstein of sexual harassment in 2016. He denied the claim.)
The agreement that Bob Weinstein underwrote with Perkins and the assistant required the women to have any of their lawyers, accountants, and therapists who might become aware of the settlement sign their own nondisclosure agreements. One clause required that they personally make calls “to tell people to shut up,” as Perkins put it. But Perkins also successfully demanded that provisions be added to the contract that she hoped would change Weinstein’s behavior. The agreement mandated the appointment of three “handlers,” one an attorney, to respond to sexual-harassment allegations at Miramax. Miramax was obligated to provide proof that Weinstein was receiving counselling for three years or “as long as his therapist deems necessary.” Perkins had to approve the therapist and attend the first session. The agreement also required Miramax to report Weinstein’s behavior to Disney and fire him if a subsequent sexual-harassment settlement was reached in the following two years.
But Miramax, Perkins said, “stalled and stalled and stalled.” The company implemented the human-resources changes, but other parts of the agreement were not enforced. She pressed for months, then gave up. “I was exhausted. I was humiliated. I couldn’t work in the industry in the U.K. because the stories that were going around about what had happened made it impossible,” she said. In the end, Perkins moved to Central America. “I’d had enough,” she said.
After Perkins decided to go public with her story, some law firms she approached for advice were reluctant to represent her, she told me. One said it worried that doing so would undermine confidence in its own nondisclosure agreements. “It appears fraternizing with me may put these other ‘big hitter’ law firms into a conflicted position,” she said. She has only been able to obtain a few pages of her own legal agreement. Both her former law firm and Weinstein’s continue to adhere to a stipulation that she never personally possess a full copy.
Weinstein’s agreements appear to have become more restrictive over time. Prior to his agreement with Perkins, Weinstein reached a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement with the actress Rose McGowan, who has publicly claimed that Weinstein raped her, in 1997, at the Sundance Film Festival. Notably, the agreement did not include a nondisclosure provision, but McGowan signed away her right to sue Weinstein. She said that she wanted to pursue charges at the time, but that her lawyer instead convinced her to sign the agreement. “That was very painful,” McGowan said. “I thought a hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money at the time, because I was a kid.”
Weinstein also regularly used nondisclosure agreements in his business dealings. Early this year, in a story first reported by the Times, a dispute arose among members of the board of amfAR, a foundation focussed on AIDS, over allegations that Weinstein improperly used six hundred thousand dollars in proceeds from foundation fund-raising to underwrite his own theatrical productions. Weinstein offered the foundation a payout of a million dollars in exchange for every member of the board signing a restrictive nondisclosure agreement, which would ban members from speaking not only about the amfAR matter but also about Weinstein’s “personal” activities. In an e-mail, Kenneth Cole, the chair of the board, pressed the rest of the board members to sign, warning that they might be sued if they didn’t. (In an interview, Cole said that he viewed Weinstein’s directing of amfAR funds to a theatrical nonprofit “legitimate,” and that he encouraged others to sign the N.D.A., which he considered a “risk-free proposition,” after consulting an attorney.)
Weinstein’s employees were, and are, bound by confidentiality agreements included in their employment contracts with Miramax and the Weinstein Company. While nondisclosure agreements are a standard feature of employment contracts, the clauses in Weinstein’s included a special provision about information “concerning the personal, social or business activities” of “the co-Chairmen”—namely, Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Estreicher, the expert on employment law, told me that the nondisclosure clause regarding the personal lives of both Weinstein brothers was unusual. “That’s not generally found, the personal conduct of an individual being part of a contract like that.”
Many employees I spoke with said that these contractual provisions made it impossible to talk about suspicious behavior they witnessed at the company. Irwin Reiter, who worked for Weinstein for nearly three decades and is currently the Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for accounting and financial reporting, had previously declined requests to participate in stories. “I hope there’s no reprisal,” he told me, referring to legal action against employees. He said that he was nevertheless going public because he felt the culture of silence at the company deserved further scrutiny. Weinstein, he told me, “was so dominant that I think a lot of people were afraid of him, afraid to confront him, or question him, and that was the environment.” Reiter also raised doubts about the fairness of lifetime nondisclosure agreements. “A forever N.D.A. should not be legal,” he told me. “People should not be made to live with that. He’s created so many victims that have been burdened for so many years, and it’s just not right.”
These contractual constraints are perfectly legal. Allred, the victim’s-rights attorney, said that courts usually enforce them and view efforts to break them as “buyer’s remorse.” But in recent weeks lawmakers and legal experts have called for reforms to this system. Estreicher has proposed that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the government body that oversees workplace discrimination, track sexual-misconduct-related settlements and investigate employers who use them repeatedly. In addition to Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s legislation regarding congressional employees, state lawmakers in New York and California are pushing legislation to curtail the use of nondisclosure agreements in sexual-abuse cases. “These secret settlements perpetuate the problem. They allow rich men to continue to be sexual predators,” Connie Leyva, the California state senator who has announced legislation in that state, told me. “I hope that we can get this done in California, and that it will spread like wildfire around the country.”
Allred raised concerns about the potential reforms, which she feared could limit victims’ options. She noted that “anyone who agrees to enter into a settlement has a choice” and accepts both the costs and the—sometimes considerable—benefits. Good attorneys, she argued, explain the full implications of such agreements. “And then the client makes an informed choice.”
Gutierrez, Perkins, and other women who signed agreements with Weinstein told me that they felt their consent was far from informed. Gutierrez said that she wished she had been aware that Weinstein had faced similar allegations in the past. When, after the fact, she learned that his behavior with her was part of a pattern, she was filled with guilt. “I couldn’t even think of that person touching someone else,” she told me. “It made me have chills.” Gutierrez said that she wants to warn people of the risks of silence. “People need to really change right now,” she said. “To listen and speak. That was the worst thing—people not speaking.”
Ronan Farrow, a television and print reporter, is the author of the upcoming book “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... ettlements
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 29, 2017 10:04 am

Harvey Weinstein scandal: New claim alleges sex trafficking

The Harvey Weinstein scandal continues to unfold.

The Hollywood producer, who stands accused of sexual assault and harassment by dozens of women, also faces a growing number of lawsuits.

The latest updates:

A civil claim of sex trafficking filed in New York

British actress Kadian Noble filed a civil suit on Monday in New York alleging that Harvey Weinstein forced her into sexual acts while abroad in 2014. Even more damning: The suit, obtained by USA TODAY, claims The Weinstein Company violated federal sex trafficking law "by benefiting from, and knowingly facilitating" Weinstein's foreign business travels in which he would "recruit or entice female actors into forced or coerced sexual encounters on the promise of roles in films or entertainment projects."

Noble says she was summoned to the producer's hotel room at Cannes Film Festival in 2014 to talk about a role. He began massaging her shoulders and told her to "relax." According to the complaint, Weinstein called an unnamed Weinstein Company producer, who told the actress that she needed to be “a good girl and do whatever (Weinstein) wished,” and if she did, “they would work” with her further. Weinstein then began groping her, pulled her into a bathroom, and forced her to fondle him.

The suit says Bob Weinstein and The Weinstein Company "knowingly participated in Weinstein's" trips to foreign countries for such purposes.

“I filed under the Federal sex trafficking law because I believe the facts as alleged in the complaint fit squarely within the statute," Jeff Herman, Noble’s lawyer, told USA TODAY in a statement. "The benefit of filing under this Federal law is that it allows us to bring a claim in the United States for an assault that occurred overseas and it has a 10 year statute of limitations.”

Noble and her lawyer will hold a news conference in New York on Tuesday.

Weinstein repeated his denial that anything non-consensual occurred. “Mr. Weinstein denies allegations of non-consensual sex," his representative Holly K. Baird told USA TODAY in a statement. "Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.”

Weinstein resigns from Directors Guild

Facing disciplinary action from the Directors Guild of America, Weinstein has announced that he's resigning from the entertainment guild.

Weinstein confirmed his resignation on Monday and said he has "nothing but the utmost respect for the organization" in a statement sent to USA TODAY by his publicist Holly Baird.

The Directors Guild broke with its policy of not disclosing internal affairs by announcing it had filed disciplinary charges against Weinstein on Oct. 13.

"As directors and team members who solve problems for a living, we are committed to eradicating the scourge of sexual harassment on our industry," said president Thomas Schlamme. "Unless we recognize what has become so acceptable in our culture and how we possibly, even unconsciously, are participants, everything else will be meaningless."

Weinstein has two directorial credits in IMDb: The Gnomes' Great Adventure (1987) and Playing for Keeps (1986).

A civil claim has been lodged in the U.K.

The first civil claim against Weinstein for a series of sexual assaults has been filed in the U.K.

In the claim issued Nov. 23 and obtained by USA TODAY, Weinstein is named as a defendant, along with The Weinstein Company (UK) Limited and The Weinstein Company LLC.

Personal injury lawyer Jill Greenfield represents the accuser, who previously worked for Weinstein, and has filed applied for an anonymity order on behalf of her client who wishes to remain anonymous.

The accuser's claim "is for damaged for personal injury, expenses, consequential loss including aggravated and exemplary damages and interest arising out of a series of sexual assaults inflicted" by Weinstein during her employment, according to the claim form. The companies are also listed as the accuser sees they are "vicariously liable."

"Both the assaults and the psychiatric damage cause to the Claimant were caused by the intentional assault by (Weinstein), the negligence and/or breach of the statutory duty and/or breach of contract of the (companies) and/or their Agents and/or their respective predecessors in title," the claim alleges.

Reps for Weinstein did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment, but has previously denied any allegations of non-consensual sex in statements through spokeswoman Holly Baird.

Uma Thurman says #metoo. USA TODAY

In a statement issued to USA TODAY Monday, Greenfield said she expects the claim to exceed £300,000, or roughly $400,000. She also says that the accuser has not filed a complaint with police about the alleged incidents that occurred after the year 2000 but believes she will do so.

Earlier this month, London’s Metropolitan Police Service, also known as Scotland Yard, confirmed its 12th report against Weinstein received through its Child Abuse and Sexual Offenses Command's Operation Kaguyak investigation.

Contributing: Andrea Mandell
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/201 ... 896904001/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed May 02, 2018 6:59 pm

Weinstein Painted as Tuxedo-Clad Pimp for Sex-Trafficking Case

ADAM KLASFELD
May 2, 2018

Film producer Harvey Weinstein poses for a 2011 photo in New York. For months now, as accusations of sexual misconduct have piled up against Weinstein, the disgraced mogul has responded over and over again with the same words: “Any allegations of nonconsensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.” (AP Photo/John Carucci, File)
MANHATTAN (CN) – A New York case that could dramatically expand the definition of modern sex trafficking began in Cannes, France, where the British actress Kadian Noble says disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein invited her up to his hotel room.

Recalling this encounter now in a Manhattan federal courtroom, Noble casts the mogul’s pattern of luring young women like her to his hotel room as more than alleged sexual assault. Last year Noble sued Weinstein, his brother and their company under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

“It’s our position that Harvey Weinstein is a pimp in a tuxedo,” Noble’s attorney Jeffrey Herman argued in court Wednesday.

But Weinstein’s attorney Phyllis Kupferstein countered that statutes designed to combat human slavery were not meant for this.

“It cannot be the case that every time a woman has sex with a more powerful man in an effort to advance her career, and it doesn’t go the way that she likes, that she somehow becomes a sex-trafficking victim,” Kupferstein said.

Weinstein and Noble first met in early 2014 at an industry event in London. There Noble says the producer promised to advance both her film and modeling career through his executive assistant.

They met again months later in the lobby of Le Majestic Hotel in Cannes. As described in her complaint, Weinstein invited the woman up to his hotel room, gave her a massage and then called an unnamed producer who told Noble that “they would work” in the future so long as she could be “a good girl and do whatever he wished.”

After Weinstein groped her breasts, Noble says, she exclaimed: “No, Harvey, no!”

Weinstein then allegedly forced Noble into the bathroom, where she says the producer forced her to masturbate him as she pleaded with him to stop.

At Wednesday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet said that whether the sex-trafficking allegations will proceed will largely depend on whether these acts fit the definition of a “commercial sex act.”

“Nobody has dealt with a factual situation like this under the statute?” Sweet asked, referring to sex-trafficking law.

Telling the judge he was correct, Kupferstein denied that there was any commercial sex act because Weinstein never promised to land Noble a film role.

“Her understanding about that is not a thing of value,” she said.

If the case is unprecedented, Weinstein’s accusers have brought the first cases on both coasts. Herman told reporters outside of court that he filed similar allegations on behalf of actress Dominique Huett in Los Angeles.

With nearly 30 years on the federal bench, Judge Sweet has fielded his share of high-profile sex-trafficking cases. Before the case settled this time last year, Sweet had been set to preside over the civil suit against disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile tied to two U.S. presidents: Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

Sweet gave no indication Wednesday whether he will advance Noble’s suit against Weinstein, who has moved to dismiss the case.

Noble herself did not appear in court, and her attorney Herman said she has been “up and down” in London.

“She was really devastated, by these events,” he said.

He added that she fell into depression before the growth of “#MeToo” movement gave her a sense of hope.
https://www.courthousenews.com/weinstei ... king-case/


Marco Polo Producer Sues Harvey Weinstein for Five Years of Sexual Abuse

Producer Alexandra Canosa also claims that members of the Weinstein Company failed to stop him from abusing and threatening her.

Yohana DestaMay 2, 2018 10:32 am
A producer on the Netflix series Marco Polo has filed a devastating suit against Harvey Weinstein, claiming that he raped her, threatened her, and sexually abused her numerous times over the course of five years. Alexandra Canosa, who worked with Weinstein for years, filed the suit in the New York Supreme Court, according to Variety, and claims that Weinstein threatened to ruin her career as recently as September 2017 if she came forward with allegations against him. She also claims that members of the Weinstein Company—which recently declared bankruptcy and found a lucrative bidder—essentially enabled his behavior.

“Harvey Weinstein created an environment in which there was no choice but to do his bidding or suffer dire consequences both physically and to plaintiff’s career,” Canosa’s attorneys wrote, per Variety.

The details of Canosa’s allegations are as disturbing as any of the claims women have made about Weinstein. She claims that Weinstein propositioned her, threatened her, and sexually assaulted her from 2010 to 2015 in New York, Los Angeles, Budapest, and Malaysia. She also claims that he raped her in Malaysia in 2014.

“Weinstein made it clear that Plaintiff was expected to give in to sexual advances and demands, expected to keep silent, and even expected to pretend to like it, in order to maintain her position and status in the workplace and the industry,” the suit reads.

Phyllis Kupferstein, Weinstein’s attorney, denied the allegations in a statement, saying that Weinstein and Canosa’s relationship was consensual:

“Ali Canosa was a friend who had worked for the Weinstein Company for 10 years, traveled the world for the company, and held several influential roles; overseeing many projects throughout the years,” she said. “From someone who has been thought of as a good friend, involved only in a consensual relationship, these claims are not only mystifying to Mr. Weinstein, but deeply upsetting, and they are not supported by the facts.”

Canosa’s is just one of several lawsuits that have been filed against Weinstein since October 2017. On Monday, actress Ashley Judd added another to his pile, filing a defamation and sexual harassment suit against him in the Los Angeles Superior Court in Santa Monica. Judd claims that Weinstein damaged her career after she rejected his sexual advances; she has noted that any money she wins from the case will be donated to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, an organization that sprang up after the #MeToo movement went mainstream. A representative for Weinstein said he “neither defamed Ms. Judd nor ever interfered with Ms. Judd’s career.” Rather, he “championed” her career and lobbied for her to be cast in two of his films. The statement did not address Judd’s sexual harassment allegations against Weinstein.

Weinstein is also facing a class-action lawsuit filed by six women accusing him of sexual misconduct. In the last few months, the disgraced producer has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women, though he has issued a blanket denial of all claims of nonconsensual acts. He is also being investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department, the New York Police Department, and Scotland Yard.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... lo-lawsuit



NY police, prosecutors under investigation for handling of Weinstein allegations
http://abc11.com/ny-police-prosecutors- ... s/3419080/


Ronan Farrow hints ‘there will be more to say’ about why NBC killed his Harvey Weinstein story
https://www.recode.net/2018/5/2/1730946 ... er-podcast



Time’s Up for Harvey Weinstein
Why Ashley Judd’s lawsuit against the film executive is such a brilliant gambit.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... ambit.html


Producer accuses Weinstein of five years of rape and assault
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-43974438
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Rory » Mon May 07, 2018 7:16 pm

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... ssion=true

Four Women Accuse New York’s Attorney General of Physical Abuse
Eric Schneiderman has raised his profile as a voice against sexual misconduct. Now, after suing Harvey Weinstein, he faces a #MeToo reckoning of his own.


What a hypocritical scumbag
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Rory » Mon May 07, 2018 8:53 pm

Cuomo's called for his head. Despite his public protestations that all was consensual, I imagine he'll be resigning in disgrace shortly.

What a horrific individual
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Rory » Mon May 07, 2018 9:40 pm

IMG_20180507_182553.jpg


#TheResistance mindset

IMG_20180507_183733.jpg


#RussiaRetards mindset

Holy moly
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Rory » Mon May 07, 2018 9:56 pm

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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Rory » Mon May 07, 2018 10:08 pm

Spectacular turnaround in this media cycle. At least (with the right pressure applied) he didn't drag it out.

Weinstein must be enjoying this
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue May 08, 2018 12:10 am

It's really a shame. Schneiderman was a very good and effective Attorney General.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Sounder » Tue May 08, 2018 6:13 am

This fellow seems to believe that what he did was consensual.

That is an odd yet common mental condition, to think it OK to hit intimate partners, while functioning well in the wider social context.

At any rate, thank-you Me Too#, gotta love seeing the hypocrites exposed.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue May 08, 2018 8:52 am

.

He was an effective AG.

He positioned himself as a 'champion' to the MeToo movement, advocating for women's rights, and of course operating center stage when suing Weinstein.

This is J.Edgar-level hypocrisy. There are four women, currently, making these (quite detailed) allegations against him, two of them revealing their names.

It appears the 'swift justice' -- essentially ruining an individual, minimally for several years or longer, within a 24hr news cycle -- for this case looks to be merited, but ending careers on allegations not yet confirmed/corroborated is a slippery slope and potentially, a powerful weapon for those with agendas to level against their foe(s).


Update: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced his resignation Monday night, hours after The New Yorker magazine published allegations of physical abuse and controlling behavior by four women who had romantic relationships or encounters with him.

"It’s been my great honor and privilege to serve as Attorney General for the people of the State of New York," Schneiderman said in a statement.

"In the last several hours, serious allegations, which I strongly contest, have been made against me.

While these allegations are unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office, they will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time. I therefore resign my office, effective at the close of business on [Tuesday]."

Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Tue May 08, 2018 12:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby liminalOyster » Tue May 08, 2018 9:18 am

[imgur-album][/imgur-album]
Rory » Mon May 07, 2018 9:40 pm wrote:
IMG_20180507_182553.jpg


#TheResistance mindset

IMG_20180507_183733.jpg


#RussiaRetards mindset

Holy moly


She is approaching LaRouche level wackery at this point.
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 08, 2018 9:21 am

_____________________

They call her “Bloody Gina,” and for some of her buddies in the torture wing of the CIA and their supporters in Congress, that is meant as a compliment




emptywheel

She will also be able to eat using her mouth, rather than receiving an enema ostensibly designed to give nourishment.

No one will diaper her and strap her arms to the ceiling.



Ryan Grim

So Haspel wanted to step aside to avoid Wednesday’s intense interrogation in the Senate, during which nobody will cover her face with cloth, turn her upside down and pour water until she thinks she’s about to drown.

She will be allowed to sleep the night before and night after.



Ken Dilanian

The water boarding of Abu Zubaydah—fully authorized under the program—left him “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through through his open, full mouth.”

“Several on the (CIA) team profoundly affected, some to the point of tears and choking up.”


I hope she can handle the torture of a Senate hearing

will she be hosed with freezing cold water and forced to dogpile naked with a bunch of other unfortunates?

But they could just destroy the tapes and it would be like it never happened..........oh wait


that's the difference between dems and repubs .....dems resign.....repubs become president ...run for office...... think it's a plus and stay on the job




I am Trump-ier than Trump.....I killed 29 miners and then covered it up...VOTE FOR ME!

Image
Republican Senate candidate Don Blankenship

Republican Santorum: Parkland students should learn CPR instead of marching
Image


but you know what is on topic?

Black Cube Israeli Intelligence
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=40981
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby liminalOyster » Tue May 08, 2018 4:55 pm

Huh?
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
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