by Ronan Farrow
In March 2015, Gutierrez’s modeling agent had invited her to a reception at Radio City Music Hall for New York Spring Spectacular, a show that Weinstein produced. As usual, Weinstein had rallied industry friends to support the show. He’d talked to Steve Burke, the CEO of NBCUniversal, and Burke had agreed to provide costumes of characters from the ubiquitous Minions franchise. At the reception, Weinstein stared at Gutierrez openly across the room. He approached and said hello, telling her and her agent several times that she looked like the actress Mila Kunis. After the event, Gutierrez’s modeling agency emailed her to say that Weinstein wanted to set up a business meeting as soon as possible.
Gutierrez arrived at Weinstein’s office in Tribeca early the next evening with her modeling portfolio. As she and Weinstein sat on a couch reviewing the portfolio, he began staring at her breasts, asking if they were real. Gutierrez said that Weinstein then lunged at her, groping her breasts and attempting to put a hand up her skirt while she protested. He finally backed off and told her that his assistant would give her tickets to Finding Neverland later that night. He said he would meet her at the show.
Gutierrez was twenty-two at the time. “Because of trauma in my past,” she told me, “being touched for me was something that was very big.” After the encounter with Weinstein, she remembered shaking, stopping by a bathroom, and beginning to weep. She caught a cab to her agent’s office and cried there, too. Then she and the agent went to the nearest police station. She remembered arriving, and telling the officers Weinstein’s name, and one saying, “Again?”
Weinstein telephoned her later that evening, annoyed that she hadn’t come to the show. She picked up the call while sitting with investigators from the Special Victims Division, who listened in and devised a plan: Gutierrez would agree to see the show the following day and then meet with Weinstein. She would wear a wire and attempt to extract a confession.
“It was a scary decision, of course,” she said. “And of course I had a sleepless night.” Anyone asked to do something risky to expose something important has to balance a complicated mix of self-interested and altruistic incentives. Sometimes, in some stories, the two coincide. But in this story, there was almost no upside. Gutierrez faced legal and professional annihilation. She wanted only to stop Weinstein from doing it again. “Everyone told me the guy could close all the doors for me,” she said. “I was willing to risk this for the fact that this guy should not have done this to anyone anymore.”
The following day, Gutierrez met Weinstein at the Tribeca Grand Hotel’s Church Bar, a plush room with golden stars and clouds stenciled on its blue walls. A team of undercover officers kept watch. Weinstein was flattering. He said, again and again, how beautiful she was. He told her he’d help her get acting jobs, if she would just be his friend, and named several other prominent actresses for whom, he said, he had done the same. The accent would need work, of course, but he said he could arrange lessons.
Weinstein excused himself to go to the restroom, then returned, demanding with sudden urgency that they go up to his penthouse suite. He said he wanted to take a shower. Gutierrez, frightened that he would touch her again or discover that she was wearing a wire, resisted. Undeterred, he tried to bring her upstairs repeatedly. The first time, she used a tactic the officers had suggested, leaving behind a jacket and insisting they go back downstairs for it. The second time, one of the undercover officers, posing as a TMZ photographer, started peppering Weinstein with questions, sending him to complain to hotel staff. Gutierrez kept trying, and failing, to extricate herself. Finally, Weinstein got her upstairs, leading her toward his room. By this time, they’d lost the undercover officers. Adding to her problems, her phone, which officers had instructed her to keep on and recording in her purse as a backup, was running out of power.
With increasing belligerence, Weinstein demanded that she go into the room. Gutierrez, terrified, pleaded and tried to draw away. In the course of the interaction, Weinstein copped to groping her the previous day: a full, dramatic confession, caught on tape. She kept pleading, and he finally relented, and they went downstairs. Officers, no longer concealing their identities, approached Weinstein and said the police wanted to speak to him.
Had he been charged, Weinstein could have faced a count of sexual abuse in the third degree, a misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail. “We had so much proof of everything,” Gutierrez told me. “Everyone was telling me, ‘Congratulations, we stopped a monster.’” But then the tabloids began to publish their stories about Gutierrez’s supposed past as a prostitute. And the office of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. began to raise the same points. When Martha Bashford, the head of Vance’s Sex Crimes Unit, questioned Gutierrez, she grilled her about Berlusconi and her personal sexual history with unusual hostility, according to two law enforcement sources. The district attorney’s press office later told the New York Times that the questioning was “a normal, typical interview” intended to anticipate questions that would be raised in a cross-examination. The law enforcement sources disagreed. “They went at her like they were Weinstein’s defense attorneys,” one of them told me. “It was weird,” Gutierrez recalled of the questioning. “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 district attorney’s office announced that it wasn’t going to press charges. It released a brief statement: “This case was taken seriously from the outset, with a thorough investigation conducted by our Sex Crimes Unit. After analyzing the available evidence, including multiple interviews with both parties, a criminal charge is not supported.”
The NYPD was incensed by the decision—so much so that the department’s Special Victims Division launched 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,” still another law enforcement source said of the other cases. “There were no controlled meets, and only rarely controlled calls.” Yet, that source said, “all of them resulted in arrests.” The public had never learned of the damning evidence Vance possessed.
Law enforcement officials began to whisper that the DA’s office had behaved strangely. Vance’s staff had been receiving new information about Gutierrez’s past on a regular basis, and hadn’t been disclosing where it was coming from. It was, one official told me, as if Weinstein had infiltrated Vance’s office personally.
At the time of the Gutierrez incident, Weinstein’s legal team was stacked with political influence. Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was closely involved. “Rudy was always in the office after the Ambra thing,” one Weinstein Company employee recalled. “He still had his mind then.” Giuliani worked so many hours on the Gutierrez matter that a spat arose afterward over billing. These fights over invoices were a leitmotif in Weinstein’s business dealings.
Several members of Weinstein’s legal team made donations to Vance’s campaigns. One attorney, Elkan Abramowitz, was a partner at the firm that formerly employed Vance, and had contributed $26,450 to Vance’s campaigns since 2008. I recognized Abramowitz’s name. When my sister reiterated her claim that Woody Allen sexually assaulted her, Allen dispatched Abramowitz to the morning shows to smile affably and deny the allegations. That history made my feelings about Abramowitz less personal, not more. This wasn’t about any one victim; this, for Abramowitz and many other lawyers, was a cottage industry.
David Boies had also worked on the Gutierrez imbroglio, and also kept the Manhattan district attorney close. He’d been a longtime donor. He would give $10,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign in the months following the decision not to press charges.
After that decision, Gutierrez was shaken, then worried about her future. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat,” she told me. As Weinstein leaned on his tabloid contacts to drum up items portraying Gutierrez as a hustler, she felt like hist
ory was repeating. She believed that the stories from Italy about her having worked as a prostitute were a product of her having testified in the corruption case against Berlusconi. She told me Berlusconi had used his power to smear her. “They said that I was a Bunga Bunga girl, that I was having affairs with sugar daddies,” she said. “Anyone who knows me knows those things are completely fake.” Slut shaming, it seemed, was a universal language. Several tabloid editors later told me they regretted their coverage of Gutierrez, and felt it laid uncomfortably bare Weinstein’s transactional relationships in their industry.
Weinstein particularly exploited his bond with Pecker and Howard at the National Enquirer. Weinstein’s employees recalled an uptick in calls from him to Pecker. Howard ordered his staff to stand down on reporting about Gutierrez’s claim, then inquired about purchasing her story in order to bury it. And then there was the item the Enquirer ultimately ran, claiming, apparently based on its own entreaties to Gutierrez, that she was flogging the story on the open market.
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.’” (She had dressed in professional office attire to meet Weinstein, with thick tights because of the cold weather.) Her reputation was curdling. “My work depends on image, and my image was destroyed,” she said. Casting calls evaporated. Paparazzi laid siege to her apartment. Her brother called from Italy to say reporters had found him at work.
When attorneys Gutierrez consulted urged her to accept a settlement, she at first resisted. But her resolve began to crack. “I didn’t want to make my family suffer anymore,” she said. “I was twenty-two years old. I knew if he could move the press in this way, I couldn’t fight him.” On the morning of April 20, 2015, Gutierrez sat in a law firm office in Midtown Manhattan with a voluminous legal agreement and a pen in front of her. In exchange for a million-dollar payment, she would agree to never again talk publicly about Weinstein or the effort to charge him. “I didn’t even understand almost what I was doing with all those papers,” she told me. “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.” Across the table, Weinstein’s attorney from Giuliani’s firm, Daniel S. Connolly, was trembling visibly as Gutierrez 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.” She knew people would judge her for taking the money. “A lot of people are not empathetic,” she said. “They don’t put themselves in the situation.” 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.”
CHAPTER 10:
MAMA
Two years later, Gutierrez shut her eyes at the memory. “Do you have the document?” I asked. She opened her eyes, stared at me. “I promise you,” I said, “I will only use anything I learn here today in a way you’re comfortable with. Even if it means giving up the story.” She picked up a white iPhone, began clicking and scrolling. She pushed the phone across to me, letting me read the million-dollar nondisclosure agreement.
The document was eighteen pages long. It was signed, on the last page, by Gutierrez and Weinstein. The lawyers involved in drafting it must have been so convinced of its enforceability that they never considered the possibility of it emerging. The contract ordered 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 evidence to Kroll, a private-security firm retained by Weinstein. She also agreed to surrender the passwords to her email accounts and other forms of digital communication that could have been used to spirit out copies. “The Weinstein confidentiality agreement is perhaps the most usurious one I have seen in decades of practice,” one attorney who represented Gutierrez later told me. A sworn statement, pre-signed by Gutierrez, was attached to the agreement, to be released in the event of any breach. It stated that the behavior Weinstein admitted to in the recording never happened.
I looked up from the agreement, and the reporter’s notebook in which I’d been transcribing notes as quickly as I could. “Ambra. Are all the copies of the tape destroyed?”
Gutierrez folded her hands in her lap and looked at them.
A moment later, I was walking fast out of the restaurant and toward the subway, dialing Rich McHugh. I told him the story. “It’s real,” I said. “And there’s audio of him admitting to it.”
I texted Noah Oppenheim. “I’m now in touch with five women with HW allegations, FYI. I just met with a model who wore a wire for an NYPD investigation in 2015. She’s going to play me the recordings. She wants to talk but she took a payout with an NDA—she showed me the document. It’s legit. Signed by HW, a million dollars.” When he replied hours later, he asked only, “Who’s your producer on this?” then fell silent.
Back at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, McHugh and I sat opposite Rich Greenberg in his office on the fourth floor. “It’s quite a story,” Greenberg said, leaning back in his mesh office chair.
“I mean, it’s huge,” said McHugh. “He admits to a crime.”
Greenberg swiveled toward his monitor.
“Let’s see here…,” he said, typing Gutierrez’s name into Google and switching over to the Images tab. He scrolled through a few pictures of Gutierrez sprawling seductively in lingerie and said, “Not bad.”
“We’re close to a big piece of evidence here,” I said, impatient. “She says she’ll play the audio for me.”
“Well, let’s see about that,” Greenberg said.
“And there’s the contract,” McHugh added.
“That part’s complicated,” Greenberg said. “We can’t be making her breach contract.”
“We’re not making her do anything,” I replied.
Later that afternoon, I called Chung, the NBC lawyer. “Theoretically, someone could say we induced her to violate the contract. But that tort is weird. There are a lot of conflicting interpretations of what’s required to prove it. Some say you need to demonstrate the defendant had the sole purpose of violating the contract, which obviously isn’t your objective,” he said. “I’m sure Rich is just being careful.”
I had tried Jonathan a few times over the course of the afternoon but only got through as I ducked out of Rockefeller Plaza at sunset. “Six calls!” he said. “I thought it was an emergency!” He was stepping out of a meeting. “Five!” I countered. We’d met shortly after he left his job as a presidential speechwriter. In the years we’d been together, he’d drifted, creating a short-lived sitcom and tweeting a lot. A couple of months earlier, he and his friends had started a media company focused on podcasts on the West Coast. It had taken off faster than anyone predicted. His trips to New York had become shorter and less frequent.
“I’m checking,” he was saying.
“Do it,” I replied. I waited thirty seconds. “Jonathan!”
“Sorry! Forgot you were there.” This happened more than you’d think. These days, our relationship consisted almost exclusively of endless calls. Occasionally, he’d try to pause me, forgetting I wasn’t a podcast.
My phone pinged. I looked down to see a string of twenty or thirty Instagram message alerts. They came from an account with no profile photo. They read, over and over, “I’m watching you, I’m watching you, I’m watching you.” I swiped them away. Strange messages were an occupational hazard of being on television.
“The crazies love me,” I said to Jonathan, and read him the messages.
“He thinks he loves you, but wait until he experiences dating
you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I love you?”
“Does it?”
“Just working on my vows for the ceremony. On the moon. In our gravity boots.”
This was a running joke. Jonathan’s mother wanted grandchildren, and not in the age of lunar bases.
“This conversation again?” I said, playing along.
“Just get someone at NBC to take a look at the threats. Take it seriously, please.”
After that first meeting with Gutierrez, I followed up again with the same contact in the district attorney’s office. “It’s weird,” the contact said. “The recording. It’s referenced in the case files. But I don’t think we have it.” This seemed improbable. The DA’s office would, according to standard procedure, have retained any evidence, in case the investigation was ever reopened. I said “thank you” and chalked it up to an insufficiently thorough search.
A week after our first conversation, I met with Gutierrez again, at a basement noodle place near Union Square. She’d arrived from a casting call, in full hair and makeup. It was like conducting an interview in a shampoo commercial. She talked about Berlusconi’s corrupt media empire, and how she’d marshaled the strength to help expose him. With each conversation we had, she sounded more like she was ready to do it again.