by Ronan Farrow
It was 1998 when Perkins got the green light to hire an assistant of her own, something she hoped would put some distance between her and Weinstein. She warned candidates for the job that Weinstein would make sexual advances. She even rejected “very overtly attractive” applicants, “because I knew he’d never leave them alone. It would never stop.” In the end, she chose Chiu, a “prodigiously bright” Oxford graduate, who would overcome paralyzing fears of retaliation and make her name public only years later.
At the Hotel Excelsior during the Venice Film Festival in September 1998, Chiu emerged from a meeting with Weinstein in his hotel room, shaking and crying, saying he had pushed her against a bed and attempted to assault her. Perkins confronted Weinstein, interrupting a lunch meeting with a prominent director on the hotel terrace. “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.’”
Chiu was, Perkins said, “shocked and in a traumatized state,” and too frightened to go to the police. The difficulty of reporting the allegation was deepened by their location at the time, Venice’s Lido island. “I didn’t know who I would go to,” Perkins recalled. “The security guard in the hotel?”
Perkins did what she could to ensure that Chiu was kept away from Weinstein for the remainder of the trip. After returning to England, Perkins notified Gigliotti, who gave her a referral to an employment attorney. Eventually, Perkins and Chiu sent notice that they were resigning from Miramax and pursuing legal action.
Their departure from the company set in motion the frenetic meetings at Miramax that Wolfe had described to me. Weinstein and other executives called Perkins again and again. The night she resigned, she received seventeen calls of “increasing desperation” from them. In the messages, Weinstein veered between pleading and menacing. “Please, please, please, please, please, please call me. I’m begging you,” he said in one message.
Perkins and Chiu hired lawyers from the London-based firm Simons Muirhead & Burton. Perkins initially pushed back on accepting what she called “blood money” and inquired about going to the police, or to Disney, Miramax’s parent company. But the attorneys seemed intent on foreclosing any outcome except a settlement and a nondisclosure agreement. In the end, she and Chiu accepted a settlement of two hundred fifty thousand pounds, to be evenly split between them. Weinstein’s brother, Bob, cut the check to the women’s law firm, obscuring the transaction from Disney and distancing it from Harvey.
In an exhausting four-day negotiation process, Perkins prevailed in adding provisions 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. The company was obligated to provide proof that Weinstein was receiving counseling for three years or “as long as his therapist deems necessary.” 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.
The company implemented the human resources changes, but other parts of the agreement were not enforced. Perkins pressed for months, then gave up. “I was exhausted. I was humiliated. I couldn’t work in the industry in the UK because the stories that were going around about what had happened made it impossible,” she recalled. In the end, she moved to Central America. She’d had enough. “Money and power enabled, and the legal system has enabled,” she eventually told me. “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.”
Auletta hadn’t captured all of the details of the story, but he’d gotten the bones of it right. I looked at his meticulously organized notes and felt, for a moment, emotional about the dusty boxes and the old secrets they held. I wanted badly to believe that news didn’t die, even when it was beaten back for so many years.
As I finished both our script for television and a 6,000-word written story for the NBC News website, the ghosts of reporting attempts past seemed to gather. In late July, I finally called Janice Min, the former Hollywood Reporter editor. She was fierce in her belief that the story was real, and doubtful as to whether it would ever break. Min had come to the Hollywood Reporter from Us Weekly, but her roots were as a crime journalist for the Reporter Dispatch in New York. “We all knew it was true,” she told me. “But we never got it over the finish line. Everyone was always too afraid to talk.” She said she’d connect me with Kim Masters, the writer who’d worked on the story during Min’s time at the magazine.
“It’s an impossible story,” Min said, before we got off the phone that day. “It’s the white whale of journalism.”
“White Whale,” McHugh texted later that day. “Great frickin’ title.”
Masters was invariably described as a veteran media journalist, which she joked was a euphemistic way to call her old. She’d worked as a staff writer for the Washington Post and a contributor for Vanity Fair, Time, and Esquire. She told me she’d heard the rumors about Weinstein “forever.” Once, years earlier, she’d even confronted him about them.
“Why are you writing this shit about me?” he’d roared at her at a lunch at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills. “Why do you say that I’m a bully?”
“Well, Harvey,” Masters recalled telling him. “I hear you rape women.”
“Sometimes you have sex with a woman who’s not your wife, and there’s a disagreement about what’s happened, and you just have to write a check to make it go away,” Weinstein replied calmly. Hiltzik, the public relations operative, was also there that day. Masters recalled him looking shocked. He’d later deny that he heard her mention rape.
Masters wasn’t convinced so much had changed, all those years later. A few months earlier, she’d worked on a story about an accusation of sexual harassment against Roy Price, the Amazon Studios executive who had canned McGowan’s deal, and a figure around whom such claims had long circulated. But the Hollywood Reporter, where Masters had written articles for seven years, had passed on the story. That summer, she was still trying to rescue it, shopping it to BuzzFeed and then to the Daily Beast. Price had hired Charles Harder, the same Gawker -slaying attorney Weinstein was using, to approach the outlets. “One of these days,” Masters told me wearily, “the dam is gonna have to break.”
I came back to Ken Auletta and asked him if he’d give an interview. For us, putting a print reporter who’d worked on a story on camera was routine. For him, it felt like an extraordinary step, relitigating old reporting. But when I told him what we had, including the audio of Weinstein’s confession, he said he’d make an exception. We arrived at Auletta’s home on Long Island in the midst of a torrential downpour and hauled in our equipment through the rain. He confirmed that he’d seen evidence of the London settlements and concluded, as we had, that Weinstein had routinely purchased women’s silence. And Auletta spoke of his quixotic returns to the topic over the decades. Running the story was important, he said, “to maybe stop him from doing it again.”
Auletta, unprompted, looked at the camera.
“Tell Andy Lack, who’s a friend of mine, he should publish this story. He will.”
“Okay,” I said.
“If NBC, which has the evidence, doesn’t go forward with this story, it’s a scandal.” Our shooter exchanged a nervous glance with McHugh. I told Auletta that I was sure NBC would run it. “Well, you better hurry,” he replied. “If the Times is on it—”
“I know,” I said. And we both looked out of his living room at the storm.
The same day, Diana Filip followed up with Rose McGowan. “I’m back home, and just wanted to thank you again for the wonderful evening!” she wrote. “It’s always a pleasure seeing you and spending time with you :). I sincerely hope I’ll be back soon and that this time we’ll have more time!”
And then she came to the point: “I
was thinking about Ronan Farrow, who you mentioned during our meeting. I still cannot get his photo out of my head. Seems like a really impressive and sweet guy. I read a bit about him and was very impressed by his work, despite the problematic family connection… I was thinking that someone like him could be an interesting and valuable addition to our project (not for the conference, but the annual activity through 2018), due to the fact that he’s a pro-female male,” Filip continued. “Do you think you could introduce us, in order to look into this opportunity further?”
CHAPTER 20:
CULT
The script we developed, over the course of late July, was spare and economical. It included the tape, naming Gutierrez with her cooperation, as well as McGowan’s on-camera, on-the-record interview, and Nestor’s interview with her face in shadow, accompanied by images of her messages from Irwin Reiter, documenting how Weinstein’s behavior was seen as a serial problem within the company. The evidence we’d uncovered of the two settlements in London was included, based on multiple firsthand accounts of the negotiations and the check from Bob Weinstein’s account. And there were sound bites from the four former employees who had gone on camera.
McHugh, in the same period, had stumbled into a subplot. At a hockey game—he played a lot, and periodically limped into the office with arcane injuries sustained on the ice—he’d run into a friend in the film industry who had tipped him off that there was mounting scrutiny of Weinstein’s role on the board of amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. Fellow board members suspected Weinstein had misused funds destined for the charity. Weinstein was trying to get them to sign nondisclosure agreements.
“Feels like 2nd beat,” McHugh texted, “but maybe worth being aggressive?”
“I’d pursue quietly,” I replied. “Don’t want to trigger anything that could adversely impact this first story.”
After McHugh sent me his notes on the script, he wrote, “Time to get the real convo going between you, legal, Rich, and me, and see the real tenor of this news org.”
“Yup,” I replied.
“We make an oddly good combo,” he added. “Not b/c we work well, but because it’s frustrating i’m sure to someone who is trying to find dirt or disparage us individually.” Neither of us knew that McHugh’s name—the names, even, of our crew members—were by then all over dossiers quietly making their way around the world.
We both had the sense, as we finished the story, that attacks were coming. We just didn’t know what form they’d take. “He has a lot to lose, back up against corner,” McHugh pointed out. “It’ll be war.”
The last week of July, Susan Weiner, the general counsel of NBC News, sat with Rich Greenberg, McHugh, and me in Greenberg’s office and paged through the script and elements list. I’d worked with Weiner before on investigations deemed particularly troublesome or likely to generate litigation. I’d found her to be a good lawyer, with sound instincts. And she’d been supportive of the reporting, even when I’d picked subjects like a litigious Korean doomsday cult. Before her twenty-plus years at NBC, Weiner had been deputy general counsel at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She was thin and pale, with a shock of frizzy hair. In the office that day, she peered over her glasses and pursed her lips. “You’ve got a lot,” Weiner said.
“Can you play her the tape?” said Greenberg, with undisguised excitement. He’d already read, and liked, the script. In a meeting with him earlier that day, McHugh had prevailed in arguing for a longer-than-standard script, with an eye toward airing it on the web. Shorter Today show and Nightly News versions could easily be slivered off.
As the audio wound down, Weiner’s tight expression dissolved into a half smile.
“Wow,” she said.
“And the source will meet you, or whomever you want from legal, to show you the contract with Weinstein’s signature on it,” I said.
I asked her if she saw any outstanding legal issues based on her review of the material so far, and she said she didn’t. “I think our next step is to seek comment,” she said. McHugh shot me a relieved look. The news division’s top lawyer and Greenberg, a veteran of its standards department, both wanted to proceed. Greenberg nodded at Weiner. “I want to let Noah know before we do,” he said.
Greenberg was still excited, barely suppressing a smile, as he, Weiner, McHugh, and I sat down with Oppenheim in his office later that day. Oppenheim flipped through his copy of the script, written story, and elements list. A groove deepened in his brow.
“It’s just a draft script,” I said. “We’ll get it tighter.”
“Okay,” he said flatly.
“We thought you should hear the audio,” Greenberg said. He seemed to be caught off guard by Oppenheim’s lack of enthusiasm. “It’s pretty powerful.”
Oppenheim nodded. He was still looking at the pages, not making eye contact. Greenberg nodded at me. I hit Play and held my phone out.
“No,” Ambra Gutierrez said, her voice shot through with fear. “I’m not comfortable.”
“I’m used to that,” Harvey Weinstein said again.
Oppenheim slouched deeper into the chair, like he was shrinking into himself.
There was a yawning silence after the tape finished playing. Apparently realizing that we were waiting for him to say something, Oppenheim produced a sound somewhere between a weary sigh and an apathetic “eh” and made a shrugging gesture. “I mean…,” he said, drawing out the word. “I don’t know what that proves.”
“He admits to groping her,” I said.
“He’s trying to get rid of her. People say a lot of things when they’re trying to get rid of a girl like that.”
I stared at him. Greenberg and Weiner stared at him.
“Look,” he said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “I’m not saying it’s not gross, but I’m still not sure it’s news.”
“We have a prominent person admitting to serious misconduct on tape,” I said. “We have multiple-sourced accounts of five instances of misconduct, with two women willing to put their name out there, we have multiple former employees saying this was a pattern, we have his signature on a million-dollar settlement contract—”
He waved a hand at me. “I don’t know if we can show contracts,” he said. McHugh and I glanced at each other. We couldn’t figure out why a news organization, which reported contractually protected information routinely in national security and business contexts, would suddenly be so concerned about upholding settlements related to sexual harassment.
“We’re not relying solely on the contracts, obviously,” I said. “But patterns of settlements are newsworthy. Look at the Fox story—”
“This isn’t Fox,” he said. “I still don’t think Harvey Weinstein’s a name the Today show audience knows.” He looked at the pages again. “And anyway, where would we even air it? This looks long.”
“We’ve run seven-minute pieces on Today before. I can cut it down to that.”
“Maybe Megyn’s show, but that’s going away now,” he said, seeming to ignore this. Megyn Kelly was concluding a brief stint anchoring a Sunday night newsmagazine program.
“We can put it on the web,” McHugh suggested.
I nodded. “And the written version can go online, too.”
Oppenheim turned to Greenberg. “What are you proposing?”
“We’d like to reach out to Harvey Weinstein for comment,” Greenberg said. Oppenheim looked at Weiner. She nodded. “I think there’s enough here to proceed with that call,” she said.
Oppenheim looked at the pages in front of him.
“No, no, no,” he said. A nervous titter of laughter escaped him. “We can’t call Harvey. I’ve got to take this to Andy.”
He rose, pages in hand. The meeting was over.
“Thank you. I think it’ll make a big impact, whatever platform we put it on,” I babbled, as Oppenheim ushered me out.
McHugh shot me a stunned look. Neither of us could make sense of the reaction.
The
earlier months of the year had been dominated by the kind of targets Ostrovskiy, the Ukrainian private investigator, was used to: four hours chasing a cheating spouse here, six tailing the wayward teenage son of a nervous mother there. In return, Khaykin, the bald Russian, would send over the agreed-upon thirty-five bucks an hour, plus expenses. But as the summer unfolded, Khaykin was issuing assignments that felt different. These jobs gave Ostrovskiy pause. They drove him back to that troublesome tendency to ask questions.
Before dawn on July 27, Ostrovskiy headed to the next of those jobs. When he arrived at what looked to be a residential address, he found Khaykin’s car, a silver Nissan Pathfinder. He and Khaykin agreed that they’d split up, Ostrovskiy keeping an eye on the target’s home, Khaykin standing ready to give chase to a work address.
Khaykin hadn’t said much about these new assignments. He’d just sent over a series of screenshots, from some kind of dossier from a client. The screenshots featured addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, biographical information. They identified spouses and other family members. Ostrovskiy’s first thought was that they were following some kind of custody dispute, but that explanation fit less and less as the summer wore on.
Ostrovskiy flicked through the screenshots as he hunkered down to keep watch on the address. The formatting was identical to that of the documents that had made their way through the offices on Ropemaker Street in London, with blue italic Times New Roman headers and shaky English. As he looked at the details, a strange feeling came over him. He wasn’t used to following reporters.