by Ronan Farrow
And there was something else: the names Doyle Chambers and Lubell compiled and called were being added to a larger master list. The list was light on insiders from the glory days, and heavy on women Weinstein had worked with, and troublesome reporters. It was color coded: some names highlighted in red, indicating urgency, especially among the women. As Doyle Chambers and Lubell updated the list based on their calls, they weren’t told that their work was being sent to Black Cube’s offices in Tel Aviv and London, then onward to operatives around the world, to serve as a basis for their increasingly involved work on Weinstein’s behalf.
At the same time, John Ksar, an agent I worked with at the Harry Walker speaking agency, was fielding inquiries from a wealth management firm in London. Its representative, Diana Filip, said that she was planning a gala focused on women’s representation in the workplace. She wanted a reporter well-versed in that issue to give a speech, or possibly even several.
Ksar had been in the business a long time and was wise to attempts to fish for information. But Filip had all her answers lined up. She rattled off the particulars, including the investors who would be in the room. She said that her firm was still finalizing its decision. They’d need to meet with me first. “I hope such a meeting could be arranged sometime in the coming weeks, in fact I’m planning to be in NY next week so if Mr Farrow is available that might be a good opportunity,” she wrote in an email. It was the first of several messages saying that a meeting had to happen promptly; and eventually, when this failed to gain traction, that she’d settle for a call with me. For more than a month, the emails from Diana Filip kept coming. Ksar figured she was just really, really into investigative reporting.
CHAPTER 30:
BOTTLE
The dawn after my latest meeting with Oppenheim, the private investigators settled in outside of my front door. Khaykin was already there when Ostrovskiy ambled over from the bagel place around the corner. “Wang anything?” Ostrovskiy had texted. “No man, Ty,” Khaykin replied. A few minutes later, they assumed their positions on the street outside, watching.
Immediately after emerging from the meeting with Oppenheim, I’d sent an email to David Corvo, and we’d agreed to meet. Inside my apartment, I put on a white button-down shirt, stuffed my notes into a bag, and headed out into the light.
At just after eight thirty, the private investigators spotted a young man with fair hair, wearing a white shirt and carrying a knapsack. They scrutinized the figure. They’d been given reference photos of me and, the day before, had undertaken additional database searches. A lot of the surveillance business was guesswork, but this looked like their mark. Ostrovskiy drove, rounding the corner just after the target, recording on a Panasonic camcorder. “I’m heading to 30 rock for now,” he texted. Khaykin gave chase on foot, descending into the Columbus Circle subway stop, then getting on a downtown train.
For the private investigators, long days of surveillance often meant few opportunities for bathroom breaks. “How far are you?” Ostrovskiy texted his boss later that day, while sitting in his car awaiting the next emergence of their target. “I need to use a bottle. If you nearby I can wait.” Khaykin was not, it came to pass, nearby. Ostrovskiy eyed the beverage he’d finished off earlier, resigned himself, picked it up, and went.
“Ok all good now,” he texted his boss.
By the time I made it to Rockefeller Plaza, I’d sweated through the white shirt. Corvo, in his office near the rest of the Dateline team, smiled and asked, “How’s it going?”
“I gather we’re going to be working together,” I said.
“Oh, that,” he said. “I’ve only gotten the broad strokes.”
I ran Corvo through the basics: the audio, the numerous allegations against Harvey Weinstein that had remained in the script after the legal review, Gutierrez’s unwavering willingness to be named and to lead the story, Nestor’s openness to showing her face to replace McGowan. His head bobbed genially as he listened. “Sounds compelling,” he said, and smiled.
Corvo had dealt with tough stories about sexual assault allegations before. In 1999, during Andy Lack’s previous tenure at NBC News, Corvo had overseen the network’s interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who had accused Bill Clinton of rape twenty-one years earlier. The network had reviewed the interview for a little more than a month after it was recorded, airing it only after Broaddrick, frustrated, had taken the story to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. “If Dorothy Rabinowitz hadn’t come to interview me, I don’t think NBC would ever have played it,” Broaddrick later said, referring to the Wall Street Journal reporter who ultimately broke the story. “I had absolutely given up.”
I was unaware that Corvo also had a personal history with sexual harassment issues. In 2007, he’d appeared to fixate on one employee, sending her leering messages. “In our renewed effort to avoid misunderstandings,” he wrote, “we have to get one ‘ground rule’ very clear: whenever you go to the pool, you must let me know. A long distance glimpse, even, will make my day.” On a hot day, he’d added, “I love warm weather, but are you going to a school event dressed like that?” Repeatedly, he’d find or create openings to be alone with the woman. Eventually she complained to management. She was promoted into a new role and stayed at the company for years after. Corvo’s ascent within the network continued uninterrupted.
I left the meeting with Corvo feeling reassured. The next day, unbeknownst to me, NBC finalized a nearly $1,000,000 separation agreement with Corvo’s accuser. When the Daily Beast later reported on the allegations, the network would say that the payout had been a mere coincidence, unrelated to her complaint. The agreement forbade her from ever speaking negatively about her time at NBC.
A few mornings later, the private investigators were in position on the Upper West Side again. This time, Ostrovskiy was on duty. “So far haven’t seen him,” he texted his boss. Then he spotted the young man with fair hair again. Ostrovskiy hopped out of his car and followed on foot. He drew close, within touching distance. Then he frowned, punched a number into his phone.
Upstairs in my apartment, I picked up. “Hello?” I said, and heard a brief exclamation in Russian, before the line went dead. In front of Ostrovskiy, the neighbor to whom I bore a passing resemblance walked on, blithely unaware, definitely not taking a call.
“Seems like no march,” Ostrovskiy texted Khaykin. “Back at residence now.” In his car, he googled for better photos of me. “Found a good ID pic,” he wrote, and sent his boss a picture of me and my sister Dylan, aged four and six, perhaps, in our parents’ arms. “Going off this one we should be good.”
“Lol,” replied Khaykin. Later, as if to make sure Ostrovskiy was kidding, Khaykin sent a screenshot from one of the dossiers with the blue Times New Roman headers, showing my birthday.
The offices of The New Yorker encircled the thirty-eighth floor of One World Trade Center, an ouroboros of news and highbrow commentary and tote bags. It was bright and airy and modern. My meeting with David Remnick was set for midday. As I walked in, my phone played a scherzo of alerts. A series of new spam texts, this time asking me to opt into or out of some kind of political survey. I swiped them away as a gangly assistant ushered me into the small conference room adjoining Remnick’s office.
David Remnick would someday be a hundred years old and they’d still call him a wunderkind. He’d started as a reporter covering both sports and crime for the Washington Post before becoming the paper’s Moscow correspondent, which had led to a celebrated book about Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize in his thirties. By that summer, he was in his late fifties, gray creeping into his black curls, and still, there was a boyishness to him. When his wife later mentioned that he was tall, this was somehow news to me. He was the rare man of his stature, physical and professional, who did not make you feel small. He sat, in jeans and a jacket, in one of the office chairs around the conference room table, body language relaxed but curious.
He’d brought with him a
young editor, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, who’d joined the magazine earlier that year after stints at Harper’s and the Paris Review. Foley-Mendelssohn was thin and quiet and intense. The evening before, Remnick had sat in her office and suggested she review Auletta’s old profile of Weinstein. She’d done more than that, reading widely.
As we sat together and I outlined the reporting, I could see Remnick thinking hard. “And you think you can get more?” he said.
“I know I can,” I replied, and told him about the leads NBC was stalling on.
He asked if he could hear the tape, and, for the second time that summer, I sat in front of leadership at a media outlet and put my phone on a table and hit Play.
Remnick and Foley-Mendelssohn listened. Their reaction was the polar opposite of Oppenheim’s. There was a stunned quiet afterward. “It’s not just the admission,” Foley-Mendelssohn said finally. “It’s the tone, the not taking no for an answer.”
“And NBC is letting you walk away with all this?” Remnick asked. “Who is this person at NBC? Oppenheim?”
“Oppenheim,” I confirmed.
“And he’s a screenwriter, you say?”
“He wrote Jackie,” I replied.
“That,” Remnick said gravely, “was a bad movie.”
Ostrovskiy and a colleague had made a last, fruitless stop outside the New York Times Building that morning. Then Khaykin called to relay fresh orders about me: “Track his cell phone.” Ostrovskiy thought back to Khaykin’s boast, the previous fall, that he was capable of doing that.
Shortly after noon, Khaykin started sending screenshots of maps, marked with pin-drops indicating the latitude, longitude, and elevation of a moving target. Maybe Khaykin hadn’t been full of shit after all: the pinpointed locations synced up exactly with my trip to the meeting with Remnick.
I was frank with the New Yorker editors about every aspect of the reporting, including my hopes about its future at NBC. “I honestly don’t know what’s happening over there,” I said. “But I work there, and if there’s a chance this last review is sincere, I have to give it a shot. I owe it to my producer there.”
Remnick made it clear that if NBC either killed the story again or didn’t intend to run its version first, he was interested. There would be more work to do, of course. The more evidence I accumulated, the better. Weinstein and his legal team, Remnick knew from experience, would be ready for a fight. But for the first time that summer, a news outlet was actively encouraging me. Remnick told me to keep Foley-Mendelssohn apprised as the outstanding pieces of reporting, including the on-camera interview Canosa was contemplating, fell into place.
“I’m not expecting you to promise anything yet, but I think there’s enough here to publish something substantial,” I said.
He nodded. “I think there may be.”
After the meeting, Remnick went back into his office, and I said my goodbyes to Foley-Mendelssohn. “If they don’t let you continue for some reason,” she said, “call.”
As I stepped out into the lobby, perhaps two hundred text messages flooded my phone. “(Survey) Should Trump be impeached?” they read, identically, one after another. “Reply to cast your vote. To unsubscribe from our list…” Each came from a different number. I stood, swiping away the texts, finally giving up and responding to opt out, which seemed not to help.
“It’s the area near World Trade Center,” Ostrovskiy wrote to Khaykin after receiving the maps. “Heading there now.” And then: “Any additional info where to expect him to come out from?” and “Building at that address? Or he’s outside possibly?”
“No data,” Khaykin replied.
“Ok will look around.”
Amid the flurry of survey texts, a message from McHugh came in, asking for an ETA. I was due back at NBC. I moved toward the subway, then reconsidered. I’d felt an odd anxiety since the day I’d wondered whether I was being followed. I moved out onto the street instead and hailed a cab. As I made my way uptown, I went right by the private investigators.
Soon after, McHugh and I sat with the two producers Corvo had assigned to work on his review of the reporting. Both seemed earnestly interested, but it was also clear that the decisions about the fate of the story would be made above their pay grade. The meeting was rushed: both producers were in and out of screenings of Dateline stories. McHugh and I gave them what reporting materials we could print quickly, making it clear that there was more, including the sensitive material in the bank vault. They didn’t ask to listen to the tape. As it turned out, they never would.
When we stepped out of the meeting, McHugh had a missed call from a number he didn’t recognize. It was Lanny Davis, the lawyer and public relations operative.
“I understand you’re working with Ronan Farrow on a story about Harvey,” Davis said. “Is that correct? Is that story still running? When do you plan to run it?”
McHugh told him he couldn’t say anything about ongoing reporting. Davis said he was on vacation and gave McHugh his cell phone number. “I’ve worked with the Clintons for many years and now I’m working with Harvey,” Davis said. “And I’m here to help.” McHugh hurried off the phone and for the rest of the afternoon seemed a little off balance.
I’d booked a flight to Los Angeles that evening. I hoped I might finally persuade Canosa to go on camera. Nestor, too, had agreed to meet, to map out a potential full-face interview.
As I stepped into the departures terminal at JFK, Canosa called. She sounded nervous. “He’s been calling me,” she said. Weinstein seemed to be keeping her close, telling her how much he valued her loyalty.
“If you feel like you can’t do this—”
“No,” she said, firmly. Her face would be in shadow, but she would do it. “I’ll give the interview.” We set a time.
The most recent rationale Oppenheim had offered for stopping the reporting—waiting for Corvo to assign a producer—had come and gone. McHugh and I let NBC know that we’d be proceeding with the interview.
After our near-miss at the World Trade Center, the private investigators idled in the neighborhood. Khaykin chain-smoked, glancing at his phone, awaiting further GPS data that never came. That evening, Ostrovskiy staked out my apartment again, fruitlessly. “Don’t worry about the Ronan time at all,” he texted his boss. “Seriously I understand the situation and did not expect to get paid unless we actually found him.”
CHAPTER 31:
SYZYGY
Harvey Weinstein was also frustrated by a lack of updates. David Boies placed the call to Andy Lack as he’d promised Weinstein he would. Boies asked Lack whether work on the story was ongoing.
Lack was reasonable and warm. He stayed quiet for most of the call, as he had during the earlier conversation with Weinstein, when the studio head had suggested that sleeping with employees was common practice. During his tenure as executive producer of West 57th in the late eighties, Lack, who was married at the time, had pursued sexual relationships with underlings and talent. Jane Wallace, one of the show’s correspondents, said that Lack was “almost unrelenting.” When she started work at the show, she said, Lack asked her to go to dinner with him “every day for almost a month,” saying he wanted to celebrate her contract. “If your boss does that, what are you gonna say?” she later told me. “You know if you say ‘I don’t want to celebrate with you,’ you’re asking for trouble.” Wallace said that it was “ultimately consensual, but I didn’t just get flirted with. I got worked over.” The relationship eventually soured. Lack, she said, became volatile. As she left the show, she recalled him yelling, “You will never get credit.” Then the network deployed a tactic that the public was barely conscious of at the time: it offered her a substantial payout to sign a binding nondisclosure agreement. Wallace accepted. “It wasn’t till I really got out of there that I felt the full force of it. Of how disgusted I was,” she told me. “The truth is, if he hadn’t been like that, I would have kept that job. I loved that job.”
Several other former employees of
Lack’s recalled another relationship with a young associate producer who worked for him named Jennifer Laird. When the relationship ended, colleagues recalled Lack turning hostile, taking what they saw as punitive actions. When Laird asked to be reassigned, Lack wouldn’t allow it. He compelled her to work longer hours, and on weekends, and proposed she cancel vacations. Through a spokesperson, Lack denied taking any retaliatory actions against Laird. Laird confirmed that the relationship had happened, and said the aftermath was “extremely uncomfortable.” She told me, “There’s clearly a reason you don’t get involved with your boss.”
Lack’s reputation had preceded him in his latest role at NBC. “Why would you do that?” one executive recalled asking Steve Burke upon learning of his decision to reinstate Lack. “The reason you have those cultural problems down there—he created that!”
That day on the phone with Boies, Lack was less quiet when the conversation turned to the story’s fate at NBC. “We’ve told Harvey we’re not doing a story,” Lack said. “If we decide to do a story, we’ll tell him.”
As I flew to Los Angeles the evening after the meeting at The New Yorker, Greenberg called McHugh, sounding frantic. He said Oppenheim had told him to “hit the pause button on this.”
“Meaning I can’t report anything else?” McHugh said.
“That’s coming from our boss,” Greenberg replied. “That’s an order.”
Then, the following morning, Greenberg called me and said the same thing.