by Ronan Farrow
Weinstein had seemed relieved after Lanny Davis’s report back on the meeting with Oppenheim and Boies’s update after the call with Lack. Weinstein had taken both as unambiguous confirmation that the story was dropped, and possibly me with it. But he wanted more. He ordered another round of calls from his legal team to NBC’s. It wasn’t long before Susan Weiner was on the phone with one of Davis’s attorneys, using similar language: I was, she said, no longer working for NBC News.
I knew nothing of this. I still had time left in my contract with NBC News and, as far as I knew, was still planning to renew it. The killing of the story had shaken me, but I still felt loyal to the network, and to my bosses there. Greenberg sounded enthused about expanding my investigative work over the upcoming years. Don Nash, the Today executive producer, proposed an expanded role for me as the show’s main investigative correspondent.
On September 11, after McHugh and I returned from one of our ongoing shoots, for a story about health care, I sat down with Oppenheim again. There was a beat of small talk about his Hollywood projects, including a long-gestating script about Harry Houdini. He was mulling possible lead actors. I suggested Michael Fassbender. Oppenheim said, like a screenwriter’s caricature of a Hollywood agent, that the actor couldn’t open a movie. I murmured something about Assassin’s Creed, and finally, it seemed, we’d agreed on something we found objectionable in Hollywood.
I told Oppenheim about my hopes for the future. He looked at me sympathetically, told me he’d looked into it. “There’s just no room in the budget for you anymore.”
“Oh,” I said.
He told me that maybe the network could have me back for one-off stories here and there. “We can’t commit to anything regular,” he said. “Sorry. I tried.”
After the meeting, I called Jonathan and told him, “So I’m about to be unemployed. Guess it’s not going to happen. You a media mogul, me on the show…”
“You’re not a morning person anyway,” he said.
Back in Los Angeles, at Jonathan’s place, I got a call from a UK number I didn’t recognize. The caller identified himself as Seth Freedman, a frequent writer for the Guardian. He said he was working “on a kind of collaborative piece with journalists from other papers on a very kind of soft piece about life in the film industry.” The description was off, strangely vague. “We’ve come across some stuff doing our research that we really can’t use,” Freedman continued. “I just wondered if what we have could be useful to you, basically.”
He asked about McGowan, saying she’d “been very helpful for the piece we’re doing.” Then he offered to connect me with another high-profile source if I could tell him more about my work.
“Someone I spoke to said, ‘Mr. Farrow might be working on something related.’”
“And who was it that suggested that this might be a topic of interest for me?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say, not in a kind of hostile way, just that the person who’d said ‘Mr. Farrow might be working on it’ doesn’t want to be involved himself.”
I told Freedman I was open to leads, but couldn’t tell him anything. He was silent for a beat, unsatisfied. “If someone makes an allegation against someone, libel law in the UK is very strict and no one will publish if you say, ‘Ms. X said this about Mr. Y.’ Unless you’ve got some kind of proof to back it up. Is it different in the States, can you publish ‘This person said that about someone else,’ or would you also have to stand it up in some way?” It sounded like a warning. “Without knowing more about the details of your story, I really couldn’t advise,” I told him, and politely ended the call. It was one of several similar calls Freedman made that month, based on instructions he received via email and WhatsApp, from a project manager at Black Cube.
About two weeks after my meeting with Oppenheim, Susan Weiner called. “The reason I’m calling is we have continued to have concerns raised to us about the reporting regarding Mr. Weinstein,” she said. “We thought we had made it clear to you that NBC is not involved in this story in any way.”
I told Weiner that, while Oppenheim had made it clear that he couldn’t go first, we were still looking at the possibility of resurrecting the TV version after the story broke in print. Greenberg had told McHugh several times that this prospect wasn’t completely dead.
“I can’t speak for Rich and Noah, but my understanding is that NBC has no interest in ever being a part of this story,” she said. “NBC does not want to be mentioned in connection with this at all. And we are being advised that you have been identifying yourself as an NBC reporter.”
Harvey Weinstein had by then acquired an expansive collection of my introductory emails to sources. Weiner began reading one of these aloud. “I see here you say you’ve reported for NBC News,” she said.
“Well, that’s accurate, of course,” I replied. I’d been transparent with sources. Since the story had been picked up by a print publication, I’d said nothing to suggest NBC had any ongoing involvement. But I’d mentioned my wider work with the network as a credential. And even after the conversation with Oppenheim about the budget, I hoped to continue that work, in the context of whatever small, piece-by-piece deal he could offer.
“My understanding is your contract is now terminated,” Weiner said. “If you in any way imply that NBC had any involvement in this story, we will be forced to publicly disclose that.”
“Susan, we’ve worked together for years,” I said. “You can reassure Noah that I won’t say NBC’s working on this, but there’s no need to—”
“Obviously we don’t want to publicly discuss your contract status, but we will be forced to do so if we receive any more complaints about this. Noah wants to make sure the word ‘NBC’ does not appear in any communications about this story.”
In conversations with people around him, Weinstein was ecstatic. “He kept saying, ‘If I can get a network to kill a story, how hard can a newspaper be?’” recalled one of them. Weinstein seemed to be referring to his trouble at the Times. “He was triumphant,” added a senior Weinstein Company executive. “It was the kind of thing he’d be yelling at us. He’d say, ‘I got them to kill this fucking story, I’m the only one getting anything done here.’”
At around close of business the day before Weiner’s call to me, Weinstein had sent Oppenheim a warm note, burying the hatchet:
From: ““Office, HW””
Date: Monday, September 25, 2017 at 4:53 PM
To: NBCUniversal
Subject: From Harvey Weinstein
Dear Noah,
I know we’ve been on opposite sides of the fence, but my team and I watched Megyn Kelly today and thought she was terrific—congratulations, I’m going to send you a little gift to celebrate. The format is outstanding as well. If there’s anything we can do to help, we have a pretty significant film and television lineup coming up. The WILL & GRACE part was warm and hilarious—really, the whole format was just smart, smart, smart.
All my best,
Harvey
To this, Oppenheim replied: “Thanks Harvey, appreciate the well-wishes!”
Shortly thereafter, Weinstein’s staff received a message in the usual format keeping them apprised of mailed gifts: “UPDATE,” it read. “Noah Oppenheim received a bottle of Grey Goose.”
CHAPTER 34:
LETTER
All that September, my representatives at CAA had been calling. First Alan Berger, my agent, and Bryan Lourd, his boss and one of the heads of the agency, called to say Weinstein had been hounding them. I told them both that if there was a story about Weinstein moving ahead, I would meet with him, as early as was appropriate. When Lourd passed on the message, Weinstein wouldn’t take no for an answer. As Lourd told the story, Weinstein showed up at the agent’s office in Los Angeles and ranted for more than an hour
.
“He said he’s far from perfect and has been working on himself for a very long time now, and felt like he was being painted with an old brush, so to speak,” Lourd said. “Honestly, I kept thinking, I did not volunteer for this. Why is this happening right now.” Weinstein said he’d hired a lot of lawyers. That he didn’t want to create problems for me. That a meeting had to happen straightaway.
The next Tuesday, the same day I spoke with Weiner, there was another email from Weinstein to Lourd demanding to talk immediately, and an update from Lourd in response.
This guy won’t meet right now
He did say he will call you soon
I think he is absolutely pursuing the story
B
That Friday, Weinstein kept calling Berger and Lourd. Weinstein told Berger his legal team was at the ready. He specifically mentioned Harder, and Boies, and—I felt a jolt when Berger repeated the name to me—Lisa Bloom.
A few hours later, copies of a letter started arriving at various offices at CAA. I thought of the scene from Harry Potter where invitations to attend Hogwarts start flying in through the fireplace and the letterbox and the windows. Berger called to read me the letter. It was not an invitation to attend Hogwarts. It was Charles Harder conveying Harvey Weinstein’s threat to sue me, based on an arrangement he suggested had been reached with NBC News:
Dear Mr. Farrow:
This law firm is litigation counsel for The Weinstein Company.
We understand that you have interviewed certain people affiliated with The Weinstein Company and/or its employees and executives (collectively, “TWC”), and have been reaching out to other persons affiliated with TWC, seeking additional interviews, based on the representation to each such person that you are working on a story for NBCUniversal News Group (“NBC”). NBC has informed us, in writing, that it is no longer working on any story about or relating to TWC (including its employees and executives), and all such activities have been terminated. Accordingly:
1. All interviews that you have conducted or been involved in relating to TWC (including its employees and executives) are the property of NBC and do not belong to you, nor are you licensed by NBC to use any such interviews.
2. Demand is hereby made that you turn over all of your work product relating to TWC (including its employees and executives) to Susan Weiner, Esq., Executive Vice President, Deputy General Counsel, NBC Universal, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112.
3. Should NBC license any content to you for any purpose, TWC will hold NBC jointly and severally liable for your unlawful acts, including defamation.
4. All interviews that you have conducted or been involved in relating to TWC (including its employees and executives) are now invalid, because they were based on the representation that the interview was for story by NBC. NBC has terminated its involvement. Therefore, you have no right to use any such interview for any purpose, and should you do so, you would be engaged in misrepresentation, deception and/or fraud.
5. If you are now working with any other news outlet regarding your investigation and story about TWC (including its employees and executives), please provide me with the name and contact information of that news outlet and the person(s) at that company to whom you report, so that we can place that company on notice of my client’s legal claims against them.
6. If you have any intention of publishing or disseminating any story or statements about TWC (including its employees and executives), now or in the future, we demand that you provide my client, in care of this office, a list of every single statement that you intend to publish or disseminate about TWC (including its employees and executives), including all statements by you and by any third parties, so that my client can place you on specific notice of any false and defamatory statements, and demand that you cease and desist from publishing or disseminating any such statements or face a lawsuit for millions of dollars in damages, and that you give my client at least fifteen (15) days to provide you with a response before any story or statements are published or disseminated.
7. Cease and desist from any and all further communications with TWC’s current and former employees and contractors. All such persons have signed confidentiality agreements, and your past communications, and any future communications, with them constitutes an intentional interference with contractual relations.
Pages of demands that I preserve documents in anticipation of potential litigation followed. NBC later denied ever reaching an agreement with Weinstein and said Harder was misrepresenting their communications.
I forwarded the letter to Bertoni. “I don’t want to disregard it, but it strikes me as silly right now,” he said. He thought a copyright claim from NBC on the underlying contents of the interviews was dubious, and that, in any case, he couldn’t imagine the network actually following through on the threat. Still, the line about written assurances that reporting had been terminated “was just shocking to me,” he recalled later.
The last time I answered a call from Lisa Bloom that summer, I expressed astonishment.
“Lisa, you swore, as an attorney and a friend, that you wouldn’t tell his people,” I said.
“Ronan,” she replied. “I am his people.”
I thought of her calls and texts and voicemails pressing me for information, dangling clients, enticing me to meet about Blac Chyna. Bloom reminded me that she’d mentioned she knew Weinstein and Boies. But that was after she made the promise not to disclose anything I told her. And she hadn’t let on that she was actually representing Weinstein in the matter she kept asking about.
Bloom told me Weinstein had optioned her book, that she’d been in an awkward position. “Ronan, you need to come in. I can help. I can talk to David and Harvey. I can make this easier for you.”
“Lisa, this is not appropriate,” I said.
“I don’t know what women you’re talking to,” she said. “But I can give you information about them. If it’s Rose McGowan, we have files on her. I looked into her myself when this first came up. She’s crazy.”
Collecting myself, I told her, “I welcome any information you think might be relevant for any story I might be working on.” Then I got off the phone. Bloom never got around to sending the supposed dirt on McGowan.
CHAPTER 35:
MIMIC
I didn’t accede to Harder’s threat—didn’t even, on Bertoni’s advice, respond to it. I just kept reporting. That month, I finally got Mira Sorvino on the phone. Sorvino, the daughter of actor Paul Sorvino, had come to prominence in the nineties. She’d won an Oscar, in 1995, for Mighty Aphrodite—one of Woody Allen’s films Weinstein had distributed and had emphasized in his threats to NBC. And she’d been a bona fide movie star for the following year or two, culminating in a leading role in another Weinstein film, Mimic. After that she more or less disappeared.
In our first call, Sorvino sounded petrified. “I already lost so much of my career to this,” she told me. “This” was a pattern of sexual harassment from Weinstein while they were working together. At the Toronto International Film Festival in September 1995 to promote Mighty Aphrodite, she found herself in a hotel room with Weinstein. “He started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable, and then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around,” she said. He was trying to kiss her when she scrambled away, improvising ways to ward him off, telling him that it was against her religion to date married men. Then she left the room.
A few weeks later, in New York City, her phone rang after midnight. It was Weinstein, saying that he had new marketing ideas for Mighty Aphrodite and asking to get together. Sorvino offered to meet him at an all-night diner, but he said he was coming over to her apartment and hung up. “I freaked out,” she told me. She called a friend and asked him to come over and pose as her boyfriend. The friend hadn’t arrived by the time Weinstein rang her doorbell. “Harvey had managed to bypass my doorman,” she said. “I opened the door terrified, brandishing my twenty-pound Chihuahua mix in front of m
e, as though that would do any good.” When she told Weinstein that her new boyfriend was on his way, he seemed dejected and left.
Sorvino said that she felt afraid and intimidated; when she told a female employee at Miramax about the harassment, the woman’s reaction “was shock and horror that I had mentioned it.” Sorvino recalled “the look on her face, like I was suddenly radioactive.”
Sorvino was convinced that, after she rejected Weinstein, he’d retaliated against her, blacklisted her, hurt her career. But she acknowledged the difficulty of ever proving this point. Sorvino appeared in a few more of Weinstein’s films after Mighty Aphrodite. On Mimic, when Weinstein and his brother, Bob, had fired the film’s director, Guillermo del Toro, and recut the film against his wishes, she’d objected and fought on del Toro’s behalf. “I can’t say definitively whether it was the Mimic fight or it was his advances,” she told me, “but it is my strong feeling I was retaliated against for refusing and then reporting this harassment.” Later, her suspicions would be borne out: the director Peter Jackson said that, when he was considering casting Sorvino and Ashley Judd in The Lord of the Rings, Weinstein had interceded. “I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs,” Jackson later told a reporter. “At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us. But in hindsight, I realize that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing.”
Sorvino told me that she’d struggled for years with whether to come forward with her story and argued—to me but also, it seemed, to herself—that her experience was mild enough that maybe she didn’t have to. But Sorvino’s claim, like the others that involved unwanted advances but not assault, were pivotal in establishing Weinstein’s M.O.