by Ronan Farrow
Sorvino was formidable. She’d graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. And she’d advocated for charitable causes related to the abuse of women, including as a UN Goodwill Ambassador to Combat Human Trafficking. It was evident, from our first conversations, that she was undertaking a careful analysis, and that her sense of wider ethical obligations weighed heavily in it.
“When you first wrote,” she said, “I had a nightmare, that you showed up with a video camera and asked about working with Woody.” She was sorry for my sister, she said. I told her—awkwardly, talking too fast, changing the subject—that half my friends in the industry had worked with Allen, that it didn’t take away from her performance, that it was my sister’s issue, not mine, that she shouldn’t worry about it. But I could sense her worrying, and reflecting, just the same.
Sorvino decided she’d help and, over the course of several calls, went fully on the record. But the fear in her voice never left. “When people go up against power brokers there is punishment,” she said. I realized her anxieties went beyond career considerations. She asked if I had security, if I’d thought about the risk of disappearing, of an “accident” befalling me. I said I was fine, that I was taking precautions, then wondered what precautions I was actually taking, other than glancing over my shoulder a lot. “You should be careful,” she said. “I’m afraid he has connections beyond just professional ones. Nefarious connections that could hurt people.”
The voices kept tumbling in. After Rosanna Arquette’s representatives went dark, I found her sister, who promised to pass on the request. A few days later, Arquette and I were on the phone. “I knew this day would come,” she said. “The anxiety that’s in my chest right now—it’s off the charts.” She sat down, tried to collect herself. “I just have this ‘danger, danger’ alarm going on,” she told me.
Arquette told me that, in the early nineties, she’d agreed to meet Weinstein for dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel to pick up the script for a new film. At the hotel, she was instructed to meet him upstairs, in his room. Arquette recalled that, when she arrived at the room, Weinstein opened the door wearing a white bathrobe. He said that his neck was sore and that he needed a massage. She told him that she could recommend a good masseuse. “Then he grabbed my hand,” she said. “He put it on his neck.” When she yanked her hand away, Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it toward his penis, which was visible and erect. “My heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,” she said. She told Weinstein, “I will never do that.”
Weinstein told her that she was making a huge mistake by rejecting him, and named an actress and a model who he claimed had given in to his sexual overtures and whose careers he said he had advanced as a result. Arquette said she responded, “I’ll never be that girl,” and left. Arquette’s story was important because of how closely it hewed to others I’d heard: professional pretext, meeting moved upstairs, hotel room, request for massage, bathrobe.
Arquette shared Sorvino’s conviction that her career had suffered because she rejected Weinstein. “He made things very difficult for me for years,” she said. Her small role in Pulp Fiction did come afterward. But Arquette felt she only got the part because of its size and Weinstein’s deference to the director, Quentin Tarantino. This, too, was a leitmotif: Sorvino had suspected that her romantic relationship with Tarantino at the time had shielded her from retaliation, and that this protection had dissipated when the two split up. Later, Tarantino would say publicly that he could have, should have, done more.
Arquette, like Sorvino, had a history of advocating for vulnerable and exploited people. The bigger picture was inescapable for her. She spoke of a cabal that was wider and deeper than Weinstein. “This is the big boys’ club, the Hollywood mafia,” she said. “They protect each other.” Over the course of several conversations, she agreed to be a part of the story.
When I told her Weinstein was already aware of my reporting, Arquette said, “He’s gonna be working very hard to track people down and silence people. To hurt people. That’s what he does.” She didn’t think the story would ever break. “They’re gonna discredit every woman who comes forward,” she said. “They’ll go after the girls. And suddenly the victims will be perpetrators.”
By then, Black Cube had already circulated another profile. It assessed Arquette’s likelihood to talk, mentioning her friendship with McGowan, her social media posts about sexual misconduct, and even a family member who had experienced abuse.
The day of my first conversation with Arquette, Lacy Lynch, the literary agent working with McGowan, sent an email to Harvey Weinstein, suggesting they meet up. A week later, Weinstein, Lynch, and Jan Miller, the founder of the agency where Lynch worked, sat together at the Lambs Club, a restaurant in midtown Manhattan decorated with pictures of old Broadway and Hollywood. Lynch and Miller pitched Weinstein on various literary properties they’d acquired. “I just had dinner with Lacy Lynch and Jan,” Weinstein wrote afterward to Glasser, his company’s COO. Weinstein described his favorite pitch, a story drawn from a book Lynch had sold about police brutality. “I think this could be great for Jay Z,” Weinstein wrote.
That summer, Lynch had been drawing closer to Weinstein. She feared his ability to retaliate against her clients with ties to him. Later, she would say publicly that she knew he was interested in her because of her connection to McGowan, and that she was just playing along. If that was the case, he never caught on. At the Lambs Club, Weinstein, Lynch, and Miller talked shop. Then Weinstein offered the women tickets to see a performance of Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway.
In the months since Lynch had introduced them, McGowan and Diana Filip had continued to spend time together. Sometimes they met at hotel bars in LA and New York. Other times they took long walks. Once, McGowan brought Filip to the Venice boardwalk. They ate ice cream as they strolled. The potential speaking engagement had been just the beginning. By that fall, Filip was talking seriously about investing in McGowan’s production company.
That September, in Los Angeles, the two met with one of Filip’s colleagues from Reuben Capital Partners. He, like Filip, was attractive, with a refined, indeterminate accent. He introduced himself as Paul Laurent. He was just as curious about and attentive to McGowan as Filip had been. The three talked about the potential for collaboration and about their shared belief in telling stories that would defend and empower women.
McGowan was still figuring out how to tell her own story, and Filip was there to help. The two discussed how explicitly McGowan was going to identify Weinstein, and under what circumstances. They talked through what McGowan had said to the press, what she was writing in the book. During one of their emotional heart-to-hearts, McGowan told Filip that there was no one else in the world she could trust.
CHAPTER 36:
HUNTER
For months, sources had been telling me that Asia Argento, the Italian actress, had a story to tell about Weinstein. Argento’s father, Dario, was a director famous for his horror films. Argento played a glamorous thief in a crime drama Weinstein had distributed, B. Monkey, and Hollywood had briefly sized up her potential as a stock exotic femme fatale type, a role she gamely played in the Vin Diesel vehicle XXX. But this proved an imperfect fit. There was an edge to Argento, a hint of something dark and maybe damaged.
As with so many others, conversations with her agents and managers had dead-ended. But I had followed Argento on social media and we’d begun “liking” each other’s photos. The day I first spoke to Arquette, Argento and I exchanged messages too. Soon after, we were on the phone.
Argento was terrified, her voice shaking. In a series of long and often emotional interviews, she told me that Weinstein assaulted her while they were working together. In 1997, she was invited to what she understood to be a party thrown by Miramax at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riviera. The invitation came from Fabrizio Lombardo, the head of Miramax Italy—though several executives and assistants told me that his title was a thin cover for hi
s actual role, as Weinstein’s “pimp” in Europe. Lombardo denied it then and has since.
He also denied what Argento told me next: that Lombardo led her not to a party but to Weinstein’s hotel room. She recalled Lombardo telling her, “Oh, we got here too early,” before he left her alone with Weinstein. At first, Weinstein was solicitous, praising her work. Then he left the room. When he returned, he was wearing a bathrobe and holding a bottle of lotion. “He asks me to give a massage. I was like, ‘Look, man, I am no fucking fool,’” Argento told me. “But, looking back, I am a fucking fool.”
Argento said that, after she reluctantly agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. “It wouldn’t stop,” she told me. “It was a nightmare.” At some point, she stopped saying no and feigned enjoyment, because she thought it was the only way the assault would end. “I was not willing,” she told me. “I said, ‘No, no, no.’… It’s twisted. A big, fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale.” Argento, who insisted that she wanted to tell her story in all its complexity, said that she didn’t physically fight him off, something that prompted years of guilt.
“The thing with being a victim is I felt responsible,” she said. “Because if I were a strong woman, I would have kicked him in the balls and run away. But I didn’t. And so I felt responsible.” She described the incident as a “horrible trauma.” Afterward, Argento said, “He kept contacting me.” She described it as “almost stalking.” For a few months, Weinstein seemed obsessed, offering her expensive gifts. What complicated the story, Argento readily allowed, was that she eventually yielded to his further advances. “He made it sound like he was my friend and he really appreciated me.” She had occasional sexual encounters with him over the course of the ensuing years. The first time, several months after the alleged assault, came before the release of B. Monkey. “I felt I had to,” she said. “Because I had the movie coming out and I didn’t want to anger him.” She believed that Weinstein would ruin her career if she didn’t comply. Years later, when she was a single mother dealing with childcare, Weinstein offered to pay for a nanny. She said that she felt “obliged” to submit to his sexual advances. She described the encounters as one-sided and “onanistic.”
This was the complex reality of sexual assault for so many survivors: these were often crimes perpetrated by bosses, family members, people you can’t avoid afterward. Argento told me that she knew the later contact would be used to attack the credibility of her allegation. She offered a variety of explanations for why she returned to Weinstein. She was intimidated, worn down by his stalking. The initial assault made her feel overpowered each time she encountered Weinstein, even years later. “When I see him, it makes me feel little and stupid and weak.” She broke down as she struggled to explain. “After the rape,” she said, “he won.”
Argento embodied, more than any other source, a collision of complications. After her involvement in my reporting, she reached a financial settlement with an actor, Jimmy Bennett, who alleged she had sex with him when he was seventeen. She stood accused of child abuse. In California, where Bennett said the incident took place, it would be illegal, statutory rape. Argento’s attorney later disputed Bennett’s account, accusing him of “sexually attacking” Argento and stating that, while the payment was an appeasement gesture, the arrangement didn’t bar Bennett from disclosing his claim. But the press observed the hypocrisy of Argento’s use of a settlement, given her own claims of victimization by someone who so routinely employed them.
The later settlement had no bearing on an undeniable truth: Argento’s story about Harvey Weinstein checked out, with corroboration from people who had seen things or been told at the time. Perpetrators of sexual abuse can also be survivors of it. Any psychologist familiar with sex offenders will tell you, indeed, that they often are. But this idea found little purchase in an environment where victims were expected to be saints and otherwise were disregarded as sinners. The women who spoke that summer were just people. Acknowledging that all did a courageous thing—Argento included—does not excuse any choices made in the years that followed.
Even before that later scandal, Argento was a lightning rod. As agonizing as the social stigma was for every source in the story, in Italy, as Gutierrez’s case had illustrated, the cultural context was still more viciously sexist. After her allegation against Weinstein, the Italian press branded Argento a “whore.”
In our calls that fall, Argento seemed aware that her reputation was too checkered, the environment in Italy too savage, for her to survive the process. “I don’t give a fuck about my reputation, I’ve already destroyed that myself over the years, as a result of many traumatic experiences, including this,” she told me. “It will definitely destroy my life, my career, everything.” I told her the choice was hers alone, but that I believed it would help the other women. As Argento grappled with the decision, her partner, the television personality and chef Anthony Bourdain, interceded repeatedly. He told her to keep going, that it was worth it, that it would make a difference. Argento decided to go on the record.
The stories multiplied. Sorvino pointed me to Sophie Dix, an English actress who, years earlier, told her a horror story. Dix had appeared in the Weinstein-distributed Colin Firth film The Advocate in the early nineties and then slipped from the spotlight. When I reached her, she was at first apprehensive. “I’m really scared he’ll come after me,” she wrote at one point. “Maybe I shouldn’t stand up and be counted.” But over the course of half a dozen calls, she told me that Weinstein had invited her to his hotel room to view footage from their film, then pushed her onto a bed, tugging her clothes off. She’d fled to a bathroom, hidden for a time, then opened the door to find Weinstein masturbating on the other side of it. She’d been able to escape when room service knocked on the door. It was “a classic case” of “someone not understanding the word ‘no,’” she told me. “I must have said no a thousand times.”
Like all of the allegations that made it into the story, Dix’s account was backed up by, among other things, people she had told, in detail, at the time. Dix’s friends and colleagues were sympathetic but did nothing. Colin Firth, like Tarantino, would later join the ranks of men in the industry who publicly apologized for hearing without really listening. Dix told enough people that Weinstein called her later that year, telling her, “I’m sorry, and is there anything I can do for you?” She sensed, despite the apology, a note of menace. She got off the phone quickly. Afterward, Dix felt disillusioned about the industry, began to drift from acting. She was, by the time we spoke, working as a writer and producer. She feared fallout among the industry colleagues she now depended upon to get films made. The actress Rachel Weisz was part of a contingent of friends who convinced her it was worth the risk. Dix put her name in the story, too.
Argento, in turn, helped me reach French actress Emma de Caunes. De Caunes told me how she’d met Weinstein in 2010, at a party at the Cannes Film Festival, and, a few months later, received an invitation to a lunch meeting with him at the Ritz, in Paris. In the meeting, Weinstein told de Caunes that he was going to be producing a movie with a prominent director, that he planned to shoot it in France, that it had a strong female role. As in Dix’s story and Canosa’s, there was an excuse to adjourn to his room: the project, he said, was an adaptation of a book whose title he could tell her, if only they could go upstairs to retrieve his copy.
De Caunes, wise to this, replied that she had to leave, since she was already running late for a TV show she was hosting. But Weinstein had pleaded until she agreed. In the room, he disappeared into a bathroom, leaving the door open. She assumed that he was washing his hands, until the shower went on. “I was like, What the fuck, is he taking a shower?”
Weinstein came out, naked and with an erection. He demanded that she lie on the bed and told her that many other women had done so before her. “I was very petrified,” de Caunes said.
“But I didn’t want to show him that I was petrified, because I could feel that the more I was freaking out, the more he was excited.” She added, “It was like a hunter with a wild animal. The fear turns him on.” De Caunes told Weinstein that she was leaving. He panicked. “We haven’t done anything!” she remembered him saying. “It’s like being in a Walt Disney movie!”
De Caunes told me, “I looked at him and I said—it took all my courage, but I said, ‘I’ve always hated Walt Disney movies.’ And then I left. I slammed the door.” Weinstein called relentlessly over the next few hours, offering de Caunes gifts and repeating his assertion that nothing had happened. A director she was working with on the TV show confirmed that she arrived at the studio distraught and that she recounted what had happened.
De Caunes, who was in her early thirties at the time, was already an established actress. But she wondered what would happen to younger and more vulnerable women in the same situation. She, too eventually went on the record—for their sake. “I know that everybody—I mean everybody—in Hollywood knows that it’s happening,” de Caunes told me. “He’s not even really hiding. I mean, the way he does it, so many people are involved and see what’s happening. But everyone’s too scared to say anything.”
CHAPTER 37:
HEIST
Virtually every day, I encountered dead ends. Some accusers declined to talk at all. All summer, I’d pursued Lauren O’Connor, a former literary scout at the Weinstein Company. In 2015, she’d written an internal memo complaining about Weinstein’s behavior with employees. He’d been verbally abusive to her, and she’d learned of his predation. At one point, a young woman had pounded on her hotel-room door, crying, shaking, and eventually recounting a familiar story about Weinstein propositioning her for a massage. “I am a 28 year old woman trying to make a living and a career,” O’Connor wrote in the memo. “Harvey Weinstein is a 64 year old, world famous man and this is his company. The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10.” But O’Connor had signed a nondisclosure agreement and was still too afraid to talk. Late that September, an intermediary called to say that O’Connor had consulted a lawyer and made her final decision. “She is terrified and will not engage. With anyone,” the intermediary told me. O’Connor didn’t want me to use her name.