by Ronan Farrow
Documents and sources illuminated Weinstein’s long relationship with Kroll and Dan Karson, the firm’s chairman of Investigations and Disputes for America. One former Weinstein staffer remembered a call in the early 2010s during which Karson said, of a chauffeur who was involved in a dispute with Weinstein, “You know we can put this guy at the bottom of a lake.” The staffer assumed it was a figure of speech but was uncomfortable enough to note it down. Through the years, Kroll had assisted in Weinstein’s efforts to thwart reporters. Several Kroll sources said that Weinstein had assigned the firm to dig up unflattering information about David Carr, the late essayist and media reporter, as he had suspected. One of the dossiers compiled by Weinstein’s private investigators noted that Carr had never included the allegations of sexual abuse in any of his coverage of Weinstein, “due to fear of HW’s retaliation, according to HW.”
In 2016 and 2017, Kroll and Karson had worked closely with Weinstein again. In one October 2016 email, Karson sent Weinstein eleven photographs of McGowan and Weinstein together at events in the years after he allegedly assaulted her. Weinstein’s criminal defense attorney Blair Berk replied that one photo, which showed McGowan warmly talking with Weinstein, “is the money shot.” As Wallace worked on the story, Kroll searched for damaging information about him and Adam Moss, his editor at New York magazine. “No adverse information about Adam Moss so far (no libel/defamation cases, no court records or judgments/liens/UCC, etc.),” Karson wrote in one email. Kroll also sent Weinstein criticism of Wallace’s previous reporting and a detailed description of a UK libel suit filed in response to a book he wrote, which was ultimately settled out of court.
PSOPS, the firm founded by Jack Palladino and Sandra Sutherland, had assisted in the search for damaging information about reporters and accusers. One PSOPS report on McGowan had sections labeled “Lies/Exaggerations/Contradictions,” “Hypocrisy,” and “Potential Negative Character Wits,” an apparent abbreviation of “witnesses.” A subhead read “Past Lovers.” Palladino sent Weinstein a detailed profile of Moss, noting, “Our research did not yield any promising avenues for the personal impeachment of Moss.” PSOPS even profiled Wallace’s ex-wife, in case she proved “relevant to considerations of our response strategy.” The firm’s work on reporters had carried forward through its dossiers on me and Jodi Kantor, of the Times, seeking to uncover our sources. (Some of the investigators’ observations were more mundane. On Twitter, one document noted, “Kantor is NOT following Ronan Farrow.” You can’t have everything.)
Weinstein had also worked with K2 Intelligence, a second firm founded by Jules Kroll after he sold the firm bearing his name in the 2000s. During the Gutierrez investigation, K2 had been retained by Elkan Abramowitz, Weinstein’s attorney. K2 hired Italian private investigators to dig up rumors about Gutierrez’s sexual history—the Bunga Bunga parties, the prostitution claims she disputed. Current and former K2 employees, all of whom had previously worked at the district attorney’s office, relayed the information about Gutierrez in calls to prosecutors. Lawyers working for Weinstein also presented a dossier of the private investigators’ findings to prosecutors in a face-to-face meeting. Two K2 employees said that those contacts were part of a “revolving door” culture between the DA and high-priced private investigation firms. A spokesperson for Vance’s office later said that such interactions with defense attorneys were standard procedure—and for the wealthy and connected, they were.
The expanding reporting also showed Weinstein’s efforts to enlist journalists in his campaign to undermine accusers. In caches of Weinstein’s communications, his alliance with Dylan Howard of the National Enquirer was inescapable. In one December 2016 exchange, Howard sent Weinstein a list of contacts and suggested they “discuss next steps on each.” After Weinstein thanked him, Howard described his efforts to obtain damaging statements about McGowan from the film producer Elizabeth Avellan. Robert Rodriguez, Avellan’s ex-husband and the father of her children, had left Avellan to have a relationship with McGowan. Weinstein figured Avellan had to be disgruntled.
For some of his work on Weinstein’s behalf, Howard turned to a frequent subcontractor of the National Enquirer, a celebrity photography service called Coleman-Rayner. For the Avellan job, Howard tapped a British reporter who was at the time a news editor at Coleman-Rayner and who had written celebrity gossip items for the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Enquirer itself.
When I reached her on the phone, Avellan told me that she remembered the incident well. The reporter “kept calling and calling and calling,” she said, and also contacted others close to her. Avellan finally called back, because “I was afraid people might start calling my kids.”
Avellan insisted that the call be off the record, and the reporter agreed. Though he was at the time in California, where both parties are legally required to consent to recording, he secretly taped her anyway. And so Weinstein and Howard exchanged their excited emails that winter: Howard writing “I have something AMAZING… eventually she laid into Rose pretty hard”; Weinstein replying, “This is the killer. Especially if my fingerprints r not on this.” Howard assured him there were no prints, and the whole thing had been recorded.
I stayed late at The New Yorker, poring over the emails, a vacuum echoing nearby. It was, it would come to pass, just the tip of the iceberg when it came to the National Enquirer and its work on behalf of prominent men with closely guarded secrets.
As we prepared to publish our report about Weinstein’s army of collaborators, panic set in at the institutions named in it. In several calls, Dylan Howard evinced a mix of flattery and menace. “Careful,” he said, as Weinstein had. Judd Burstein, a lawyer working with Howard, followed up with a letter describing the reporting as defamation and libel. When that didn’t prevail, Howard grew angry. He said of me to two colleagues: “I’m going to get him.”
Black Cube’s UK-based law firm was sending threats, too, promising to take “appropriate action against you” if we published the Black Cube documents or information from them. Inside the agency, Dr. Avi Yanus, the director, contemplated destroying the materials from the Weinstein investigation. “We wish to dispose of every document and information we possess in regards with this project,” he wrote in one email. Then he pressed the agency’s lawyers to seek an injunction to stop The New Yorker from publishing.
But we did publish, and the story reverberated like a gunshot. On one program after another, television personalities expressed disbelief. What did it say about the gulf between the powerful and the powerless that wealthy individuals could intimidate, surveil, and conceal on such a vast scale?
Ostrovskiy, the private investigator, saw the story immediately. He read about Black Cube’s target list, and the journalists on it, and thought back to the jobs of the past summer. He sent the story to Khaykin and asked if he’d seen it. Khaykin replied that they’d have to discuss it in person. A few days later, during a routine stakeout, Ostrovskiy asked again. Khaykin seemed irritated, wanted to get off the subject. But finally, he said, “Now you know who we work for.”
Some time passed before Ostrovskiy had the chance to press the point again. It was the dead of night, and the two private investigators were on a boat in the cold waters just north of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Khaykin loved sailing—he ran a social media account for sailing enthusiasts. The men were heading back to New York after dinner at a waterside restaurant in Atlantic Highlands. Ostrovskiy seized on the chance to bring up Black Cube again.
Khaykin fixed his hard eyes on him and said, “To me, this is like doing a mitzvah. I’m doing something good for Israel.” Ostrovskiy stared back. It was not a mitzvah, and it wasn’t for Israel.
“I’m scared, but it’s interesting and it’s exciting,” Ostrovskiy said of their work for Black Cube, playing along.
“I’m the one who needs to be scared, this whole Weinstein thing was under my license,” Khaykin replied. He quickly added: “It was all legal. We never broke the law.” But he sounded nervo
us.
All through the last days of reporting, the men close to the Black Cube operation had undertaken a frantic hunt for the source who’d passed me the contracts and other documents. “We’re investigating everything. All the parties involved, and what was stolen,” the deeper of the two voices said. He mentioned he was enforcing a new round of polygraphs, and promised to sue anyone he caught. “We find it hard to believe that a worker would go on a suicide mission like this,” the higher voice added.
“I just want to make sure you are not at risk,” I wrote to Sleeper. “I will do all I can to keep you protected.”
A response, quick as usual: “I do appreciate your care… Momentarily, I feel safe.”
Just before we published, I made a last push for the source’s identity. I wrote that knowing more was a matter of journalistic importance. Sleeper told me one thing that made it clear where the documents were coming from—and asked me to do one thing to keep the secret.
There was also a note about motive. “I’m an insider who is fed up with BC’s false and devious ways of obtaining material illegally,” Sleeper wrote. “Moreover, in this case, I truly believe HW is a sex offender and I’m ashamed as a woman for participating.”
I paused, processing this, feeling another moment of hair-prickling realization. That, in the end, is what I can tell you about Sleeper, and the risks she took to uncover something vast. She was a woman and she’d had enough.
“Lets just say that I will never ever give you something that I cant back you for 100%,” she wrote in one of her final messages to me. “I work in the information industry. World of espionage and endless action. Hope we can actually talk about it some day. The project I’m involved in…. out of this world, my dear.”
CHAPTER 50:
PLAYMATE
The reporting on Dylan Howard and the Enquirer opened up a vein. One after another, sources in and around American Media Inc. were calling, saying that Weinstein wasn’t the only figure with whom the tabloid empire had worked to suppress stories.
Late that November, a lawyer, Carol Heller, wrote to me. There was more, she explained, to a report that the Wall Street Journal had published in the fall of 2016, about a Playboy model who’d signed over to AMI the exclusive rights to her story about a purported affair with Donald Trump—a story AMI never published. Heller told me that the woman at the heart of the mystery, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year named Karen McDougal, was still “too frightened” to talk. If I could get her and others around the transaction to open up, I might be able to reveal how the contract with AMI came about, and begin to unravel how the culture of nondisclosure agreements and buried stories extended beyond Hollywood and into politics.
Late that month, I was on the phone with McDougal. She told me the contract with AMI “took my rights away.” It contained a clause that could allow AMI to force her into a private arbitration process and seek financial damages. McDougal was struggling to make ends meet. AMI could wipe her out. “At this point I feel I can’t talk about anything without getting into trouble,” she told me. Of Trump, she said, “I’m afraid to even mention his name.” But as I gathered more evidence, including her contract with AMI and accounts of how it came about from others involved in the process, McDougal began to share her story.
McDougal, who grew up in a small town in Michigan and worked as a preschool teacher before beginning her modeling career, met Trump at a pool party at the Playboy Mansion. It was June 2006, and he was there to shoot an episode of his reality show The Apprentice. “Come on over,” he said to a couple of models in corsets and bunny tails. “Wow, beautiful.” The show’s camera operators zoomed and panned like they were nature photographers and breasts were an endangered species. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. But Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal remembered him being “all over” her, calling her beautiful. Then he asked for her number. The two began talking frequently and, soon after, met for dinner in a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “We talked for a couple hours—then, it was ‘ON’! We got naked + had sex,” McDougal wrote in notes about the affair that I later obtained. As McDougal got dressed and prepared to leave, Trump offered her money. “I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, No thanks—I’m not ‘that girl.’” Afterward, McDougal “went to see him every time he was in LA (which was a lot).”
Over the course of the affair, Trump flew McDougal to public events across the country but hid the fact that he paid for her travel. “No paper trails for him,” her notes read. “Every time I flew to meet him, I booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.” During the relationship, Trump introduced McDougal to members of his family and gave her tours of his properties. In Trump Tower, McDougal wrote, Trump pointed out Melania’s separate bedroom. He “said she liked her space,” McDougal wrote.
In April 2007, after nine months, McDougal ended the affair. Learning more about Trump’s family had brought on a creeping sense of guilt. And Trump’s behavior chafed against her polite Midwestern sensibility. Once, he called McDougal’s mother, who was around his age, “that old hag.” On another occasion, as she and one of her girlfriends joined Trump in his limo on the night of a Miss Universe pageant, he started slinging comments about penis size and pressing McDougal’s girlfriend about her experiences and preferences—asking about “small dicks” and “big dicks” and “black dick.”
A friend of McDougal’s, Johnny Crawford, first proposed selling the story. In 2016, as they watched election-season coverage of Trump, Crawford said, “You know, if you had a physical relationship with him, that could be worth something.” At his urging, McDougal wrote the notes on the affair. She didn’t want to tell her story at first. But when a former friend of hers, fellow Playboy model Carrie Stevens, started posting about the affair on social media, McDougal figured she should talk before someone else did.
Crawford enlisted Jay Grdina, the ex-husband of the porn star Jenna Jameson, to help sell the story. Grdina first brokered two meetings between McDougal and JJ Rendón, a Latin American political operative who was already, by then, denying media reports that he constructed fake bases of support on social media and hacked opponents’ email accounts. When he wasn’t interested, Grdina turned to Keith M. Davidson, an attorney with a track record of selling salacious stories. Davidson got in touch with AMI. Pecker and Howard, in turn, alerted Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer. Soon, Trump was on the phone with Pecker, asking for help.
In June 2016, McDougal and Howard met. Howard then made an offer: initially just $10,000 and then, after Trump won the Republican nomination, considerably more than that. On August 5, 2016, McDougal signed a limited life-story rights agreement granting AMI exclusive ownership of her account of any relationship she’d had with any “then-married man.” Her retainer with Davidson made explicit that the man in question was Donald Trump. In exchange, AMI agreed to pay her $150,000. The three men involved in the deal—Davidson, Crawford, and Grdina—took 45 percent of the payment as fees, leaving McDougal with a total of $82,500. The day she signed the contract, McDougal emailed Davidson to express confusion over what she was signing up for, and how she’d have to respond to questions from reporters. “If you deny, you are safe,” Davidson wrote. “We really do need to get this signed and wrapped up…” “I’m the one who took it, so it’s my fault, too,” McDougal told me. “But I didn’t understand the full parameters of it.”
As voters went to the polls on Election Day in 2016, Howard and AMI’s general counsel were on the phone with McDougal and a law firm representing her, promising to boost McDougal’s career and offering to employ a publicist to help her handle interviews. That publicist was Matthew Hiltzik, flack to Ivanka Trump, who had called me on Weinstein’s behalf—although his services ultimately were not used. AMI responded quickly when journalists tried to interview McDougal. In May 2017, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin,
who was writing a profile of David Pecker, asked McDougal for comment about her relationships with AMI and Trump. Howard, working with a different publicist, forwarded McDougal a draft response with the subject line “SEND THIS.” In August 2017, Pecker flew McDougal to New York and the two had lunch, during which he thanked her for her loyalty.
In late 2017 and early 2018, as we worked on the story, AMI’s interest in enforcing the contract seemed to increase. On January 30, AMI’s general counsel sent an email with the subject line “McDougal contract extension,” proposing a renewal and a new magazine cover to sweeten the deal.
That February, our story ran anyway, with McDougal overcoming her fear and agreeing to speak on the record about the matter for the first time. In the years before, she had become religious and, in turn, fiercely altruistic. “Every girl who speaks is paving the way for another,” she told me. Her own silence was about a consensual affair, but she could help expose a deeper and wider system of burying stories that was sometimes used to cover up more serious, even criminal, behavior.
The White House called the story “just more fake news.” AMI’s general counsel wrote that this report, too, was “false, and defamatory,” and that I’d colluded in “a plot by McDougal and her lawyer to milk AMI for more money.” Howard issued his own threats to publicly attack The New Yorker. AMI insisted that it had declined to print McDougal’s story because it did not find it credible. It just hadn’t met the Enquirer’s exacting journalistic standards.