Ronan Farrow published a new piece on the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and this should answer a lot of questions. Many people – even allies – sometimes wonder why it took so long for Weinstein’s victims to come forward, why more victims didn’t speak out publicly before now, why so many women still felt so intimidated and handcuffed within and by the Hollywood system. Here’s one answer: because when only a handful of women were thinking of speaking out, when only a couple of journalists were working to locate Weinstein’s victims, Harvey Weinstein hired a team of private security agents, former spies and ex-Mossad operatives to intimidate the victims, to gather information about the victims and to actually lie to victims in person. The same “private security” operatives also targeted the few journalists working on the Weinstein stories. You can read the latest New Yorker piece here. Here’s the intro:

In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.

The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.

In some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers, including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Times story about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times, including in a libel case.

Techniques like the ones used by the agencies on Weinstein’s behalf are almost always kept secret, and, because such relationships are often run through law firms, the investigations are theoretically protected by attorney-client privilege, which could prevent them from being disclosed in court. The documents and sources reveal the tools and tactics available to powerful individuals to suppress negative stories and, in some cases, forestall criminal investigations.

In a statement, Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, said, “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”

[From The New Yorker]

The rest of the story made my skin crawl – a woman who called herself Diana Filip, claiming to be a “wealth manager,” actually met with Rose McGowan repeatedly. Filip told McGowan that she (Filip) was a victim too, and Filip tried to get information out of McGowan over the course of several in-person meetings. Filip was actually a Black Cube agent who was likely recording all of her meetings for Weinstein. Filip also met with a New York Mag journalist named Ben Wallace, attempted to meet with Ronan Farrow, and tried to contact the NYT’s Jodi Kantor. The attempts to contact journalists were probably more of a scheme to gather information, but the way these operatives contacted Weinstein’s victims has a larger purpose: Weinstein was looking for any and all weaknesses with the women he had already abused. He was actively looking for ways to discredit them, to call them liars, sluts and famewhores and to dismiss them or pay them off. Plus, I bet he got off on listening to all of those recordings too. Jesus Christ.

The part about David Boies will have largerepercussions – acting as Weinstein’s lawyer, Boies contracted and paid the two security agencies, Black Cube and Kroll, and he got all of their reports too. Boies tells Farrow that he wasn’t directing the agencies’ work and it wasn’t his choice to hire them. Boies also denies any conflict of interest, but the New York Times has already released a statement about it: “We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters. We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable, and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies.”

Photos courtesy of WENN.