The 2015 complaint by Ambra Battilana Gutierrez and the New York City Police Department investigation brought an allegation against Harvey Weinstein into official scrutiny, but did not result in criminal charges. The case also exposed a second struggle over what could be known: prosecutors declined to proceed, the police withheld the incident report, and Weinstein pressed a newspaper to leave the investigation out of its coverage.

Background and Complaint

Rumors about Weinstein’s treatment of women had circulated for years, but, according to the account, many people dismissed his behavior as philandering, and it had not been publicly documented. Earlier reporting efforts had failed to produce a story. In 2015, the New York City Police Department investigated an allegation that Weinstein had groped Gutierrez, an Italian model, during a meeting in his office. The case stood out because Gutierrez apparently was the only woman known to have reported the producer to law enforcement.

The investigation involved undercover detectives, and Gutierrez apparently made a recording in which Weinstein discussed what had happened. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office ultimately declined to prosecute. The account establishes that no criminal charges followed; it does not treat that decision as proof that the allegation was unfounded.

The Case and the Limits of Access

When Megan Twohey pursued the case for The New York Times, she was unable to get a response from Gutierrez. The New York City Police Department also refused to provide her with the incident report, citing its longstanding policy against releasing such records. With the central document inaccessible and the model not responding, Twohey called lawyers and others who might know about the investigation.

Twohey contacted Linda Fairstein, a prominent sex-crimes prosecutor whom she had previously interviewed while reporting on DNA evidence in Chicago. Fairstein had worked in the same sex-crimes division that declined to bring charges. After learning why Twohey had called, Fairstein took a cool tone and insisted that Gutierrez’s allegations were unfounded, that no criminal conduct had occurred, and that the case had been handled properly. Her statements conveyed Fairstein’s position; the account does not present them as an independent finding resolving the allegation.

Weinstein’s Effort to Shape Coverage

The investigation had already become difficult for The New York Times to cover. In 2015, as the paper prepared a story about the Broadway debut of Finding Neverland, Weinstein yelled at an editor in its Culture department and demanded that the story omit the fact that he had come under police investigation over Gutierrez’s complaint. He maintained that the accusation was false and argued that the paper should disregard it, although the case had already received wide coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere.

Executive editor Dean Baquet directed staff to retain the reference and told Weinstein not to address his journalists that way again. The confrontation over a theater story foreshadowed the much greater stakes of a broader investigation into Weinstein’s treatment of women. Baquet anticipated that Weinstein would do nearly anything to stop that reporting; Weinstein and his lawyer David Boies had already sought off-the-record conversations with Baquet and the publisher.

Consequences and Significance

The complaint and investigation ended without prosecution, but their significance in the book extends beyond that outcome. The absence of charges coexisted with an undercover recording, an inaccessible police report, and sharply different accounts of how the case should be understood. Each fact shaped the reporting problem without, by itself, settling the underlying allegation.

The episode also illustrates how the pressure surrounding a story could operate before publication: access to records was restricted, a potential source was unreachable, and Weinstein tried directly to remove the investigation from a newspaper article. The episode became part of the context in which The New York Times pursued a more consequential account of his conduct.