Black Cube

Black Cube was an Israeli firm whose work for Harvey Weinstein went beyond conventional surveillance: its operatives used false identities and social engineering to approach women, journalists, and potential sources. Hired as Weinstein faced scrutiny over his treatment of women, the firm became part of an effort to gather information about those who might speak out and, under a revised contract, to stop The New York Times from publishing its investigation. Its methods also drew a serious conflict-of-interest question because the lawyer who helped arrange the work represented the newspaper.

From surveillance to deception

Weinstein had long hired private detectives to protect his reputation. Their work could include watching journalists, writing reports, and searching reporters’ garbage. The book distinguishes that familiar, if disreputable, practice from Black Cube’s more interventionist approach: the firm manipulated targets as well as observing them. Its operatives included former military intelligence experts, and it used an actor operating under a false identity to deceive people who did not know they were being approached on Weinstein’s behalf.

Weinstein had begun a secret relationship with the firm nine months before an October 2016 email to David Boies. In the message, he said Black Cube had been put in touch with him through Ehud Barak and asserted that Boies’s firm had used it. Boies, Schiller & Flexner had indeed used Black Cube previously. That October, the law firm executed an agreement between Weinstein and the Israeli company; under the contract, Weinstein agreed to pay $100,000 a month for work intended to shield his conduct from scrutiny. The arrangement connected a client seeking to contain damaging reporting with a firm capable of covertly approaching the people who might supply it.

Undercover approaches to women and journalists

Seth Freedman, a British freelance journalist, supplied Black Cube with information he collected from women Weinstein feared might go public. Freedman approached women while presenting himself as a reporter who had worked for The Guardian. Depending on the approach, he described his subject as life in Hollywood or the film industry. Katherine Kendall and other women who received his calls said they spoke freely, believing they were talking to a journalist doing ordinary reporting. The discrepancy between that appearance and his role for Black Cube was central to how the operation obtained information.

The firm also targeted Benjamin Wallace, who was investigating Weinstein’s treatment of women for New York Magazine. Freedman contacted Wallace offering information but did not deliver it. A female Black Cube agent also approached Wallace while posing as a potential source. She used the name Anna; Wallace, wary that she might be working for Weinstein, disclosed little. He and his editors eventually suspended the investigation. Wallace later described the story as seeming to have reached a dead end because no one was talking; the account places Black Cube’s approaches within that stalled reporting effort without establishing that they alone caused it.

By May 2017, the agent using the name Anna was approaching Rose McGowan under another identity: Diana Filip, who claimed to be an executive at Reuben Capital Partners, a London wealth-management firm. Filip spoke with a German accent, used a UK mobile number, and offered McGowan $60,000 for a speaking engagement. Over the following months, the two met at least three times in places convenient to McGowan. Their conversations lasted for hours and centered on women’s issues and Filip’s stated interest in investing in McGowan’s production company. McGowan also read her a passage from her memoir. Filip presented herself as someone who cared about women; in the operation, the relationship also gave the agent access to information about McGowan and her book.

A contract to stop publication

In July 2017, Boies helped renegotiate Black Cube’s contract with Weinstein. The revision addressed both the firm’s billing dispute with him and the journalists’ investigation. Black Cube expected a bonus for obtaining information about McGowan’s memoir; Weinstein disputed the payment, arguing that the pages largely repeated her tweet. At the same time, the revised agreement made the reporting objective explicit: the firm was to provide intelligence to help Weinstein stop publication of a negative article in a leading New York newspaper. The contract assigned the agent known as Anna, or Diana Filip, to the work full time, alongside a so-called freelance journalist.

The revised terms described a broader operational toolkit: operators creating false identities on social media, linguists, and operations experts focused on social engineering, advised by former heads of Israeli intelligence services. If Black Cube stopped the article from appearing, it stood to receive a $300,000 bonus. Boies signed the new contract on July 11, weeks before Lanny Davis met with Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Rebecca Corbett at The New York Times. Davis’s meeting did not disclose that an agent from Black Cube had attended his first meeting with Weinstein. He later told Megan Twohey that he had not known precisely what the agent was doing for his client.

The operation reaches the reporters

The approach to Kantor showed how the operation could present itself as an ordinary professional invitation. The same week Davis met the Times journalists, Diana Filip emailed and texted Kantor, claiming to represent Reuben Capital Partners and inviting her to take part in events about women in the workplace. Kantor declined. The invitation was poorly suited to her role: she was reporting, not participating in workplace activism, and Times ethics rules prohibited journalists from accepting corporate speaking engagements. Filip followed up; Kantor replied that she was tied up and wished her luck with the project. At the time, Kantor did not know the overture came from an agent hired to undermine the investigation.

The surveillance also included efforts to map the journalists’ sources. Lisa Bloom, whom Weinstein had retained, collaborated with the Black Cube agent and worked with private investigator Sara Ness, who compiled dossiers on journalists investigating Weinstein. The dossiers tracked their social-media activity, including whom Kantor and Farrow followed on Twitter and when they began following them, in an attempt to infer who their sources might be. They named several important sources. Some assessments were already out of date: the dossier questioned whether McGowan would speak to Kantor or Farrow even though the reporters had been talking with her for weeks. Bloom’s role linked the undercover approaches to a wider effort to monitor both the journalists and women who might accuse Weinstein.

Exposure and institutional consequences

Ronan Farrow later uncovered Black Cube’s work for Weinstein, including the operation’s use of false identities and the contract that specified stopping publication as an objective. The revelations placed the firm’s tactics in the same account as the effort to suppress the Times investigation, rather than leaving its approaches to McGowan, Wallace, or Kantor to appear as unrelated encounters.

The arrangement also exposed a direct institutional contradiction. Boies’s firm had helped execute and revise Weinstein’s contract with Black Cube even as it represented The New York Times in legal matters. Boies said he believed Black Cube would gather facts supporting Weinstein’s defense and that he had not known about the firm’s underhanded tactics against journalists; he regretted not paying closer attention. He maintained that his firm’s actions did not create a conflict of interest. The newspaper nevertheless fired the firm, describing its actions as “reprehensible.” Black Cube’s significance in the account therefore lies not only in its covert methods, but in the way those methods connected Weinstein’s attempt to control a story with professional and institutional relationships that were supposed to serve other interests.