The Black Cube operation to obstruct The New York Times’ Weinstein investigation was a covert campaign commissioned by Harvey Weinstein and shaped, in part, by his lawyer David Boies. It sought not merely to monitor reporters but to manipulate sources and impede publication. Its methods included false identities, deceptive approaches to women and journalists, and a contract that made stopping the article an explicit objective.

Background and the Original Arrangement

Weinstein had long used private detectives to protect his reputation. Such firms watched journalists, wrote reports and sometimes searched through reporters’ garbage. The practice was considered shady in the informal rules governing journalists and their subjects, but it was not described as surprising or illegal. The Black Cube arrangement marked a change in kind: the firm did not simply observe people but also manipulated them, including through operatives posing under invented identities.

In an email to Boies on October 16, 2016, Weinstein referred to Black Cube as an Israeli firm and said it had been introduced to him through Ehud Barak. He also noted that the firm claimed Boies’s law firm had used it. Boies’s firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, had in fact worked with Black Cube before; it soon executed an agreement between Weinstein and the company. Under a contract struck that October, Weinstein agreed to pay Black Cube $100,000 a month to shield his conduct from scrutiny. At the time of Weinstein’s email, two of the firm’s operatives had recently been arrested in Romania on hacking charges. That detail situates the firm’s work amid serious allegations about its methods, though the account does not establish that those operatives’ arrests concerned the Weinstein assignment.

Deceptive Approaches and Intended Targets

One channel ran through Seth Freedman, a British freelance journalist who supplied Black Cube with information he was collecting from women Weinstein feared might disclose damaging material. Freedman presented himself to the women 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 spoke with him said they believed they were talking to a journalist and did not suspect that he was working for a different purpose.

Black Cube also targeted Benjamin Wallace, who was investigating Weinstein’s treatment of women for New York Magazine. Freedman contacted Wallace offering information that never arrived. A female agent, presenting herself as a potential source, also met Wallace. He said little because he suspected she might be working for Weinstein. With sources elusive and the story appearing to have reached a dead end, Wallace and his editors eventually suspended the investigation. The account does not reduce that decision to the agent’s approach alone; it shows the approach within a wider reporting environment in which potential sources were not talking.

By May 2017, the same agent was approaching Rose McGowan under another identity: Diana Filip. She claimed to lead sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners, a London wealth-management firm. She used a German accent and a UK mobile number, offered McGowan $60,000 for a speaking engagement, and presented herself as interested in women’s issues and in investing in McGowan’s production company. Over the following months, they met at least three times, in cities convenient to McGowan, and spoke at length. McGowan even read her a passage from her memoir. The trust created by the assumed identity gave the operative access to conversation and material that McGowan did not understand to be part of an intelligence-gathering effort.

The July Revision and the Times Investigation

By July 2017, the arrangement had two immediate complications. Weinstein and Black Cube were disputing a bill: the firm expected a bonus for obtaining information about McGowan’s memoir, while Weinstein argued that the pages largely repeated a tweet. At the same time, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were reporting on Weinstein for The New York Times. Boies helped renegotiate the contract to address both the billing dispute and the threat posed by the journalists’ investigation.

The revised agreement made the publication campaign explicit. Black Cube was to provide intelligence to help Weinstein stop a negative article in a leading New York newspaper. The agent known as Anna, who had approached Wallace and McGowan as Diana Filip, was assigned to the case full time, alongside a so-called freelance journalist. The contract also provided for operators using fabricated social-media identities, linguists and operations specialists focused on social engineering, with advice from former heads of Israeli intelligence services. If Black Cube succeeded in stopping publication, it would receive a $300,000 bonus. Boies signed the revision on July 11, weeks before Lanny Davis met with Kantor, Twohey and Rebecca Corbett at The New York Times.

The operation also intersected with the journalists’ efforts to obtain Weinstein’s response. During his meeting with them, Davis dangled the possibility of an interview but did not disclose that a Black Cube agent had been present at his first meeting with Weinstein. He told Twohey about the agent only later, saying he had not known exactly what the operative was doing for his client. In the same week as the Davis meeting, Kantor received messages from the woman using the Diana Filip identity. The woman said she represented Reuben Capital Partners and wanted Kantor to contribute to events about advancing women in the workplace. Kantor declined, but the approach extended the operation’s deceptive contact beyond McGowan and Wallace to one of the reporters preparing the investigation.

Secrecy as a Wider Obstacle

The Black Cube campaign operated in a context where secrecy already constrained what could be learned about harassment. In separate sexual-harassment settlements examined by the reporters, women could be required to surrender recordings, diaries, emails and other evidence, while restrictions could also prevent them or their lawyers from helping others with similar claims. Such terms were not the same thing as Black Cube’s intelligence operation, but they formed part of the broader landscape the investigation was trying to expose: information about alleged conduct could be hidden from future employees, journalists and the public.

Those agreements could be attractive to women seeking money, privacy or a way to move on, especially when litigation offered uncertain returns. The book describes federal protections that excluded some workers, a filing deadline that could be as short as 180 days, and damages capped at $300,000. It also describes lawyers paid contingently, with losing in court potentially bringing them no fee. These pressures help explain why private settlements recurred; they do not establish that any particular settlement produced the Black Cube operation. Together, the two mechanisms illuminate different forms of concealment: contractual restrictions could keep claims and evidence out of view, while covert approaches attempted to gather information and interfere with the reporting that might bring those claims into public view.

The operation’s significance lies in that deliberate turn against scrutiny. Black Cube’s work reached toward potential sources, a competing journalist, McGowan and the Times reporters, while the revised contract tied the effort to a financial reward for stopping publication. The campaign made the investigation not just a story about Weinstein’s conduct but also a contest over who could control the information surrounding it.