Little Park

Little Park was the Tribeca restaurant whose tucked-away bar became the meeting place for Jodi Kantor and the company accountant Irwin Reiter as he disclosed what he knew about Harvey Weinstein. The choice carried an edge: Weinstein’s office was six blocks away, in a neighborhood whose transformation was bound up with Miramax’s rise. In the bar’s relative privacy, the reporters returned to their source over several weeks, turning scattered, guarded accounts into leads they could investigate and verify.

Setting and choice of meeting place

Reiter arranged the first meeting for 9:30 p.m. at the bar behind Little Park, setting terms before he and Kantor met: he would ask the questions, could leave after five minutes, and would pay the check. Kantor was surprised by the location. Tribeca was Weinstein’s world: after Miramax moved its offices there decades earlier, the company’s ascent had helped reshape a formerly gritty neighborhood into one associated with wealth, prestige, expensive restaurants, multimillion-dollar lofts, and a famous film festival. The Weinstein Company, which Weinstein had cofounded with his brother in 2005, was only six blocks away. Little Park seemed the sort of stylish, costly place Weinstein himself might frequent. Kantor did not challenge Reiter’s decision; if he wanted to meet close to Weinstein’s orbit, that was where they would meet.

The restaurant’s public bustle gave way at the back to a less exposed setting. On Monday night, September 18, Kantor entered the busy dining room and looked around, hoping not to encounter anyone she knew who might interrupt. She continued to an almost hidden, sparsely populated bar. It resembled a dim, clubby living room, with couches and wing chairs set in separated clusters and ample room between them. The arrangement made a private conversation possible without removing the meeting from the city and neighborhood where Weinstein’s business operated.

The first meeting

Before she found Reiter, Kantor wondered whether he might be a spy placed to discover what the reporter knew. The man waiting in an armchair at the back did not fit that suspicion: he was short, in his fifties, visibly nervous, and glancing over his shoulder. He made dark jokes about evading the goons he believed Weinstein had employed. His avuncular manner and bridge-and-tunnel cadence contrasted with his anxiety. In the room’s relative privacy, the tension was not simply about what he might reveal; it was also about the risks he believed surrounded the act of speaking.

Kantor initially asked about financial details from old settlements. Reiter seemed puzzled, perhaps disappointed, by her focus on the past. He redirected her toward what he described as more recent offenses against employees. Kantor and Megan Twohey had few confirmed details about those events beyond the 2015 police investigation of Weinstein’s behavior. When Kantor pressed for more, Reiter tensed and spoke elliptically, mentioning a young development executive who read scripts and another employee who had worked at The Weinstein Company while in business school. He offered initials, including EN and LO, but resisted saying more. His expressed concern was that Weinstein be stopped from what he had been doing to young women at the company.

A recurring reporting room

For the next two weeks, Kantor and Reiter met every few nights, almost always late, at the bar behind Little Park. The meetings became a repeated, carefully contained part of the reporting process. Kantor and Twohey told no one beyond their editors; in emails and texts, they referred to Reiter only as the source or Jodi’s guy. Reiter repeatedly swore each meeting would be the last because his job was at stake. He sometimes supplied information, sometimes withheld it, and at times refused to attach names. His account moved unevenly between episodes that seemed central and others that were difficult to establish or whose relevance was not yet clear. He did not claim to understand everything that had happened at the company, and he did not tell the story in order.

The bar was therefore not where a finished account simply arrived. Between meetings, Kantor and Twohey worked to test Reiter’s fragments: they spoke to former employees, sought records, and contacted the women he had alluded to. Their questions were concrete—what Weinstein had done to these young women, and what evidence could substantiate the accounts. As the reporting progressed, they began to see that Reiter’s information opened onto a longer investigation. During 2014 and 2015, the producer’s danger to women had become more visible within the company’s senior ranks, with problems surfacing repeatedly.

From guarded source to documentary lead

On September 28, five days after Twohey’s article about the amfAR transactions was published, Kantor met Reiter at the same bar. Reiter had been texting her about how employees at The Weinstein Company read and discussed the article. He had not participated in the transactions: Weinstein’s theater business was separate. But Reiter said he and other employees were riveted by seeing someone hold their boss to account. The meeting connected the reporters’ work beyond the private exchange in the bar: an article about the charity transactions had prompted a reaction inside the company, while editors were urging the reporters to begin composing an initial Weinstein article. Kantor and Twohey still wanted stronger documentation of what had happened at the company, material they could publish without identifying their source.

Reiter had mentioned a memo by junior executive Lauren O’Connor, whom he described as well respected and as having left over Weinstein’s treatment of women. When Kantor asked to see the memo again, he began reading it aloud from his phone, then stopped. He said he was going to the restroom, threw her the phone with the email open, and left her alone. After indignation, unsuccessful efforts to intervene, and moments of giving up, Reiter had taken an action the narrative presents as irrevocable: he was helping Kantor access a document that could support the reporting. Little Park’s secluded bar had served first as the setting for suspicion and fragmented disclosures, then as the site of a consequential handoff. Its significance lies in that progression—from a discreet meeting place in Weinstein’s own neighborhood to a point of access to evidence about the company.