The amfAR auction proceeds’ transfer to Finding Neverland investors was a disputed $600,000 transaction that revealed how a financial arrangement connected to Harvey Weinstein’s Broadway production could draw an AIDS charity, its board, and its investigators into a struggle over transparency. Megan Twohey’s reporting followed the money from a 2015 gala auction in Cannes to the production’s investors, and made the transaction a separate line of inquiry into Weinstein’s influence over institutions and the resistance facing those who tried to examine his conduct.

Background and the Transaction

In 2015, amfAR, an AIDS charity, raised $600,000 at an auction associated with its splashy Cannes fund-raiser. Weinstein had helped the organization stage these events. As Finding Neverland struggled to get its Broadway production off the ground, he arranged for the auction proceeds to pass, through a series of complicated transactions, into the accounts of investors in the show. The transfer was not disclosed to the charity.

The arrangement unsettled some of amfAR’s leaders. They felt duped and feared that something illegal might have occurred. The money’s destination made the matter more than an accounting question: it linked charitable funds raised for AIDS research to investors in a production connected to Weinstein. Twohey’s reporting later found that Weinstein appeared to have used more than half a million dollars raised for AIDS research to reimburse his own investors. The account did not establish that a crime had been committed; legal experts told her the arrangement might amount to fraud, while its legality remained a question.

The Review and the Emerging Questions

amfAR’s board hired lawyer Tom Ajamie to investigate the transaction. He told Twohey that the review was unlike anything he had experienced: Weinstein blocked his examination at every turn, while David Boies used nondisclosure agreements to muzzle members of the board. Ajamie’s account placed the financial inquiry within a broader pattern of difficulty getting information about Weinstein and his business dealings.

The more Ajamie asked about Weinstein, the more he heard allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. In October 2016, troubled by those claims, he raised them with Lisa Bloom over a drink in Los Angeles. Ajamie had previously met Bloom and was impressed by her feminist credentials; he hoped she might be willing to take on Weinstein as she had taken on other powerful men. This connection matters to the transaction’s place in the reporting: the charity inquiry did not itself establish the allegations about women, but it brought Ajamie into contact with information that widened the questions surrounding Weinstein.

Twohey’s Reporting and Resistance

Twohey spent two weeks piecing together the route taken by the $600,000. Jodi Kantor and the editors worried that the financial story might distract from the larger investigation into how Weinstein treated women. Twohey nevertheless continued because the transaction seemed to show how he could bend an institution to his will. She confirmed that the New York State Office of the Attorney General was investigating and obtained internal records showing grave concern among people at amfAR. The charity’s chief financial officer had written, “Nothing about this deal feels right to me.”

The reporting also documented the obstacles around the review. Boies had helped silence amfAR’s board when it sought an outside investigation. In an interview with Twohey, he spent nearly two hours arguing against the story’s implications, with Lanny Davis and Charlie Prince, a Weinstein Company attorney, reinforcing the defense that there was nothing to see. On September 19, Weinstein himself came to the fourth floor of The New York Times Building to confront Twohey and try to beat back the story. The face-to-face pressure was part of the reporting’s chronology, not proof in itself of wrongdoing; the underlying concern remained the documented path of the funds and the unresolved questions about it.

Publication and Aftermath

Twohey’s article about the amfAR matter was published five days before September 28, 2017. Its reception inside The Weinstein Company gave the story a significance beyond the charity’s financial review. Employees read and discussed it; Irwin Reiter, who had not been involved in the transactions because Weinstein’s theater business was separate, told Kantor that he and other employees were riveted. They were watching someone hold their boss to account. Weinstein continued to deny wrongdoing.

The article was followed by official scrutiny, though not by a public resolution in the account. Federal investigators in Manhattan opened a criminal inquiry into the transactions and had made no public comment about the examination’s status. The New York State Office of the Attorney General wrote to amfAR that the transactions raised concerns, including whether they “resulted in benefits to private interests,” and told the charity to strengthen its corporate governance. The letter identified a governance problem for the organization to address; it did not announce a finding of criminal guilt.

Significance

The transaction’s importance lies both in the question of where the auction money went and in the resistance that surrounded attempts to find out. The account sets the public purpose of a charity auction against the private benefit alleged to have reached investors in a struggling production. It also traces how nondisclosure agreements, pressure on investigators, and uncertainty inside an institution could impede scrutiny without settling the underlying legal question.

For the reporters, the financial inquiry risked becoming a detour from the investigation of Weinstein’s treatment of women. Instead, it offered a distinct example of institutional influence and an avenue through which Ajamie encountered further allegations. The subsequent article’s effect inside the company, and the attention from authorities that followed, made the transaction part of the wider story of efforts to hold Weinstein and the institutions around him to account.