Boies, Schiller & Flexner

Boies, Schiller & Flexner enters the book not simply as a law firm but as an intermediary whose documented work connected Harvey Weinstein’s effort to stop a newspaper investigation with the company’s attempts to manage legal and financial exposure. The firm had used Black Cube before Weinstein retained it; later, David Boies helped execute and revise Weinstein’s contract with the Israeli firm. At the same time, Boies advised Weinstein and participated in company governance discussions, creating a role that board member Lance Maerov came to regard as conflicted. The account traces how these relationships blurred the boundary between protecting a client, protecting a company, and preventing scrutiny of alleged misconduct.

The firm and Black Cube

Weinstein’s relationship with Black Cube began before the firm’s work on the investigation. In an October 2016 email to Boies, Weinstein described the Israeli company as a group of strategists and noted that Boies’s firm had used it. The account distinguishes Black Cube from ordinary private investigators: its operatives could manipulate targets, including through fabricated identities, rather than merely observe journalists. Weinstein agreed under an October contract to pay the company $100,000 a month. Boies, Schiller & Flexner soon executed an agreement between Weinstein and Black Cube, placing the firm in a direct contractual role in that relationship.

In July 2017, Boies helped renegotiate the contract. The renegotiation addressed two matters: the journalists’ reporting and a dispute over Black Cube’s billing. The company had sought a bonus for obtaining information about Rose McGowan’s memoir; Weinstein disputed the claim, arguing that the pages largely repeated material already made public. The revised assignment made the reporting objective explicit: Black Cube was to gather intelligence to help Weinstein stop publication of a negative article in a leading New York newspaper, as well as continue collecting information from McGowan’s book.

The revised terms specified a network of people and methods. The agent known as Anna, who had approached McGowan and another target under the name Diana Filip, would work full time on the assignment. A purported freelance journalist would also be involved, alongside operators creating false social-media identities, linguists, and specialists in social engineering. Former heads of Israeli intelligence services would advise the operation. If Black Cube succeeded in stopping publication, it could receive a $300,000 bonus. Boies signed the revised contract on July 11, weeks before Weinstein’s representatives met with Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Rebecca Corbett at The New York Times.

Advice and corporate oversight

Boies’s work also intersected with the Weinstein Company’s internal governance. In 2015, as Weinstein’s contract came up for renewal, Maerov, one of three independent board members, sought to examine Weinstein’s personnel file. Weinstein refused access, with Boies backing him. Boies proposed that he review the file himself and report any potential legal problems for the company. Maerov found that arrangement unacceptable: he distrusted Boies because it was not clear to him whether Boies was acting for the company or for Weinstein when potentially damaging information was at issue.

The dispute mattered because the file was not an abstract legal concern. Irwin Reiter secretly showed Maerov a memo concerning Emily Nestor, after executives had outlined complaints of verbal abuse. Maerov had finally seen material relevant to the conduct he suspected, but the board member’s access remained limited. Boies’s proposed review would have left the information in the hands of the lawyer whose divided loyalties Maerov questioned, rather than giving the watchdog direct access to it.

The company adopted a new code of conduct and contractual penalties for future settlements arising from Weinstein’s misconduct. Weinstein would cover settlement costs and face escalating penalties: $250,000 for the first settlement, $500,000 for the second, and up to $1 million; the contract also allowed termination for misconduct. Bob Weinstein had wanted his brother’s commitment to intensive therapy for sex addiction put in writing. Boies talked him out of making it a formal requirement, warning that Maerov might use the information to gain greater control of the company. Bob accepted a private promise instead, which could not be enforced. These measures gave the company financial and legal protections, but the account emphasizes that such protections did not amount to a guarantee that women would be safe from harassment.

The board learns what the investigation may reveal

As publication approached in October 2017, Maerov called an emergency board discussion, upset that Weinstein had hired lawyers and Lanny Davis’s firm to handle a forthcoming story without the board’s knowledge. Boies addressed the board. After years of minimizing Weinstein’s problems in that setting, he now warned that the Times article would be damaging to the company. He outlined the investigation’s findings, including an estimated eight to twelve settlements, and said the number might be higher; he also told participants that Weinstein might not remember how many payments he had made.

Boies argued against both defending Weinstein outright and terminating him, favoring what he characterized as a middle course and a united response. The intervention exposed a further tension in his position: the lawyer who had helped structure a covert operation to stop the reporting was now briefing directors about the likely impact of the reporting and advising them on how to respond. The board had to confront information that the company’s earlier oversight had not brought into the open.

Significance

The firm’s significance lies in the convergence of its roles, not in a claim that every action by Boies was formally undertaken on the firm’s behalf. The evidence identifies Boies, Schiller & Flexner as a prior user of Black Cube and documents its execution of Weinstein’s contract with that company; it then records Boies’s signature on the revised agreement targeting the Times investigation. Separately, Boies acted in discussions about Weinstein’s personnel file, contractual safeguards, and the company’s response to the impending story.

That convergence illustrates how professional expertise can serve different principals whose interests do not necessarily coincide. The company’s board needed information to oversee Weinstein; Weinstein had an interest in controlling what became public; and women whose complaints were hidden by private settlements were affected by decisions made without their participation. The proposed file review, unenforceable therapy promise, escalating financial penalties, and Black Cube contract were distinct arrangements, but together they show oversight and legal intervention repeatedly organized around liability, reputation, and control of information. In the book’s account, the firm is therefore part of the machinery through which a powerful client sought to obstruct reporting, while its associated lawyer also helped shape the company’s response once that effort appeared unlikely to succeed.