Harvey Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein is the subject of one of the book’s central investigations: a powerful producer whose alleged mistreatment of women was accompanied by efforts to contain what others could say about him. The account does not rest on a single accusation. It traces a pattern through settlements, employees’ knowledge, financial scrutiny, attempts to map the reporters’ sources, and the women who later described how his professional standing had affected their choices.

Public scrutiny and the company’s interests

The reporting first brings Weinstein into view through more than allegations about his conduct. An inquiry into an amfAR auction raised questions about a 2015 financial arrangement involving Finding Neverland, the Broadway production he had arranged to bring to the stage. As that production struggled, $600,000 raised at an amfAR gala auction was directed to its investors without disclosure to the charity. Some amfAR leaders felt misled and worried that the transaction might have involved illegal conduct. The account establishes their concern; it does not present that concern as a finding of illegality.

Tom Ajamie, a lawyer hired by amfAR’s board to investigate the transaction, told Megan Twohey that Weinstein had obstructed his review. David Boies had secured nondisclosure agreements from board members, limiting what they could discuss. As Ajamie asked questions about the finances, he also heard allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. In October 2016, he raised those claims with Lisa Bloom, whom he had met in Los Angeles. Ajamie admired her feminist credentials and hoped she might take on Weinstein or already be representing women who accused him. This encounter became an early indication that the investigation of the transaction and the inquiry into Weinstein’s conduct were converging.

The financial matter carried corporate stakes beyond the charity. In 2015, after Ambra Battilana Gutierrez accused Weinstein of groping her following a work meeting, she went to the New York Police Department. The allegation became public while The Weinstein Company was poised to sell its television division to ITV for more than $400 million. Irwin Reiter, who said he had been promised a million-dollar bonus if the sale went through, was appalled by the public crisis. Police helped Gutierrez secretly record a conversation with Weinstein about the incident; they later said they had wanted to see him charged with sexual abuse. The episode made the accusation unusually visible and exposed the pressure a public allegation could place on the company at a financially precarious moment.

Containing scrutiny

The book describes Bloom’s work for Weinstein as extending beyond legal counsel. He paid her an initial retainer of $50,000, and her billing records documented subsequent work. Bloom collaborated with a Black Cube agent identified as Anna, whose name was Diana Filip, and met with Weinstein and Boies. She helped organize the gathering of information about Rose McGowan, Gutierrez, Ashley Judd, and other women who might accuse Weinstein.

Bloom also worked with private investigator Sara Ness, who compiled dossiers on journalists investigating Weinstein. The dossiers tracked journalists’ social-media activity in an effort to infer who their sources might be. One assessment identified people believed to be important sources for Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow and recorded whom those people followed on Twitter and when. Several were among Kantor and Twohey’s most important sources. Some judgments were already out of date: the dossier questioned whether McGowan would speak to the reporters even though they had been talking with her for weeks, and underestimated the possibility that Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow would matter to the story. The monitoring was therefore both a threat to source protection and an imperfect attempt to anticipate what the reporters could publish.

By August and September 2017, Kantor and Twohey had accumulated accounts of alleged misconduct but faced a basic reporting problem: much of what they knew could not yet be stated in print. At a meeting in a quiet Midtown Manhattan bar, Rebecca Corbett asked them to account for what could be established. The reporters had stories from stars and former employees, as well as information about settlements, but only Laura Madden had agreed to go on the record with a firsthand account, and even her decision was not final. Their evidence about payoffs remained incomplete. Weinstein’s influence in the investigation thus appears not only in reported allegations, but in the gap between what people had experienced or heard and what the journalists could verify and publish.

The investigation and its publication

On October 2, 2017, the reporters and editors considered how to present their findings to Weinstein and give him a chance to respond. They planned to identify each allegation they intended to publish, including the relevant dates and women’s names, while leaving out Judd and Paltrow because their decisions to go on the record were uncertain. They would incorporate Weinstein’s answers, report a denial or apology if he offered one, and omit claims he could refute. The process reflected the newspaper’s stated obligation to give even an untrustworthy subject a fair opportunity to respond.

That obligation created a competing risk. Once Weinstein knew the allegations and the deadline, he might pressure women to recant, encourage others to contradict their accounts, leak information to another outlet, or issue a statement before publication. The editors had to weigh his right of reply against the safety of sources and the integrity of the article. Dean Baquet had ultimate authority over the decision, while Corbett, who had guided the project, and Matt Purdy remained closely involved. The reporting account presents publication as a coordinated editorial judgment, not an automatic consequence of collecting accusations.

The headline announced that Weinstein had paid off sexual-harassment accusers for decades. The article opened with three accounts connected to the Peninsula hotel and described at least eight settlements. It traced allegations from an assistant in New York in 1990 through Madden’s account in Ireland and onward to 2015. It also reported that dozens of current and former employees, ranging from assistants to senior executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while working for him, while only a handful said they had confronted him. The article’s account of women being shut down or silenced connected the individual allegations to a larger pattern of workplace knowledge and nonresponse.

The newsroom read the story through together after Weinstein sent his statements. Twenty-four minutes later, at 2:05 p.m., the article was released. The sequence emphasizes the compressed final stage of a long investigation: the subject had been given an opportunity to answer, the editors had reviewed the text, and the publication proceeded without last-minute changes.

After publication and the use of reputation

The book returns to the consequences in a gathering held in Los Angeles on January 16, 2019. Twelve women who had been part of the reporting met at the journalists’ request to discuss what had happened to women who spoke up and how they understood the events that followed. The gathering gave the investigation a later vantage point: publication had not erased the different costs and outcomes for the women whose accounts had informed it.

Ashley Judd described a public life transformed after the Weinstein story. She had been praised as a heroine, received awards, and accepted a teaching post at Harvard Kennedy School, where she was to begin in fall 2019. She had joined the board of Time’s Up, an organization promoting safe and fair workplaces that began in Hollywood after the scandal and spread beyond the industry. She had also filed suit against Weinstein, alleging harassment, defamation, and loss of career opportunities. Her public recognition did not mean that the dispute was over; it existed alongside continuing legal action.

The gathering also brought together women whose stories had once been separated by secrecy. Zelda Perkins, a former Miramax employee who had become an activist, had publicly broken her settlement nondisclosure agreement in the weeks after the reporting appeared. She spoke to the press while withholding the specific experience and identity of her colleague Rowena Chiu, whom she had tried to protect. Perkins challenged confidential settlements in the media and before the British Parliament, questioning their use to silence allegations of sexual abuse and other wrongdoing. The account notes that she had dared Weinstein to pursue her legally, but he had not done so.

Paltrow’s account revealed another consequence of Weinstein’s reputation and career power. After the story appeared, women told her that Weinstein had cited her name, Oscar, and success while harassing or assaulting them, implying that they could obtain a comparable career if they yielded to him. Some women spoke publicly; others told Paltrow they felt unable to speak because they had succumbed to him sexually. Weinstein denied making those claims about her. Paltrow described feeling used as an instrument of coercion and, despite recognizing that the feeling of culpability was illogical, found the realization painful. Her account recast her success as something Weinstein could invoke against other women, rather than simply as a measure of her own career.

Place in the book’s investigation

The book situates Weinstein’s story within three years of reporting, from spring 2016 through spring 2019, alongside investigations concerning Donald Trump’s treatment of women and Christine Blasey Ford’s public accusation against Brett Kavanaugh. The notes describe hundreds of interviews, including repeated interviews with Weinstein, and the review of thousands of pages of documents. The investigation included records and accounts that had initially been off the record; further reporting and renewed contact with participants enabled the authors to include some of that material. Weinstein was approached for comment repeatedly, most recently in spring 2019.

This documentary frame matters to how his character is presented. The narrative identifies allegations as allegations, records his denials where relevant, and shows the work required to move from private accounts and incomplete records to a publishable story. Its portrait emerges through the actions surrounding him: a charity’s financial review, company concerns, agreements limiting disclosure, information gathering about accusers and reporters, and a newsroom’s effort to verify claims while offering a response. The later gathering then shows that publication redistributed attention and opportunity, but did not make the consequences of speaking out uniform or complete.