Harvey Weinstein—David Boies's Retained Lawyer Relationship

Harvey Weinstein’s relationship with David Boies was not confined to conventional legal advice: in the episodes recounted here, Boies helped Weinstein resist scrutiny inside The Weinstein Company and was connected to efforts to contain information and blunt reporting about him. The arrangement became particularly consequential when Boies’s firm helped execute a contract aimed at undermining The New York Times investigation while the firm was also representing the newspaper in other legal matters. The resulting conflict exposed how legal expertise could serve both as counsel in a dispute and as an instrument for controlling who could learn about it.

Counsel and the Company’s Internal Scrutiny

In 2015, as senior figures at The Weinstein Company considered whether Weinstein’s behavior posed a liability to the business, Boies became a central intermediary. Bob Weinstein sent him a letter for his brother, hoping that Harvey Weinstein and Boies would return with a responsible plan of action. The letter acknowledged that Harvey had begun working with doctors to address longstanding problems. Bob’s appeal therefore placed Boies between a family member seeking meaningful intervention and the executive whose conduct had become a source of concern.

The board’s effort to examine Weinstein’s personnel file made that intermediary role more contentious. Lance Maerov, a board member involved in renewing executive contracts, wanted access to the file after a public accusation raised questions about a possible pattern of behavior. Weinstein refused to let him see it, with Boies backing him. Boies proposed that he review the file himself and report any potential legal problems to the board. Maerov distrusted this arrangement: Boies sometimes described himself as working for the company and sometimes for Weinstein, leaving unclear whose interests would govern the handling of damaging information.

Maerov eventually learned about complaints through Irwin Reiter, who showed him material concerning Emily Nestor. But the disclosure did not translate into effective leverage over Weinstein. In October 2015, Weinstein signed a new contract that secured his power for years. The account describes Boies as assisting Weinstein in outmaneuvering Maerov, Reiter, and Bob Weinstein. The contrast is central to their relationship: a proposed review intended to protect the company from liability ended with the executive retaining his position and the board’s internal challenge defeated.

Confidentiality and Control of Information

The relationship also intersected with efforts to restrict what other people could disclose. During an inquiry into a financial transaction involving amfAR and the Weinstein Broadway production Finding Neverland, lawyer Tom Ajamie told Megan Twohey that Weinstein had obstructed his review and that Boies had muzzled members of the charity’s board with confidentiality agreements. The episode extended the significance of Boies’s role beyond advice to Weinstein in the company’s contract dispute: confidentiality could also impede people examining a transaction and limit what they could say about what they had learned.

Later, in the context of Weinstein’s response to the reporting, Boies’s work was connected to the use of nondisclosure agreements and intelligence-gathering. At a meeting arranged by Lisa Bloom, Weinstein asked Ajamie to sign an agreement drawn up by Boies that would keep secret what Ajamie had learned about him. Separately, Bloom collaborated with a Black Cube agent and met with Weinstein and Boies. She helped organize the collection of information about Rose McGowan, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, Ashley Judd, and other women who might accuse Weinstein; a private investigator was also compiling dossiers on journalists and tracking their social-media activity for clues about their sources. These actions show how legal instruments and information-gathering operated alongside one another in Weinstein’s effort to anticipate and constrain disclosure.

The Investigation and a Conflict of Roles

Boies’s connection to the campaign against the reporting became especially stark because of his firm’s relationship with The New York Times. The firm helped execute a contract intended to undermine the newspaper’s investigation even as it represented the newspaper in other legal cases. Boies said he believed that the best response to critical stories was to provide facts supporting Weinstein’s defense, and that he thought Black Cube would gather such information. He said he had not known about the firm’s underhanded tactics against journalists and regretted not paying closer attention.

The newsroom did not initially see the connection. Jodi Kantor received messages from an actor-agent hired to sabotage the investigation and undermine victims’ accounts, but did not recognize them as part of an operation linked to Weinstein or Boies. On Dean Baquet’s instructions, Kantor and Megan Twohey had declined requests to meet with Boies; he seemed to them a lawyer at the margins of the reporting effort. The gap between that appearance and the later-disclosed contract makes the relationship’s concealed dimension clear: while reporters were trying to establish what had happened, a lawyer associated with Weinstein was helping to arrange measures directed at the investigation itself.

When the arrangement came to light, Boies maintained that it was not a conflict of interest. The New York Times rejected that position and fired his firm, calling its actions reprehensible. The episode made the conflict concrete rather than merely theoretical: the firm’s work for a client seeking to obstruct the newspaper’s reporting sat alongside its work representing the newspaper in legal matters. Whatever distinction Boies drew between gathering defensive facts and using improper tactics, the consequences included the loss of the firm’s relationship with the newspaper and a public rupture over professional responsibility.

Significance of the Relationship

Across these episodes, the relationship joined several forms of influence: legal advice about Weinstein’s employment and company exposure, proposed review of records held inside the company, confidentiality provisions affecting people with relevant information, and a contract connected to opposition to investigative reporting. The evidence does not reduce every action to a single motive or erase Boies’s stated account of what he believed Black Cube was doing. It does, however, document how his work repeatedly intersected with Weinstein’s effort to preserve control—over company decisions, potentially damaging information, and the conditions under which others could speak.

That pattern gives the relationship its institutional significance. Internal oversight was weakened when Weinstein denied Maerov direct access to the personnel file and Boies offered to review it himself; the challenge ended with Weinstein’s renewed contract. Outside the company, confidentiality agreements and investigative work placed further obstacles between witnesses, board members, journalists, and information. The eventual break with The New York Times exposed the incompatibility at the heart of the arrangement: a firm could not plausibly serve the newspaper in legal matters while helping its opposing client arrange a campaign against the newspaper’s investigation without inviting a serious conflict-of-interest dispute.