Italy

Italy enters the account not as a narrated travel destination but through legal records later used in the aftermath of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez’s accusation against Harvey Weinstein. The book distinguishes what those records documented from what Weinstein’s lawyers and associates sought to make them mean: they raised questions about how Gutierrez might be perceived in court, but did not prove that her accusation against Weinstein was false.

Court records and earlier cases

Weinstein’s private investigators collected records from two Italian court cases involving Gutierrez. In 2011, she testified for the prosecution at the trial of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was charged with patronizing an underage prostitute. Gutierrez described a party at Berlusconi’s home involving teenage girls and said she had refused to participate in lewd acts.

A separate allegation and its limits

During cross-examination at the Berlusconi trial, the defense questioned Gutierrez about an earlier sexual-assault allegation against a man in his seventies. Prosecutors had declined to pursue that case after Gutierrez refused to cooperate. On the stand, she denied the original facts she had provided in a sworn affidavit. These details formed part of her legal history; the account does not present them as proof that she had lied about Weinstein, or even that she had lied about the older man.

Records used in the Weinstein case

The Italian records nevertheless acquired force in the dispute over Gutierrez’s credibility. David Boies and Elkan Abramowitz shared them with Ken Auletta, a writer for The New Yorker who had been considering an account of the case. Auletta later explained that the lawyers persuaded him Gutierrez was not trustworthy. New York prosecutors would also acknowledge concern about how her history, highlighted by Weinstein, might affect her appearance as a witness at trial.

Weinstein invoked the Italian episode when speaking to board member Lance Maerov, portraying Gutierrez as someone who had made a similar allegation before and pointing to her connection to the Berlusconi case. The narrative’s distinction is consequential: Italy’s court records supplied material for a credibility attack, but did not resolve the truth of Gutierrez’s allegation against Weinstein.