New York City

New York City is more than the setting of the investigation into Harvey Weinstein: it is the geography through which the reporting moved from rumor and silence toward documented allegations and criminal proceedings. Reporters sought sources in private homes and restaurants, pursued government records, confronted corporate representatives in the newsroom, and ultimately watched Weinstein appear in a Manhattan courtroom. Across those settings, the city connects the investigation’s intimate encounters with its institutional consequences.

The investigation takes shape

The New York Times investigation began with a refusal. On May 11, 2017, Rose McGowan told Jodi Kantor that she was reluctant to help the newspaper, citing what she considered sexist treatment by its coverage and an earlier uncomfortable conversation with a reporter about Weinstein. The exchange established a problem the reporting would have to confront in New York as well as in Hollywood: potential sources had reasons to distrust the institution asking them to speak.

The city was also a place where allegations had circulated without becoming public documentation. Rumors about Weinstein’s treatment of women had persisted, and journalists had tried before to investigate. A 2015 inquiry by the New York City Police Department into a groping accusation ended without criminal charges. The absence of a public record did not settle the underlying questions; it helped explain why reporters looked beyond newspaper accounts and searched for records held by government agencies.

That search crossed jurisdictional lines. Megan Twohey asked whether people who had experienced harassment might have filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or state agencies in New York and Los Angeles, where Weinstein had operated companies. The federal and New York agencies had no records. A researcher instead obtained a California agency report showing workplace complaints involving Miramax, including a sexual-harassment complaint received on September 12, 2001, and closed that same day. The contrast made the reporting’s geography consequential: the records that opened a path into the company’s past came from outside New York, even as the investigation and many of its encounters unfolded in the city.

Streets, homes, and guarded conversations

New York City’s residential neighborhoods became reporting sites when phone calls failed. In the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale, Twohey waited near the home of John Schmidt, a former Miramax executive who had been the company’s chief financial officer in 1990. She hoped he might know whether a former assistant who had disappeared that year had signed a settlement. When Schmidt appeared, Twohey explained how such agreements could prevent people from speaking and asked for his perspective, not an on-the-record account. He was not ready to talk and escorted her to the door. The encounter gave the investigation a specific human measure: access to a potential source depended not only on what a reporter knew, but on whether a former insider was prepared to engage with it.

A different meeting took place in Tribeca, in a bar behind Little Park. On September 18, Jodi Kantor met Irwin Reiter there after he set strict terms: he would ask the questions, could leave after five minutes, and would pay the bill. The location carried a connection to Weinstein’s business world. Miramax’s move into Tribeca decades earlier had accompanied the neighborhood’s transformation into a place of wealth and prestige; The Weinstein Company’s office was six blocks away. Kantor accepted the chosen venue rather than challenge it. The conversation began under the shadow of the power structure the reporting was trying to understand, with Reiter wary of surveillance and Kantor unsure what he knew or why he had chosen that spot.

The city’s power centers also shaped how reporters approached sources. When Kantor and Twohey contacted Lance Maerov, a board member of The Weinstein Company, he was walking into his Park Avenue office building with coffee. Twohey told him the newspaper was preparing a story about allegations spanning decades, read from Lauren O’Connor’s memo, and asked what he had done about it. Maerov’s coffee spilled from his hands. Within hours, she met him in Bryant Park, where he described his concern about Weinstein, the board’s code of conduct, and his decision to let the issue go after David Boies told him the complaint had been withdrawn. The movement from a phone call to a public park meeting turned corporate governance into a question asked face-to-face.

The newsroom as a site of confrontation

The New York Times Building brought the investigation and its subject into direct contact. Weinstein came to the newsroom’s fourth floor determined to challenge Twohey’s reporting about an amfAR financial transaction. Editors had approved the interview on two conditions: it would be on the record, and it would address the financial transaction rather than allegations of mistreatment of women. Rebecca Corbett participated to help keep the meeting within those limits. The location mattered because the encounter was neither private negotiation nor a general interview: it was a formally bounded exchange in the newsroom of the paper preparing to publish.

The confrontation also connected the city’s corporate and charitable networks. Twohey believed records and internal concerns indicated that more than half a million dollars intended for AIDS research had been used to reimburse Weinstein’s investors. Weinstein had longstanding ties to amfAR and had helped its Cannes fundraiser; David Boies had helped silence the board when it sought an outside investigation. In New York, the interview gave Weinstein a chance to contest the account, while the newspaper’s on-the-record conditions set a boundary around what the meeting could address. The city served both as the location of the confrontation and as the institutional home from which the reporting proceeded.

From reporting to courtroom

Seven months after the first story about Weinstein’s alleged misconduct was published, Kantor and Twohey sat in a Manhattan courtroom waiting for him. Earlier that morning, he had been booked and fingerprinted at a precinct house a few blocks away. The producer who had once occupied a position of extraordinary influence was now on the defendant docket among ordinary cases. Outside, cameras and long lines recalled the red carpets associated with his former public life, but the proceeding placed him in a different role.

The court called the case to order, and a prosecutor announced charges of two violent felonies involving separate alleged assaults. Weinstein was charged with raping one woman and forcing another to perform oral sex in a criminal sexual act. He surrendered his passport and posted one million dollars’ bail. The courtroom did not conclude the broader account of what had happened, but it marked a change in the investigation’s consequences: allegations that had been difficult to document and report were now before a criminal court, and Weinstein faced formal charges.

New York City’s significance in the book lies in this chain of places and thresholds. A source’s home, a carefully chosen Tribeca bar, an office building, a newsroom, a park, and a courtroom each stage a different encounter with evidence and power. The city is not presented as the sole origin of the records or allegations; the reporting reaches across jurisdictions. But it is where the investigation’s central work becomes visible, from asking for a conversation to watching a defendant enter court.