Reuben Capital Partners

Reuben Capital Partners is presented in the book as the London-based wealth-management firm that a Black Cube agent claimed to represent while approaching Rose McGowan and Jodi Kantor. Its purported focus on women’s advancement supplied a credible public-facing rationale for meetings and invitations that, unbeknownst to the journalists and McGowan at the time, formed part of an effort to gather information connected to reporting on Harvey Weinstein. The account describes the firm’s claimed identity and use, but does not establish whether it was an operating investment company independent of the operation.

Claimed Identity and Public Image

The agent who approached McGowan identified herself as Diana Filip and said she led sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners in London. She used a German accent and a UK cell-phone number. She offered McGowan $60,000 to speak at an event, and in subsequent meetings spoke of investing in McGowan’s production company. The professional title, financial offer, and stated social purpose together made the approach resemble a legitimate business relationship.

The agent also presented Reuben Capital Partners to Kantor as an organization staging events to advance women in the workplace. Its website showed a smiling woman in a business suit and called for gender equality in corporate life, citing women’s lower pay, fewer promotions, and lack of recognition. It advocated combating workplace discrimination and promoting women’s inclusion in business, using unusually forceful language for corporate feminism, including calls for progressive activism and full transparency. The online presentation appeared sufficiently plausible that the newspaper’s security expert, whom Kantor consulted, said the URL looked fine.

Approaches to McGowan and Kantor

By May 2017, the agent had met McGowan at least three times, in cities convenient to her. Their conversations lasted for hours and concerned women’s issues as well as the agent’s stated interest in McGowan’s production company. McGowan even read her a passage from her memoir. She later recalled that the woman seemed genuinely concerned about women. The trust built through these encounters depended not only on a business pretext but on sustained conversation and an apparent alignment of values.

The same agent contacted Kantor in the week of a meeting involving Harvey Weinstein’s representatives and the reporters. Kantor had not heard of her. The agent described a series of workplace events and asked Kantor to contribute; after Kantor brushed off the requests, she persisted by email. The agent was also known as Anna, the name associated with her approach to another journalist investigating Weinstein. The recurrence of the same operative under an apparently respectable organizational identity linked the invitations to a broader effort to approach people who might possess information relevant to the reporting.

The Cover’s Limits and Significance

Kantor found something about the email slightly off, although she could not identify exactly what. The website’s reassuring appearance did not overcome her professional judgment: her work was to gather information, not participate in activism. Times ethics rules also barred journalists from accepting corporate speaking engagements, and she had no time for the proposed coffee meetings. After a further email, she replied tersely that she was tied up and wished the project luck. The invitation therefore failed to draw her into the agent’s approach.

Reuben Capital Partners matters in the account less as a documented investment business than as the name that made covert cultivation look like ordinary networking. Its advertised commitment to women’s equality was particularly suited to opening conversations with women whose accounts could damage Weinstein. The contrast between that public message and the concealed information-gathering purpose turns the firm’s presentation into part of the operation itself: a language of workplace inclusion used to approach people investigating abuse and those who might speak about it.