Tribeca is more than a backdrop in the account of Jodi Kantor’s meetings with Irwin Reiter: it places the investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s conduct inside a neighborhood shaped by the film business, only blocks from The Weinstein Company. At Little Park, a stylish restaurant with a secluded bar behind it, Kantor and Reiter met late and repeatedly. The discreet setting suited an exchange that began cautiously and, over time, helped surface records about the company’s treatment of women.

A neighborhood shaped by the film business

The choice of Tribeca mattered because it was already closely associated with Weinstein’s world. When he moved Miramax’s offices there decades earlier, the company’s rise helped transform a formerly gritty neighborhood into a wealthy, prestigious area of multimillion-dollar lofts, expensive restaurants, and a famous film festival. The Weinstein Company, which Weinstein cofounded with his brother in 2005, had an office six blocks from Little Park.

Reiter selected the meeting place and set its terms: 9:30 p.m. at the bar behind the restaurant; he would ask the questions, could leave after five minutes, and would pay. Kantor was surprised by the location, but did not challenge it. If Reiter was willing to meet close to Weinstein’s orbit, she would meet him there. The proximity gave the conversations an evident tension: the source was talking about his employer in a place situated within the neighborhood the film companies had helped remake.

A secluded place for a guarded first meeting

On September 18, Kantor entered the busy restaurant and looked around to make sure she did not recognize anyone who might interrupt. She continued to a sparsely occupied area at the back: a dim bar arranged like a clubby living room, with couches and wing chairs separated by ample space. Its relative privacy made it possible to talk without drawing attention, although the setting did not immediately make the encounter feel safe or straightforward.

Reiter was waiting in an armchair, nervous and watchful. He made dark jokes about avoiding people he believed Weinstein had hired to follow him. Kantor initially wondered whether he might be there to discover what she knew. Instead, as she asked about old settlement finances, Reiter seemed puzzled that she was concentrating on the distant past. He redirected her toward more recent conduct involving young women who worked at the company. Tribeca thus became the location not only of a confidential interview but of a shift in the investigation’s focus.

Repeated meetings and the work of verification

For the next two weeks, Kantor and Reiter met every few nights, usually late and almost always at the bar behind Little Park. The conversations were irregular rather than a single orderly account. Reiter spoke in a rush, sometimes withholding names, and moved between episodes that seemed central and others that were difficult to establish. He repeatedly warned that each meeting would be the last and understood that his job was at risk. In messages to one another, Kantor and Megan Twohey referred to him simply as the source or as Kantor’s contact.

The reporters kept the relationship close to the newsroom: beyond their editors, they told no one about the meetings. Between visits to Tribeca, they checked what Reiter said by contacting former employees, seeking records, and approaching the women he had mentioned. The bar was therefore one part of a reporting process, not a substitute for corroboration. Reiter himself did not claim to know everything that had happened at the company, and the journalists treated his accounts as leads to test. The location’s repeated use gave them a dependable meeting point while the reporting expanded beyond what one source could establish.

The return of the source and a consequential disclosure

On September 28, 2017, five days after Twohey’s article about transactions involving amfAR appeared, Kantor again met Reiter at the bar behind Little Park. He described employees at The Weinstein Company reading and discussing the article, and said that they were absorbed by the prospect of seeing their boss held accountable. Meanwhile, the newspaper’s editors were urging Kantor and Twohey to begin composing an initial article about Weinstein. The reporters wanted further documentation, especially material about the company that could be published without identifying Reiter.

That need brought the O’Connor memo back into the conversation. Reiter had previously mentioned the document, written by company executive Lauren O’Connor, and had read Kantor passages from it. At a later meeting in this reporting sequence, he began reading the memo aloud, then handed Kantor his phone, with the email open, and left her alone while he went to the restroom. The gesture turned the phone into a means of access to a document he had hesitated to share. In the book’s account, it marked a change from guarded disclosure to an action Reiter could not easily reverse.

Tribeca’s significance comes from this convergence of place and investigative method. The meetings took place near the company whose internal events were under scrutiny, in a neighborhood whose rise had been linked to Miramax’s success. Little Park’s secluded bar provided a recurring, discreet setting; it also became the point from which the reporters pursued independent records and witnesses. What began there as a source’s uneasy, fragmented account developed into a broader inquiry into what company employees had witnessed and documented.