Weinstein–Black Cube contract

The Weinstein–Black Cube contract was a paid agreement through which Harvey Weinstein enlisted Black Cube to gather information and protect him from scrutiny. Revised in July 2017, it made stopping Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigation for The New York Times an explicit objective. The contract’s significance lies in the way it turned the effort to forestall publication into a defined intelligence assignment, complete with operatives, deceptive approaches, and a bonus tied to success.

Origins and Arrangement

Weinstein had already relied on private detectives to guard his reputation, but his relationship with Black Cube involved more than observing journalists. Black Cube operatives could manipulate the people they approached, including by adopting false identities; some had backgrounds in military intelligence. An October 2016 email from Weinstein to David Boies described Black Cube as a group of strategists and noted that Boies’s firm had used it before. Boies, Schiller & Flexner had indeed previously engaged the company, and the firm went on to execute an agreement between Weinstein and Black Cube.

Under the initial contract, struck in October 2016, Weinstein agreed to pay Black Cube $100,000 per month to shield his conduct from scrutiny. That monthly payment established an ongoing relationship, rather than a one-off request for information. By the time the arrangement was renegotiated, the operation was already active: Seth Freedman, a British freelance journalist, was passing Black Cube information he collected from women Weinstein feared might disclose damaging information. He introduced himself to women as a reporter, sometimes invoking work for the Guardian or describing a story about Hollywood or the film industry. Katherine Kendall and other women who spoke with him said they did not realize he was operating for Black Cube.

The July Revision

By May 2017, a Black Cube agent had approached Rose McGowan under the name Diana Filip. Filip presented herself as an investment professional at Reuben Capital Partners in London and offered McGowan $60,000 for a speaking engagement. Over the following months, they met at least three times in cities convenient to McGowan. Filip spoke with her about women’s issues and described an interest in investing in McGowan’s production company; McGowan also read her part of her memoir. The conversations were presented as a potential professional relationship, while the agent was gathering information connected to Weinstein’s concerns about the book.

In July, Boies helped renegotiate the contract as Weinstein and Black Cube disputed payment. Black Cube expected a bonus for obtaining information about McGowan’s memoir; Weinstein refused, arguing that its pages mostly repeated a tweet. The revision addressed that disagreement while also giving the operation a new, more specific purpose: Kantor and Twohey’s reporting. Boies signed the revised contract on July 11, weeks before Lanny Davis met with the reporters and Rebecca Corbett at The New York Times.

The revised terms called for intelligence to help the client completely stop publication of a negative article in a leading New York newspaper, as well as for continued gathering of information from McGowan’s book. The agent known as Anna, also identified as Diana Filip, was assigned to the case full time, alongside a purported freelance journalist. The contract also provided for avatar operators who would create false social-media identities, linguists, and operations experts focused on social engineering, with advice from former heads of Israeli intelligence services. If Black Cube stopped the article from appearing, it stood to earn a $300,000 bonus. The monthly fee and success bonus thus attached financial terms both to continued information gathering and to the desired outcome of preventing publication.

Approaches to the Reporters

The same assumed identity used with McGowan reached toward the reporters. In the week Davis met with Kantor, Filip contacted Kantor, presenting herself as a representative of Reuben Capital Partners and inviting her to contribute to events about advancing women in the workplace. Kantor had not previously heard of her and brushed off the requests, but Filip persisted by email. The approach placed a seemingly ordinary professional invitation alongside the contract’s specified use of false identities and social engineering.

Davis did not tell the reporters during that meeting that a Black Cube agent had been present at his first meeting with Weinstein. He disclosed the agent’s presence to Megan Twohey only later, saying he had not known exactly what the agent was doing for his client. The omission meant the journalists encountered Davis’s overt invitation to discuss the story without being told, at the time, about the parallel operation set out in the revised contract.

Exposure and Significance

The contract’s objective became clearer to the company’s board as publication approached. At an emergency conference call, Maerov pressed the issue after learning that Weinstein had hired lawyers and Davis’s firm to address a story of which the board had not been informed. Boies told participants that The New York Times story was coming and would be damaging, and outlined that there had been eight to twelve settlements, possibly more. By then, the contract’s effort to stop the reporting had not prevented the article from nearing publication.

The agreement belongs to a broader pattern in which information about alleged harassment was restricted or concealed, but it operated differently from a settlement with a complainant. The settlements described in the reporting imposed confidentiality requirements on women, sometimes requiring them to hand over evidence and limiting their ability to assist others; one alleged victim received about $9 million and another $3.25 million. The Black Cube contract instead paid an outside firm to gather information and obstruct scrutiny of Weinstein. Both kinds of arrangements could leave the public, potential future employees, and others without access to information, but the mechanisms were distinct: one restricted disclosure by people who had brought claims; the other deployed covert information-gathering to impede journalists.

That distinction gives the document its particular force in the account. It records not just an attempt to influence coverage, but an attempt structured as a professional service: an initial monthly fee, named operational methods, personnel assigned to the case, and a substantial bonus for stopping publication. The reporting describes the operation alongside the company’s internal failures to examine allegations and protect employees. Together, those episodes show how formal contracts and institutional authority could be directed toward containing information rather than confronting the underlying conduct.