Weinstein’s attempts to stop The New York Times from publishing its investigation

Harvey Weinstein’s attempts to stop The New York Times from publishing its investigation turned the ordinary journalistic process of seeking comment into a contest over time, access, and credibility. His representatives demanded more time and threatened legal action; Weinstein repeatedly tried to identify the reporters’ sources; and a last-minute meeting brought attacks on the women into the newsroom. The effort did not derail the investigation. Instead, it made the methods used to resist publication part of the story’s stakes.

The record behind the investigation

The confrontation had a history inside The Weinstein Company. In November 2014, accountant Irwin Reiter warned Weinstein about allegations he had heard through the office grapevine, including by sending an accusatory email. Weinstein admitted nothing and subsequently treated Reiter coldly, referring to him around the office as the sex police. Reiter’s intervention was motivated at first by concern that a scandal could damage an already precarious company, not by a reckoning with what women had experienced.

That concern became harder to keep abstract in December, when temporary receptionist Emily Nestor told colleagues that Weinstein had repeatedly proposed exchanging sex for career mentorship during a breakfast meeting at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. She did not want to file a human-resources complaint. Reiter and other executives instead persuaded employees who had heard her account firsthand to write down what they knew. One record noted that Nestor had continued saying no for more than an hour. The account supplied a specific, contemporaneous record of conduct the company had reason to confront.

The attempt to bring such information before the company’s board met resistance. Board member Lance Maerov had sought access to Weinstein’s personnel file, but Weinstein refused to let him see it, with David Boies offering to review it himself and report on possible legal problems. Maerov distrusted this arrangement because Boies seemed to move between representing the company and representing Weinstein. On July 1, 2015, Reiter and two executives secretly showed Maerov pages outlining the Nestor complaint during breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The board member could inspect the pages but was not allowed to leave with them. Months later, Weinstein signed a new contract that preserved his power, despite the concerns of Maerov, Reiter, and Bob Weinstein.

A more expansive complaint followed in November 2015, when company employee Lauren O’Connor described not only offensive remarks but a workplace culture shaped by Weinstein’s treatment of women. Bob Weinstein agreed that the board should be informed. Rather than circulate the document, he invited board members to read it in person; Maerov photographed its first and last pages and noted the witnesses and other details. When Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Rebecca Corbett read the memo, their understanding of the investigation changed: reporting that had seemed a historical corrective now carried the urgent possibility of preventing further harm.

The response process becomes a pressure point

On October 2, 2017, the reporting team met in Dean Baquet’s office to decide how to present its findings to Weinstein and how long to allow for a reply. The reporters planned to share every allegation they intended to publish, with each woman’s name and the relevant dates. They would include Weinstein’s denials, apologies, or refusal to comment, and would omit allegations he could refute. This was the paper’s ordinary fairness process, but disclosure created a particular risk: Weinstein might pressure women to recant, encourage them to contradict their accounts, or take the story elsewhere before publication.

The editors therefore had to protect both the sources and the article while setting a deadline. Before the call, Kantor and Twohey warned Laura Madden, Zelda Perkins, and the other women that they would share the allegations with Weinstein. They explained that this step would document a fair opportunity to respond and asked the women to record any calls or intimidation. The women agreed. Their consent was a final act of trust in a process that required the journalists to reveal information the women had kept private.

Weinstein joined the call with Lanny Davis, Lisa Bloom, and the newly involved lawyer Charles Harder. Harder listened and said the team would respond later. Weinstein repeatedly interrupted the reporters to ask who else was on the record and who had spoken against him. When Twohey raised the number of settlements Davis had previously given her, Weinstein disavowed Davis’s account, insisting that the lawyer had spoken for himself. The moment threatened a crucial detail: the circle of people who knew about the settlements was small, and the reporters needed independent confirmation.

The call also became a negotiation over time. Rebecca Corbett initially said the response was due by the end of the day. Harder called that impossible, asked for two weeks, and then reduced his request to forty-eight hours. Weinstein warned that if the timing did not suit him, he would cooperate with another outlet, a threat that matched the reporters’ concern that he might preempt or blunt their article. The team ultimately set a noon deadline for October 4, making that the new target publication date.

Threats and counterclaims

As the deadline passed, Weinstein’s representatives provided no substantial response. Their calls offered partial denials and accounts of episodes not included in the article, alongside renewed complaints about the time allowed. Baquet, who had previously avoided speaking to Weinstein’s representatives, took Twohey’s phone and demanded that Davis coordinate the lawyers and return with a response.

At 1:43 p.m., Harder sent an eighteen-page letter marked confidential and off the record. The journalists did not accept that designation as binding: material could only be kept off the record by agreement. The letter demanded that The New York Times cease publication and preserve documents. It denied that Weinstein had sexually harassed employees or actors, threatened liability for more than $100 million in damages, and requested two weeks for Weinstein and his counsel to investigate and present evidence. Its invocation of the Actual malice standard recast publication of the allegations as deliberate defamation and presented Weinstein as the party wronged by the reporting.

The letter also attacked the sources. It characterized former employees as disgruntled and unreliable, denied that they had personal knowledge, and asserted that their accounts were false and defamatory. That language gave the reporters a preview of a public strategy that might portray former employees as bitter outcasts. The letter singled out Madden, and Kantor considered whether Weinstein had a genuine refutation or was simply relying on the assumption that one woman would have little power or proof. The legal threat thus reached beyond the newspaper: it put pressure on the people whose accounts made the story possible.

The ambush and its limits

Weinstein next sought an in-person meeting at the newsroom. Twohey agreed to meet, wanting to hear what he had and to confront him directly. He arrived with Lisa Bloom, Elkan Abramowitz, and Linda Fairstein, who had previously told Twohey there was nothing to the allegations of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. Twohey led the group to a small glass-walled meeting room beside a busy corridor and limited the discussion to fifteen minutes.

The representatives’ case focused on the women rather than on substantial contrary evidence. Abramowitz and Fairstein portrayed Gutierrez as opportunistic; Bloom produced photographs of Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd smiling with Weinstein, as if public red-carpet pictures disproved their accounts. Weinstein described the two women as mentally unstable, drawing on Judd’s memoir and her history of seeking inpatient psychological treatment for issues rooted in childhood. The material was intended to discredit the accusers, but it did not address the reporters’ investigation on its own terms.

Kantor and Twohey had already checked Gutierrez’s background with help from a colleague in Italy and had asked researcher Grace Ashford to examine Judd’s memoir for possible complications. Twohey kept her reaction controlled. The encounter did not undermine the reporting; it revealed more clearly the tactics Weinstein and his allies were prepared to use. In a separate emergency call that night, Maerov pressed the company board after learning that Weinstein had hired lawyers and Davis’s firm to handle a story the board had not been told about. Boies warned the board that the article would be damaging, while arguing against both immediate dismissal and unqualified defense of Weinstein. Bloom, meanwhile, advised Weinstein that the effort to kill the story would fail and proposed acknowledging harassment, expressing remorse, and promising change.

The attempts to block publication therefore produced a revealing contrast. The reporters disclosed their case and offered a response opportunity, while Weinstein’s side sought more time, challenged the sources, threatened a lawsuit, and tried to redirect attention toward the women’s character. For the reporting team, the attacks did not erase the evidence; they clarified the conflict surrounding it. The investigation had begun with records of complaints that company insiders struggled to bring before the board. By the final response process, the effort to control what could be published had itself become part of what the journalists needed to understand and report.