Harvey Weinstein Hired Private Investigators to Spy on Actresses and Journalists

The New Yorker has just released another bombshell on Harvey Weinstein. Following up its earlier revelations, the magazine now reports that last fall, Weinstein hired private security agencies to collect information on the women and journalists trying to expose his alleged years of sexual  assault and misconduct.

According to dozens of pages of documents, Weinstein hired one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, Kroll, as well as an enterprise run largely by “former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies,” Black Cube.

The New Yorker writes that two private investigators from Black Cube (which offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units”) met with actress Rose McGowan, one of the most outspoken of Weinstein’s accusers. But they met her before she publicly accused the media mogul of rape, to try and get information out of her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate, secretly recording at least four meetings with the actress. The same investigator pretended to have more information about Weinstein’s conduct to arrange a meeting with a journalist working on the story. The investigator was trying to find out which women were talking to the press.

Ultimately, Weinstein’s goal was to stop the publication of the sexual abuse allegations against him, the contract with Black Cube states. Despite his efforts, many of them were eventually published in The New York Times and The New Yorker earlier this year. But Weinstein had these agencies gather information on dozens of individuals, including psychological profiles and sexual histories. According to The New Yorker, Weinstein monitored these investigations himself.

Weinstein also involved his lawyers, including David Boies. Notably, Boies represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute, argued for marriage equality in front of the Supreme Court, and was representing the Times in a libel case at the same time he signed the contract directing Black Cube to find information that would stop the publication of a Times’ story about Weinstein.