Following last month’s bombshell report documenting years of sexual harassment and assault allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein, The New Yorker just published yet another shocking investigation—this time, detailing the “army of the spies” Weinstein assembled to keep the accusations from going public.
As documented by reporter Ronan Farrow, starting in the fall of 2016, Weinstein began hiring private security agencies to secure information from the women who alleged abuse, as well as the journalists who were trying to uncover these stories.
“According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, one of the world’s largest corporate intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies,” Farrow wrote. “Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives ‘highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,’ according to its literature.”
One of the woman these operatives met with was Rose McGowan. A female investigator working on behalf of Black Cube posed as a women’s rights advocate and had repeated meetings with the actress, even telling her that she wanted to invest in her production company. The investigator was working to extract information from McGowan—who, following the original New Yorker report, publicly accused Weinstein of rape. Hours of conversations between the two women were recorded by the operative and after McGowan revealed that she had spoken to Farrow about his initial report, the investigator emailed Farrow as well (he did not respond to the message).
Beyond this, the agency hired reporters on behalf of Weinstein to obtain information from women who alleged that the producer had sexually assaulted them. Per the report:
“Black Cube also agreed to hire ‘an investigative journalist, as per the Client request,’ who would be required to conduct ten interviews a month for four months and be paid forty thousand dollars. In January, 2017, a freelance journalist called McGowan and had a lengthy conversation with her that he recorded without telling her; he subsequently communicated with Black Cube about the interviews, though he denied he was reporting back to them in a formal capacity. He contacted at least two other women with allegations against Weinstein, including the actress Annabella Sciorra, who later went public in The New Yorker with a rape allegation against Weinstein.”
The agency decline to comment on any work that was conducted for Weinstein. But they were not the only resource the producer reportedly used to collect information. Weinstein exchanged emails with Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of American Media Inc. (the company that publishes the National Enquirer), about personal information about McGowan that one of Howard’s reporters had collected in effort to discredit her. Weinstein also worked with Los Angeles-based firm PSOPS, whose investigators “produced detailed profiles of various individuals in the saga, sometimes of a personal nature, which included information that could be used to undermine their credibility.” This included detailed reporting on McGowan that included her “address and other personal information, along with sections labelled ‘Lies/Exaggerations/Contradictions,’ ‘Hypocrisy,’ and ‘Potential Negative Character Wits,’ an apparent abbreviation of ‘witnesses.'”
Weinstein consulted separate agencies to file similar reports on actress Patricia Arquette, another accuser, as well as journalists who were looking to publish reports on the allegations—include New York magazine’s editor in chief Adam Moss
A statement given to The New Yorker from Weinstein’s spokesperson Sallie Hofmeister read: “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”
Related: These Are All the Women Who Have Accused Harvey Weinstein of Sexual Harassment and Assault