Harvey Weinstein’s Secret Settlements

This story was always, in my eyes,

about the abuse of power.

The techniques Harvey Weinstein used are, I think,

important for us all to talk about,

because, while they are extreme,

they open a window into a set of tools available

if you're that rich, that powerful,

and that bent on stopping dissent about you.

As the world knows now, Harvey Weinstein was surrounded

by allegations going back decades from women who said

that he sexually harassed and assaulted them.

[Interviewer] Do you have any advice

for a young girl moving to Hollywood?

If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party

in the Four Seasons, don't go.

They were described as an open secret

for years in Hollywood, but they never broke,

and there are a lot of reasons for that.

In the Fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein became aware

that a number of women were starting to talk.

One of the precipitating events for that

was Rose McGowan, the actress, tweeted saying that

Harvey Weinstein, she heavily implied without naming him,

was, in her words, her rapist.

She then set off a series of events

that I think she could've never fathomed.

Over the course of the past year,

a woman calling herself Diana Phillip

of Reuben Capital Partners reached out to Rose McGowan

through a literary agency working with her.

All seemed very legit, they offered her

a great deal of money to speak at a gala

kick off event for a women's rights campaign

that they were operating,

right in Rose McGowan's area of interest.

As it turns out, Reuben Capital Partners

was a fake front company.

She was, in fact, an agent for Black Cube, this elite

Israeli private intelligence firm, operating undercover

using multiple identities to extract information.

He assigned them to kill forthcoming stories

about these allegations and to ferret out information

about which women were talking.

Rose McGowan was very much in the crosshairs here.

She says that she was gaslit, that everybody lied to her,

that she was living in a world of fun house mirrors.

They secretly recorded tens of hours

of conversation with her.

It reads like a spy novel, but it's all true.

[soft music]

[Interviewer] What's going to happen to him now?

One of the things we've been reporting on

is the concerted criminal justice effort

targeting Harvey Weinstein at this point.

There are law enforcement agencies

going after him in a very diligent way.

I think partly to atone for the fact

that the ball was dropped a number of times over the years

where there could have been criminal proceedings.

We talk about, in our story, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez,

an Italian model who had an allegation

that Harvey Weinstein groped her in 2015.

[Ambra] I don't feel comfortable.

[Harvey] Honey, don't have a fight with me

in the hallway. It's not nothing, it's...

Please, I'm not gonna do anything.

I swear on my children.

Please come in.

On everything, I'm a famous guy.

I'm, I'm feeling very uncomfortable right now.

Please come in now.

And one minute, and if you wanna leave

when the guy comes with my jacket you can go.

Why yesterday you touch my breast?

Oh, please, I'm sorry, just come on in.

I'm used to that.

This machine that suppressed these allegations

for so long had many moving parts

and one of them was legal in nature.

When you look at the agreement

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez signed, it is highly unusual.

It specifically calls for the destruction

of all evidence related to the incident.

It has Draconian penalties for breach.

It had her sign a sworn affidavit saying

that nothing chronicled in the recording,

that he admitted to in the recording, ever happened,

to be released if she ever breached.

You know, one lawyer I talked to

with knowledge of that agreement said,

This is one of the most usurious, unethical

agreements I have ever seen.

This New Yorker story was the very first

to report sexual assault and rape.

At a point in time at which Harvey Weinstein

was already saying, This is just harassment,

this isn't so bad, I'm gonna get treatment,

this is gonna pass.

It was always apparent to me how important this was.

Every woman who spoke out in our coverage

did an incredibly brave thing.

It was painful personally, it put them at professional risk.

They put a lot on the line.

The fact that this story has had the impact that it has had

is, I think, deeply tied to this moment in history.

My own sister spoke out against a powerful man in Hollywood.

That catalyzed a lot of conversation,

but it was very different then.

The women who came out against Bill Cosby

also faced a really aggressive level of public humiliation.

And then there was Roger Ailes, and then

there's been this cascade of men since,

and I think what people have described

as the Weinstein Effect is actually

a much broader swath of a moment in our culture

and our conversation around these issues

where finally, one story after another piling on,

has let people understand that they can speak

and that there's strength in numbers

that they didn't know existed before.