This is so unbelievably sick it boggles the mind:
In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is 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. 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.
So this guy sexually harasses and (allegedly) rapes dozens of women, then hires professional spies to dig up dirt and discredit those women. I don’t know who is more disgusting—Weinstein or the people that did this for him:
Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.
The goal was to stop publication about his abuses, the same abuses were recently published in the New York Times and New Yorker.
Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.
According to the New Yorker, one of the key players of this sordid escapade was attorney David Boies, who personally signed the contract with “Black Cube” with a view towards stopping the allegations from being published in the Times. He did this while his while his law firm was representing the Times in other cases. Boies, who represented the interests of former Vice President Al Gore in the disputed 2000 election, now calls his firm’s contracting with these agencies a “mistake."
Ya think? The article notes that these witch-hunts were likely run through a law firm to cloak them with attorney-client or work-product privilege.
The article describes the tactics employed against one of Weinstein’s accusers, Rose McGowan. She was approached by a woman who perversely represented herself as “launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace.” The woman offered McGowan a hefty fee to speak, apparently to build her trust, then started asking questions about her knowledge of Weinstein’s proclivities, eventually learning that McGowan had contacted the New Yorker about them. Ronan Farrow, the author of the source article linked above then received a call from the same woman who told him she admired his work and gave him the same phony spiel about advocating for “gender equality." Farrow ignored her.
In fact this “woman’s rights advocate” was a former officer of the Israeli Defense Forces operating under an alias, and working for “Black Cube." She also approached reporters at New York Magazine and the New York Times under the same pretense, and offered made-up stories about Weinstein to try to secure those reporters’ trust. The NY Mag reporter grew suspicious at this strange source’s seeming inability to provide meaningful information while simultanously grilling him for information about Weinstein.
The whole sordid thing is laid out in Farrow’s piece from today's New Yorker. There's more—a lot more, including the involvement of an anonymous freelance journalist who contacted Weinstein’s accusers and reported back to “Black Cube."
But Weinstein’s obsession didn't stop with using these Israeli spooks to undermine his victims. One of the major players in this was Kroll, the corporate security firm:
During the more recent effort to shut down emerging stories, Kroll again played a central role. E-mails show that Dan Karson, the chairman of Kroll Americas’ Investigations and Disputes practice, contacted Weinstein at his personal e-mail address with information about women with allegations. In one October, 2016, e-mail, Karson sent Weinstein eleven photographs of McGowan and Weinstein together at different events in the years after he allegedly assaulted her. Three hours later, Weinstein forwarded Karson’s e-mail to Boies and Weinstein’s criminal-defense attorney, Blair Berk, and told them to “scroll thru the extra ones.” The next morning, Berk replied that one photo, which showed McGowan warmly talking with Weinstein, “is the money shot.”
All of the multiple firms Weinstein hired were involved in trying to determine the extent of various reporters’ knowledge about the allegations. Eventually, though, the sheer enormity of Weinstein’s behavior overwhelmed the efforts of even these most dogged of smear artists. But they left a trail of emotionally terrorized women in their wake:
After a year of concerted effort, Weinstein’s campaign to track and silence his accusers crumbled. Several of the women targeted, however, said that Weinstein’s use of private security agencies deepened the challenge of speaking out. “It scared me,” [the actress Annabella Sciorra] said, “because I knew what it meant to be threatened by Harvey. I was in fear of him finding me.”
This is simply sexual violence wedded to corporate money and power, run amok. The extent of the complicity here is absolutely staggering.
Hopefully the awards in the lawsuits that are certain to follow will be as well.