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When the actress Ashley Judd claimed a studio head had sexually harassed her, almost but not quite identifying Weinstein, AMI reporters were asked to pursue negative items about her going to rehab. After McGowan’s claim surfaced, one colleague of Howard’s remembered him saying, “I want dirt on that bitch.”
I’d spent most of my life avoiding my sister’s allegation—and not just publicly. I did not want to be defined by my parents, or by the worst years of my mother’s life, of my sister’s life, of my childhood. Mia Farrow is one of the great actors of her generation, and a wonderful mom who sacrificed greatly for her kids. And yet so much of her talent and reputation was consumed by the men in her life, and I took from that a desire to stand on my own, to be known best for my work, whatever it might be. That left what happened in my childhood home frozen in amber, in ancient tabloid coverage and
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By the account Dylan gave when she was seven years old and has repeated precisely ever since, Allen took her to a crawl space in our family’s home in Connecticut and penetrated her with a finger.
Immediately before the alleged assault, a babysitter had seen Allen with his face in Dylan’s lap.
Maco dropped the effort to charge Allen, attributing the decision to his desire to spare Dylan the trauma of trial, taking pains to state that he’d had “probable cause” to proceed.
I argued that her claim fell into a category of credible sexual abuse allegations that were too often ignored by both the Hollywood trade outlets and the wider news media. “That kind of silence isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous,” I wrote. “It sends a message to victims that it’s not worth the anguish of coming forward. It sends a message about who we are as a society, what we’ll overlook, who we’ll ignore, who matters and who doesn’t.”
I was also looking for defenses of Weinstein. But those I found rang hollow.
she remembered her costar in Phantoms, Ben Affleck, seeing her visibly distraught immediately after the incident, and hearing where she’d just come from, and replying, “God damn it, I told him to stop doing this.”
In March 2015, Gutierrez’s modeling agent had invited her to a reception at Radio City Music Hall for New York Spring Spectacular, a show that Weinstein produced.
David Boies had also worked on the Gutierrez imbroglio, and also kept the Manhattan district attorney close. He’d been a longtime donor. He would give $10,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign in the months following the decision not to press charges.
On the morning of April 20, 2015, Gutierrez sat in a law firm office in Midtown Manhattan with a voluminous legal agreement and a pen in front of her. In exchange for a million-dollar payment, she would agree to never again talk publicly about Weinstein or the effort to charge him.
Across the table, Weinstein’s attorney from Giuliani’s firm, Daniel S. Connolly, was trembling visibly as Gutierrez picked up the pen. “I saw him shaking and I realized how big this was. But then I thought I needed to support my mom and brother and how my life was being destroyed, and I did it,” she told me.
I was passing by St. Paul the Apostle, the fortress-like Gothic Revival church near my apartment. I looked up, then hurried out of its shadow.
“Well, he’s not dumb. He’s going to do something. Look, you have your book to finish, right? So this is on the back burner for you,” he said. I glanced at the notes I’d been taking throughout the call. My eyebrows went up when I saw it: Hiltzik had let slip a small but useful lead.
There were limits to how much we could hide the work. The subject of any new interviews would still be revealed on detailed expense reports. But we could avoid calling attention to the matter with leadership.
Weinstein interrupted their conversation to yell into his cell phone, screaming at, of all people, Today show management, enraged that they’d canceled a segment with Amy Adams, a star in the Weinstein movie Big Eyes, when she refused to answer questions about a recent hack targeting Sony executives. Afterward, Weinstein told Nestor to keep an eye on the news cycle, which he promised would be spun in his favor and against NBC. Later in the day, items critical of NBC’s role in the spat surfaced as promised.
In the end, she and Chiu accepted a settlement of two hundred fifty thousand pounds, to be evenly split between them. Weinstein’s brother, Bob, cut the check to the women’s law firm, obscuring the transaction from Disney and distancing it from Harvey.
“The thing with being a victim is I felt responsible,” she said. “Because if I were a strong woman, I would have kicked him in the balls and run away. But I didn’t. And so I felt responsible.”
“It will definitely destroy my life, my career, everything.” I told her the choice was hers alone, but that I believed it would help the other women. As Argento grappled with the decision, her partner, the television personality and chef Anthony Bourdain, interceded repeatedly. He told her to keep going, that it was worth it, that it would make a difference. Argento decided to go on the record.
Weinstein came out, naked and with an erection. He demanded that she lie on the bed and told her that many other women had done so before her. “I was very petrified,” de Caunes said. “But I didn’t want to show him that I was petrified, because I could feel that the more I was freaking out, the more he was excited.” She added, “It was like a hunter with a wild animal. The fear turns him on.” De Caunes told Weinstein that she was leaving. He panicked. “We haven’t done anything!” she remembered him saying. “It’s like being in a Walt Disney movie!” De Caunes told me, “I looked at him and I said—it
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“He’s not even really hiding. I mean, the way he does it, so many people are involved and see what’s happening. But everyone’s too scared to say anything.”
Bourdain said Weinstein’s predation was sickening, that “everyone” had known about it for too long. “I am not a religious man,” he wrote. “But I pray you have the strength to run this story.”
With painful frequency, stories of abuse by powerful people are also stories of a failure of board culture.
Annabella Sciorra
The contracts were signed by Dr. Avi Yanus, the Black Cube director, and by Boies Schiller. This was an astonishment. Boies’s law firm represented the New York Times. But here was the esteemed lawyer’s signature, in genteel blue-inked cursive, on a contract to kill the paper’s reporting and obtain McGowan’s book.
“I work in the information industry. World of espionage and endless action. Hope we can actually talk about it some day. The project I’m involved in.… out of this world, my dear.”
A friend of McDougal’s, Johnny Crawford, first proposed selling the story. In 2016, as they watched election-season coverage of Trump, Crawford said, “You know, if you had a physical relationship with him, that could be worth something.” At his urging, McDougal wrote the notes on the affair. She didn’t want to tell her story at first. But when a former friend of hers, fellow Playboy model Carrie Stevens, started posting about the affair on social media, McDougal figured she should talk before someone else did.
Crawford enlisted Jay Grdina, the ex-husband of the porn star Jenna Jameson, to help sell the story.
Grdina turned to Keith M. Davidson, an attorney with a track record of selling salacious stories. Davidson got in touch with AMI. Pecker and Howard, in turn, alerted Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer. Soon, Trump was on the phone with Pecker, asking for help.
McDougal and Howard met. Howard then made an offer: initially just $10,000 and then, after Trump won the Republican nomination, considerably more than that. On August 5, 2016, McDougal signed a limited life-story rights agreement granting AMI exclusive ownership of her account of any relationship she’d had with any “then-married man.” Her retainer with Davidson made explicit that the man in question was Donald Trump. In exchange, AMI agreed to pay her $150,000. The three men involved in the deal—Davidson, Crawford, and Grdina—took 45 percent of the payment as fees, leaving McDougal with a
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AMI insisted that it had declined to print McDougal’s story because it did not find it credible. It just hadn’t met the Enquirer’s exacting journalistic standards.
“You don’t forget when someone says, ‘Oh, by the way. The maybe-future president has a love child.’” In February 2018, I sat down in David Remnick’s office and told him about the story. “You know what people are going to say when they find out you’re reporting this?” he said, wonderingly. We both laughed. I knew my way around a paternity rumor.
a growing number of documents and sources made clear that AMI really had bought the rights to the dubious claim, then worked to prevent its disclosure.
As he later did during the McDougal affair, Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, had monitored the unfolding events closely. “There’s no question it was done as a favor to continue to protect Trump,” one former AMI employee told me. “That’s black-and-white.”
“I don’t understand what they had to pay this guy for,” he said. “I’m the dad.” “Got it,” I said, and gave him a condoling look. I told him I was making sure they had the chance to respond if they wanted to. I said I understood how awful it could feel to have the press circling your family. He nodded. “I understand. You’re Farrow.” “Yeah.” “Oh I know.” And then he was the one with the pitying look.
Howard directed Davidson to Michael Cohen, who established a shell company to pay Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence. The contract used pseudonyms: Daniels was “Peggy Peterson” and Trump, “David Dennison.”
Trump hadn’t included any of the payments on his financial disclosure forms during the election. As we released our reporting, a nonprofit watchdog organization and a left-leaning political group filed formal complaints requesting that the Justice Department, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Federal Election Commission examine whether the payments to Daniels and McDougal violated federal election law.
The timing, during the election, was good circumstantial evidence that AMI’s intent had been to help the campaign; the conversations with Cohen even more so. Media companies have various exemptions from campaign finance law. But that might not apply, the legal experts added, were it established that a media company was acting not in its press capacity but as an extension of a powerful person’s public relations effort.
In the summer of 2017, Pecker visited the Oval Office and dined at the White House with a French businessman known for brokering deals with Saudi Arabia. Two months later, the businessman and Pecker met with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
“In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship,” Maxine Page, the AMI veteran, told me, “but in fact Pecker has the power—he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.”
Over the years, the company had reached deals to shelve reporting around Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Tiger Woods, Mark Wahlberg, and too many others to count. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” George said. One after another, the AMI employees used the same phrase to describe this practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it. It was an old term in the tabloid industry: “catch and kill.”
Just a few months later, they cut a deal to avoid prosecution for a battery of potential crimes, including violations of campaign finance law, and admitted to everything. In the early days of Trump’s candidacy, they conceded, Pecker had met with Cohen and another member of the campaign. “Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided,” the nonprosecution agreement read. They’d caught, and they’d
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One on-air personality, who signed a nondisclosure agreement in 2012, said that NBC sought the deal after she showed colleagues messages that she took to be propositions, from both Lauer and one of the senior executives who later departed the company. Colleagues recalled both men making lewd remarks about the on-air personality over open mics during broadcasts. “I was like a hanging piece of meat,” she said. “I would walk into work with a knot in my stomach. I would come home and cry.” After she declined the advances, she felt she received fewer assignments. “I got punished,” she said. “My
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Ann Curry left NBC in 2012.
A year after he was ordered to stand down on the Weinstein reporting, McHugh resigned. Then he gave an interview to the New York Times, saying that the reporting had been killed at “the very highest levels of NBC,” that he’d been ordered to stop taking calls about the story, and that the network had lied about what happened.
I told my agents to drop negotiations. The reprisal was decisive. With each of the AMI stories over the following months, I was invited to appear on MSNBC and NBC shows at all hours—and then, suddenly, uninvited. On-air personalities called upset, one near tears, to say I’d been unbooked over their objections, on direct orders from Griffin.
I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program.
