01x02 - The Reporters

[bunniefuu]

I met Harvey at The Peninsula

at least 20 years ago.

And I remember sitting

there on the terrace

out there at The Peninsula

waiting for Harvey.

And, all of a sudden, Harvey comes

running onto this thing

screaming like a mad man.

Why do you write this sh*t about me?

Why do you write this sh*t?

Why do you say, I'm a bully?

Which was funny in the moment.

And then he said, what have you

heard about me?

And I thought, all right, like this

is the moment. Like, this is it.

I gotta do this now or do it never.

I said, I've heard you r*pe women.

CATCH AND k*ll

THE PODCAST TAPES

THE REPORTERS

Testing. One, two, three,

four, five, six, seven, eight.

- All right, you guys speeding?

- Speed C.

How many years do you think

you circled this story for?

Long, I mean intermittently.

I don't wanna make you think

I'm just constantly every week,

like let me do a Harvey check-in.

Every once in a while, I'd be like, this

guy just left Miramax. Let's call him.

Kim Masters has been reporting

on Hollywood since the 90s,

which means she's also been reporting

on Harvey Weinstein since the 90s.

The stories of Weinstein's alleged

abuse go back literally for decades.

Do you have any advice for

a young girl moving to Hollywood?

If Weinstein invites you to a private

party in the Four Seasons, don't go.

Journalists had tried for years

to nail down these rumors,

to convince sources to go on

the record, to break this story.

Every girl knows that

if she's a competent actress,

if she could get on your good side.

You could make her a star overnight.

Howard, I wish, the movies are too

expensive, the risks are too great.

People have referred to Weinstein's

behavior as an open secret.

I'd heard rumors for years.

Two names I heard

that he had assaulted were Gwyneth

Paltrow and Rosanna Arquette.

My situation that happened at The

Beverly Hills Hotel in the early 90s

was there was a film called Romeo

is Bleeding with Gary Oldman.

And he had wanted me

to play the wife.

So, I get here, supposed to have

dinner at the Polo Lounge.

And Mr. Weinstein, we'll see you

upstairs. And I got really like

And I said okay, but they're meeting

in the hotel room,

like, you know, they always do.

It's not a big deal. I've met

a lot of directors in hotel rooms.

I did, for years.

That's where people held meetings.

If you're coming from New York, you

rent a hotel and you have a suite

and the living room part

is where the meeting is.

It's not in a bed.

There's no bed there.

I get up there, he opens the door in

his white bathrobe which was his thing.

Rosanna, I can't move my neck.

And I was like, I stood back and

I went, I have a masseuse for you.

And he took my hand, you know,

and then I yanked it away.

- He pulled your hand towards

- Towards his p*nis.

Which was actually

in the robe but hard already.

I had to pull my hand away.

It was gross.

Like I didn't,

and all of this stuff is like,

and then he said, Rosanna,

you're making a very big mistake.

And I said, I'll never be that girl.

What were you thinking as you left

that meeting with Harvey?

I knew, as soon as I went down

that elevator.

It was just like I knew it. It's over.

Like as I got to the bottom floor,

and I just immediately knew.

I said, there's gonna be retaliation.

I'm f*cked. I know it.

And I was right.

We'd find out that Arquette's

experience was far from unique.

But when Kim Masters

was reporting on this in the 90s,

those were just rumors.

We really wanted to get at it

but there was no, it was like

trying to grab like smoke.

Because you're not gonna be able

to call up Gwyneth Paltrow

and say, were you assaulted

by Harvey Weinstein?

Given who Harvey was at that time.

Mr. Weinstein?

Who could basically say,

would you like an Oscar

or would you like to litigate

until I destroy you?

It felt like a complete hopeless thing

to try to get a hold of that.

I feel like the people in New York

got farther than the people in LA.

Like I think Ken Auletta got some

stuff maybe that we didn't have.

I profiled him

for The New Yorker in 2002

and I reached out

to Matthew Hiltzik

who was then his public

relations guy.

And they came back, as I remember,

we're not gonna cooperate.

I said, okay, I'll do it anyway.

Ken has covered the media

for The New Yorker since 1993.

Over the course of his career, he's

profiled a lot of elite power players,

everyone from New York Mayor Ed Koch

to Michael Eisner to Roy Cohn,

Nixon's advisor and a mentor

to a young Donald Trump.

Ken wanted to write the most

comprehensive piece

ever published

about Harvey Weinstein.

That's what he was trying to get

Weinstein and Hiltzik to understand.

You say, I don't wanna just talk

to your enemies and adversaries.

I wanna talk to you. I wanna

understand you. That's my job.

And at that point, they succumbed

and said, they'll cooperate.

What was his reputation at the time,

when you started digging into this?

People were afraid of him.

Harvey instilled enormous fear.

They thought he could affect their

career. He could destroy their career.

He could and he often did call people

who wanted to leave his employ

and tell people, don't hire this person,

and he bad mouthed them.

I had any number of people who say,

I'll talk but you can't quote me.

And what was that about?

It was fear.

Every time you confronted him about

a near fistfight he had,

putting a reporter in a headlock,

threatening Graydon Carter,

the editor of Vanity Fair

Throwing an ashtray at the wall

behind Donna Gigliotti, right?

- Isn't that in your profile?

- Yeah, and a marble ashtray.

I mean one, really,

like five-pound ashtray.

Every time I would confront him,

he said, I know I go to excess.

I know I have a hot temper.

I'm reformed.

Then you began to hear

about these allegations.

What you do is, as you get

to know people

and talk to them more than once,

you become more intimate with them.

And they feel, they relax a little bit.

And then you say, what am I missing?

Who else should I talk to?

Or I hear that Harvey boasts about

the women actresses he sleeps with.

Tell me about that.

And as you get to know people,

they feel comfortable enough

to share some secrets with you.

You just try to put the pieces together,

like a detective would.

The two women I came closest to

exposing Harvey's behavior towards,

Zelda Perkins, who's his assistant

in London and Rowena Chiu.

Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu

were assistants

who quit Weinstein's company,

Miramax, in 1998,

after Rowena said Weinstein

tried to r*pe her.

They later took legal action.

Harvey had attempted

to r*pe Rowena

and I knew they had signed

a non-disclosure agreement,

been paid a total of over $250,000

to sign that non-disclosure agreement.

I went to the court system

in New York.

I could find nothing in the court

system. And I'm saying, why?

There's no court record of any of it.

And then I realized what he did.

What he did was as soon

as you made an accusation

Harvey flies over his lawyer,

hires a law firm in London.

They reach an agreement.

I'll pay you, you sign this

non-disclosure agreement.

You don't get a copy of it.

It stays in my lawyer's office.

It never gets to the court.

It's a private document.

It's not a public document. And

I realized, that's what he did.

And that's why you couldn't get it out.

We didn't have anyone on the record.

But I knew he had done these things.

But I just couldn't prove it.

And so I confronted Harvey

in my final interview.

I spent a fair amount of time with him

and I have about 12 hours

of taped interviews with him.

And I confronted him,

just the two of us,

and I said, Harvey, tell me about

Rowena Chiu and Zelda Perkins

and your attempted r*pe at the Venice

Film Festival in '98, of Rowena.

And he stood up from his chair

and he said,

Ken, this was a consensual affair.

You're gonna ruin my marriage.

You're gonna destroy

my three young daughters' lives.

And you can't do it. And he stood

over me shaking, fists clenched.

When I stood up, at that moment,

thinking, actually,

we were gonna get into fistfight,

he broke down and started crying.

And it was quite extraordinary.

And I wondered, was that

the bully crying

or was it just so, so fearful that

finally he was gonna be exposed?

The Tuesday before Ken's profile ran,

Harvey Weinstein and his lawyer,

David Boies,

set a meeting with Ken,

his editor, David Remnick,

and the magazine's lawyer

at The New Yorker's offices.

Harvey thinks we're gonna run what

he's done with Zelda Perkins

and Rowena Chiu.

And we're sitting across from each other

in The New Yorker conference room

in the old New Yorker building

on 42nd Street.

And he started screaming,

I'm gonna stop you from publishing.

And David Boies, to his credit,

taps him on the arm and said,

Harvey, there's a First Amendment

in this country. You can't do that.

Then I lean forward and I said, Harvey,

here's what we need tomorrow.

I need to see how you paid

these two non-disclosure agreements

for Zelda and for Rowena.

And he said, I'm not gonna.

Harvey, I need to see it tomorrow.

Of course, I'm thinking, if I could

show that the corporate parent, Disney,

paid for the non-disclosure,

or Miramax itself paid,

someone's going to jail

and I could write the whole story.

I didn't need the women to talk to me

cause I had it then.

So, the next day he comes with

his brother, Bob Weinstein,

and they slide across the table two

canceled checks from Bob Weinstein.

They're personal checks.

When I confront the guy and he says,

they're consensual affairs,

I paid for silence to protect my

marriage. I can't prove otherwise.

By using personal checks

to pay off the women,

Weinstein avoided

committing corporate fraud.

Ken wasn't able to expose him.

And David said to me,

I don't see how we could run this.

And I agreed with him.

And I still agree with him.

I think it was the right decision.

We couldn't prove it.

The profile published

on December 16th, 2002.

Looking back at it, there's this

one passage that really stands out.

Weinstein doesn't wanna

share the costs of the movie

or trade half an interest

in a Miramax film.

Instead, his partners,

the studio head said,

feel r*ped, a word often invoked

by those dealing with him.

You couldn't get the allegations

of sexual abuse reportable.

But you did include the word, r*pe,

there. Talk about that decision.

It was deliberate because I knew he

was guilty but I couldn't prove it.

And I knew that, actually, he didn't

just physically r*pe people.

He verbally r*ped people.

He r*ped people by threatening

them with fear for their job,

for their livelihood,

for their careers.

So, r*pe, is a word that,

I think defines not just

the act of physical r*pe.

But in Harvey's case,

the way he abused people.

So, they didn't interpret it. They

sincerely took it at face value, too?

They didn't take it literally.

Well, people didn't know

that Harvey was a sexual predator.

Other than that one veiled word,

the profile made no mention

of sexual misconduct.

And this is a good man.

People don't know that.

But he's don't a lot

of good things in life.

They'll write an article about

that someday, too. New Yorker.

You know, to write about Harvey

was to make Harvey mad.

The way Kim tells it, she was always

getting into scrapes with Weinstein

over how she wrote about

the films he distributed.

She wrote about production issues

on the set of Gangs of New York.

That was a fight.

We had a big tangle

over Inglourious b*stards

because my father was a Viennese

Jew who became a British commando.

The actual guys who were Jews

and became commandos

were very offended

by Inglourious b*stards.

They were highly trained elite troops.

They were not guys with baseball bats.

I wrote about this for The Daily Beast,

My Father: The Inglourious b*stard.

Harvey threatened to sue me.

Well, it even gets better.

He had optioned, my father wrote

a memoir and Harvey optioned it.

I was not involved at all. I made

a huge point not to be involved.

- He never paid my father.

- No, he was famous for that.

And he said to me once in a meeting

when we were talking about,

he says, all these people say

I don't pay them.

Who are these people?

Where are these people?

And it was all I could do not to say,

my father, my 83-year old father,

you son of a b*tch.

But I didn't because I didn't want

the door opened to Harvey

then would have said, you know,

I'll write you a check right now.

Kim circled the story for years.

But no one was willing

to give concrete answers.

When Janice Min was running

The Hollywood Reporter,

we thought we were gonna

break the story.

It wasn't me, to be fair. It was Rose

McGowan was going to go public.

The actress, Rose McGowen, had recently

Tweeted about her own sexual as*ault,

Tweets lots of people

assumed were about Weinstein.

Rose McGowen opened up about

a past experience

where she was sexually assaulted

by a big Hollywood studio head.

She had a series of Tweets like,

my, I was r*ped. My boyfriend this.

And I went to my editor and said,

we can connect the dots here.

There's only one person this could be.

Her boyfriend is Robert Rodriguez.

The r*pist is Harvey. We can do this.

And our lawyers were

not ready to go there.

It really did feel like

the ungettable story.

Did the Harvey Weinstein story keep

you up at night over the years?

Yeah, I often thought about

how I couldn't solve the case,

how I couldn't expose

his sexual predation.

In 2015, Ken saw another opportunity,

when a Filipina-Italian model named

Ambra Gutierrez, went to the police

and told them Weinstein

had assaulted her in his office.

The story had been

all over the tabloids.

So, I call up Harvey. I said, Harvey,

I need to talk to you about Ambra.

And he said, I can't talk to you

cause I'm under instructions

from DA Vance not to talk

about the case to the press.

And I had a source

in the police department

and the police department's saying,

we believe this woman,

that she's got the goods on Harvey.

I said, can I get the tape?

Can't, can't do that.

Then, Vance decides

not to prosecute the case.

I'm dead. The story is dead.

By the spring of 2017,

I was working on my own Weinstein

reporting at NBC News.

I was also starting to sense resistance

within the network to airing the story.

And, so, I started reaching out

to the journalists

I'd heard had gone at this the hardest.

So, what did you think

when I called you?

I thought, does this guy

have what he says he has?

Cause you were dropping

the veil a bit.

And then I thought, when you said NBC,

I did think, are you, Ronan?

I don't know why I was so skeptical,

but I felt like they don't have

the stomach for it.

Well, you had the last laugh

on that one.

I was right. Yes.

At the same time, I was reaching out

to Ken Auletta. He encouraged me.

He even said he'd saved all his

notes from his 2002 reporting

and kept them in a private archive

in the New York public library.

Box after box of notes

and transcripts and tapes.

My wife calls me a**l cause

I don't throw anything out.

And it drives her nuts.

It was a moment where I was reminded

of the importance of our profession.

I was discovering uncanny synergy

between what I had been investigating

and what you had found.

I had this other

separate source

that separately corroborated

something

that had been sitting

there in that notebook

that you kept so precisely

for 17 years, or whatever it was.

You had independently come

to the same conclusion.

You had, you know,

three women on the record.

You had five women not by name but

who were certified that he had abused.

And you had the audio tape from 2015.

I mean my heart was racing.

I said, my God, Ronan's got it.

He's got the story. I get goose bumps

as I think about it now.

I mean, it was thrilling.

Ken agreed to a filmed interview

for my NBC story.

We talked about his reporting from the

early 2000s and what he'd uncovered.

At the end of the taping,

while we were wrapping up,

Ken had one more thing

he wanted to say.

And I said, would you put

the camera back on.

- You want me to say that on camera?

- I'm rolling, so

Yeah, I think we should.

If you think it, say it.

I mean, if you don't, if NBC,

which has the evidence,

doesn't go forward

with this story, it's a scandal.

Ken's words would prove prophetic.

Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein

was making bold moves

to try to control reporters

looking into him.

Here it is.

The date is June 29th, 2017.

Says, from Harvey Weinstein,

big letters on the top.

Dear Kim, as you may

or may not know,

we have a publishing arm

of the company

and I have an idea for a fun

Michael Korda kind of biography.

Are you available to discuss today?

All my best, Harvey.

When the note came in,

Kim was in the middle of texting

with her former editor at

The Hollywood Reporter, Janice Min.

And then I say, sh*t,

Harvey W. is calling me. Why did

I answer the f*cking phone?

k*ll me. Excuse my language

but this is how Janice and I,

we're very classy.

She says, what did he want?

Three question marks.

I say, to offer me a book deal.

And she says, I mean,

is it a lot of money?

There you have it, documentary proof.

Now I would like to say,

I would very much like to know

how much money it was.

Cause I wanna know what price Harvey

put on me taking this book deal.

But I did answer the phone, as I said,

sh*t, I answered the phone.

And he said, I wanted to talk to you.

I said, Harvey, we're not doing this.

We're not having this conversation.

And he's like, but,

and I'm like, not gonna happen.

We're, goodbye. We're not, no.

That August, Noah Oppenheim,

the president of NBC News,

told me NBC was k*lling

my reporting on Weinstein.

I was free to take it anywhere.

But where could I turn?

I called Ken Auletta.

You said to me, can I call you

on a secure phone?

I said, what? I was really,

what is that all about?

And you said to me that Noah

Oppenheim rejected your work.

I just couldn't believe it. I mean,

these are fellow journalists.

How could they

have k*lled that story?

And I called Remnick,

the editor of The New Yorker,

and I said, David, I'll never

forget the word I used,

I said, Ronan Farrow

has broken the code.

He's got the goods

on Harvey Weinstein.

I called Remnick. We met and he agreed

that the reporting was newsworthy.

Ultimately, he decided to dig in

and get it in shape

for The New Yorker to publish.

In the days leading up to publication,

Kim Masters was watching closely.

To the very last minute, doubting it

would ever see the light of day.

Just always feeling, I'm gonna

believe this when I see it.

I wanna see it in print and then,

then I'll believe it.

Heading outside, it is a crystal clear,

still a bit of a breeze, though.

The wind chill in the city

is right around 44.

At 10:47 am, on October 10th,

we hit publish.

There are growing allegations of sexual

harassment and now outright as*ault

by movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein.

New Yorker magazine reporting

new claims of sexual harassment,

as*ault and r*pe.

Weinstein is heard admitting

to inappropriately touching

an Italian model.

It was like a b*mb went

off in our offices.

It was unanticipatable,

if that's a word.

I could never, ever have imagined

what would happen in the aftermath.

Our phones blew up.

You talk about whether

or not people are redeemable.

Is Weinstein redeemable

at this stage?

Harvey Weinstein

is not coming back.

He offered me the book deal to prevent

me from doing exactly what I did,

which was to go on television,

literally around the world.

I was on TV in Australia, in Asia,

in France, in Germany and Britain.

I was constantly talking

about him on TV.

If I had taken the book deal,

that wouldn't been a thing.

- Why is this coming out now?

- It's a result of changing times.

You know, we're in a world

post-Cosby, post-FOX News.

I think that women

are getting a bit fed up.

In the months and years that followed,

there would be an exodus of senior

and mostly white male executives

from Hollywood, forever

changing the face of the industry.

Of course, all this change,

it's only gone so far.

Have all the enablers

been exposed? No.

And will they ever be?

Probably not.

For decades, Weinstein managed

to intimidate his victims

into keeping quiet.

His undoing would be those who dared

to speak out and face their ab*ser,

like a former assistant who had

kept her secret for 20 years.

I remember thinking,

he's so much bigger than me.

Holy crap, I'm really in trouble. And

thinking, I've gotta get out of here.