by Ronan Farrow
The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She lived in terror of him; she still slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she said, had violently raped her and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly.
In the early nineties, after Sciorra starred in The Night We Never Met, which Weinstein produced, she said that she became ensconced in “this circle of Miramax.” There were so many screenings and events and dinners that it was hard to imagine life outside of the Weinstein ecosystem. At one dinner, in New York, she recalled, “Harvey was there, and I got up to leave. And Harvey said, ‘Oh, I’ll drop you off.’ Harvey had dropped me off before, so I didn’t really expect anything out of the ordinary—I expected just to be dropped off.” In the car, Weinstein said goodbye to Sciorra, and she went upstairs to her apartment. She was alone and getting ready for bed a few minutes later when she heard a knock on the door. “It wasn’t that late,” she said. “Like, it wasn’t the middle of the night, so I opened the door a crack to see who it was. And he pushed the door open.” Sciorra paused. The story seemed almost physically impossible for her to tell. Weinstein “walked in like it was his apartment, like he owned the place, and started unbuttoning his shirt. So it was very clear where he thought this was going to go. And I was in a nightgown. I didn’t have much on.” He circled the apartment; to Sciorra, it appeared that he was checking whether anyone else was there.
Sciorra told me that listening to Gutierrez’s recording from the sting operation “really triggered me.” She remembered Weinstein employing the same tactics as he cornered her, backing her into her bedroom. “Come here, come on, cut it out, what are you doing, come here,” she remembered him saying. She tried to be assertive. “This is not happening,” she told him. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”
“He shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me.” Sciorra struggled. “I kicked and I yelled,” she said, but Weinstein locked her arms over her head with one hand and forced sexual intercourse on her. “When he was done, he ejaculated on my leg, and on my nightgown.” It was a family heirloom, handed down from relatives in Italy and embroidered in white cotton. “He said, ‘I have impeccable timing,’ and then he said, ‘This is for you.’” Sciorra stopped, overcome, hyperventilating. “And then he attempted to perform oral sex on me. And I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me.” Sciorra said that her body started to shake violently. “I think, in a way, that’s what made him leave, because it looked like I was having a seizure or something.”
The renderings of these stories that were ultimately published in The New Yorker were precise and legalistic. They made no attempt at communicating the true, bleak ugliness of listening to a recollection of violent rape like Sciorra’s. Her voice caught. The memory erupted in ragged sobs. You heard Annabella Sciora struggle to tell her story once, and it stayed inside you forever.
In the weeks and months that followed the alleged attack, Sciorra didn’t tell anyone about it. She never spoke to the police. “Like most of these women, I was so ashamed of what happened,” she said. “And I fought. I fought. But still I was like, Why did I open that door? Who opens the door at that time of night? I was definitely embarrassed by it. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had fucked up.” She grew depressed and lost weight. Her father, unaware of the attack but concerned for her well-being, urged her to seek help, and she did see a therapist, but, she said, “I don’t even think I told the therapist. It’s pathetic.”
Sciorra, like so many others, suspected that Weinstein had retaliated. She said that she felt the impact on her livelihood almost immediately. “From 1992, I didn’t work again until 1995,” she said. “I just kept getting this pushback of ‘we heard you were difficult; we heard this or that.’ I think that that was the Harvey machine.” The actress Rosie Perez, a friend who was among the first to discuss Sciorra’s allegations with her, told me, “She was riding high, and then she started acting weird and getting reclusive. It made no sense. Why did this woman, who was so talented, and riding so high, doing hit after hit, then all of a sudden fall off the map? It hurts me as a fellow actress to see her career not flourish the way it should have.”
Several years later, Sciorra did begin working again, and Weinstein again pursued her with unwanted sexual advances. In 1995, she was in London shooting The Innocent Sleep, which Weinstein did not produce. According to Sciorra, Weinstein began leaving her messages, demanding that she call him or that they meet at his hotel. She didn’t know how he’d found her. One night, he showed up at her room and began pounding on the door, she said. “For nights after, I couldn’t sleep. I piled furniture in front of the door, like in the movies.”
Two years later, Sciorra appeared in the crime drama Cop Land as Liz Randone, the wife of a corrupt police officer. She said that she auditioned for the part without realizing at first that it was a Miramax film, and she learned that Weinstein’s company was involved only when she began contract negotiations. In May 1997, shortly before the film’s release, Sciorra went to the Cannes Film Festival. When she checked into the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, in Antibes, a Miramax associate told her that Weinstein’s room would be next to hers. “My heart just sank,” Sciorra recalled. Early one morning, while she was still asleep, there was a knock on the door. Groggy, and thinking she must have forgotten about an early hair-and-makeup call, she opened the door. “There’s Harvey in his underwear, holding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape, a movie, in the other,” she recalled. “And it was horrific, because I’d been there before.” Sciorra said that she ran from Weinstein. “He was closing in really quickly, and I pressed all the call buttons for valet service and room service. I kept pressing all of them until someone showed up.” Weinstein retreated, she said, when hotel staff arrived.
Over time, Sciorra opened up to a small number of people. Perez said that she heard from an acquaintance about Weinstein’s behavior at the hotel in London and questioned Sciorra about what happened. Sciorra told Perez about the attack in her apartment, and Perez, who was sexually assaulted by a relative during her childhood, began crying. “I said, ‘Oh, Annabella, you’ve gotta go to the police.’ She said, ‘I can’t go to the police. He’s destroying my career.’”
Perez said that she urged Sciorra to speak by describing her own experience of going public about her assault. “I told her, ‘I used to tread water for years. It’s fucking exhausting, and maybe speaking out, that’s your lifeboat. Grab on and get out,’” Perez recalled. “I said, ‘Honey, the water never goes away. But, after I went public, it became a puddle and I built a bridge over it, and one day you’re gonna get there, too.’”
When Sciorra decided to go on the record, I told Remnick that I had more. He assigned David Rohde, a veteran war reporter for Reuters and the Times, as an additional editor. Rohde, who had once been kidnapped by the Taliban, had an angelic face that seemed incapable of arranging itself into expressions of malice or deception.
That October, he and Foley-Mendelssohn oversaw what became a story about the complex struggle each of the women had faced over whether to speak. We included Sciorra’s account, and that of the actress Daryl Hannah, who told me Weinstein had sexually harassed her, too. Hannah said that, during the Cannes Film Festival in the early 2000s, Weinstein had relentlessly pounded on her hotel-room door until she slipped out via an exterior door and spent the night in her makeup artist’s room. The night after, he’d tried again, and she’d had to barricade her hotel door with furniture to keep Weinstein out. Several years later, while she was in Rome for the premiere of Kill Bill: Volume 2, which Miramax distributed, he simply showed up in her room. “He had a key,” Hannah told me. “He came through the living room and into the bedroom. He just burst in like a raging bull. And I know with every fiber of my being that if my male makeup artist was not in that room, things would not have gone well. It was scary.” Weinstein, appearing to cover for the bizarre i
ntrusion, demanded that she go downstairs for a party. But when she got there, the room was empty; it was just Weinstein, asking, “Are your tits real?” and then asking to feel them. “I said, ‘No, you can’t!’ And then he said, ‘At least flash me, then.’ And I said, ‘Fuck off, Harvey.’” The next morning, the Miramax private plane left without Hannah on it.
Sciorra and Hannah both talked about the forces that keep women quiet. Hannah said she’d told anyone who would listen from the get-go. “And it didn’t matter,” she told me. “I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”
Sciorra, on the other hand, had been afraid to talk for all the reasons survivors of rape so often are: the bludgeoning psychic force of trauma; the fear of retaliation and stigma. “Now when I go to a restaurant or to an event, people are going to know that this happened to me,” Sciorra said. “They’re gonna look at me and they’re gonna know. I’m an intensely private person, and this is the most unprivate thing you can do.”
But there had been something separate and more specific behind her silence. Weinstein’s vice grip on the media had made it hard to know whom to trust. “I’ve known now for a long time how powerful Harvey became, and how he owned a lot of journalists and gossip columnists,” she said.
And she couldn’t prove it, but she was convinced Weinstein was spying on her, keeping tabs, sending intermediaries with concealed motives. She conceded it sounded crazy. “I was afraid of you, because I thought it was Harvey checking up on me,” she said. “As I was talking to you, I got scared that it wasn’t really you.” When I asked her if anyone suspicious had contacted her, she strained to remember. There had been a call, she said, from a British reporter that had unsettled her. “It struck me as BS,” she told me. “And it scared me that Harvey was testing to see if I would talk.” She fished through her texts. There he was, in August, not long after I’d heard from him: “Hi Ms. Sciorra it’s Seth, the journalist in London…. Might you have time for a very quick call to help with our piece? No more than ten minutes, and it’d be really useful for our research…”
CHAPTER 46:
PRETEXTING
Seth Freedman cut a colorful profile. He was a small man with wild eyes, a thick beard, and hair that seemed perpetually askew. He’d been a London stockbroker, then moved to Israel and served in a combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces—IDF—for fifteen months in the 2000s. Later, he turned whistle-blower, taking to the pages of the Guardian to expose his financial firm’s manipulation of wholesale gas prices, eventually getting fired for it. His articles had a rambling, jocular quality and were laced with frank references to a drug habit. In 2013, he’d written a novel called Dead Cat Bounce, about a coked-out London-based Jewish finance guy who runs away to join the IDF and gets swept up in a world of espionage and crime, all under the guise of being a writer for the Guardian. Freedman wrote like a gangster in a Guy Ritchie movie talks: “The perfect mojito is a line of coke. See what I’m saying? Rum, lime, sugar, mint—yeah, yeah, yeah, but trust me, it’s the poor man’s Charlie. The scared man’s snow. The straight man’s chang.”
In late October 2017, after the conversation with Sciorra, I followed up on Freedman’s call, saying I wanted to talk. I told him it was time-sensitive. A tumble of WhatsApp messages came back. “Massive congratulations on your reporting,” he said. “Have been following closely.” He said he’d been working with an English paper to get some of the stories out. Later, he’d explain how he passed recordings he’d made of his conversations with McGowan and another Weinstein accuser to the Guardian’s Sunday publication, the Observer, and how it published articles based on the interviews. The articles made no mention of Freedman, and talked around who conducted the interviews, and why.
Freedman professed to have shared the recordings out of a sincere desire to help expose the truth. And he offered to help with my reporting too. Quickly, he sent a screenshot of a document entitled “List of targets.” It was a portion of a list of nearly a hundred names: former Weinstein employees, unfriendly journalists, and, most of all, women with allegations. Rose McGowan. Zelda Perkins. Annabella Sciorra. Many of the sources in my reporting were on it, including several who had expressed uneasy suspicions that they were being watched or followed. Priority targets were in red. It was the same list Lubell and Doyle Chambers had helped assemble. In some cases, it was annotated with their updates on conversations with targeted individuals.
A few hours after we began exchanging messages, I was on the phone with Freedman. At first, he repeated his story about having only journalistic interest in the matter. “I got tipped off in about November last year that something was gonna happen, and people were looking into a story about Harvey Weinstein,” he said. “At the time, I wanted to just write a piece about Hollywood, about what life was like there.”
But over the course of the conversation, more fine details emerged about the “people” who were “looking into” Weinstein’s accusers. First he referred to this shadowy group as “them.” “I kind of knew them already, but in an extremely different context,” he said. Then it was “we.” “Initially, we thought this was… the normal kind of business dispute you have with Oligarch 1 against Oligarch 2, the equivalent in Hollywood,” he said. The earliest dossiers he received scrutinized Weinstein’s business rivals, including board members at amfAR. But as the focus turned to McGowan, and Perkins, and Dix, he said, he began to grow uncomfortable with his involvement. “It turned out that it was actually about sexual assault. We pulled back and we said there’s no way we’re getting involved with this. How do we extricate ourselves? Because he’s hired us.”
I struggled to make sense of who Seth Freedman was working with on Weinstein’s behalf. “Are we talking about private investigators working for him or other journalists?” I asked.
“Yeah, the first, yeah,” he said cautiously. “I was in the Israeli army,” he continued. “I know a lot of people involved in Israeli intelligence. That should be enough to give you a guide to who they are without me telling you who they are.”
I tried one more time. “Can you name any of the individuals in this group or the name of the group?”
Finally, he said, “They’re called Black Cube.”
For you or me, the term “private detective” might conjure images of hard-drinking ex-cops working out of rundown offices. But for moneyed corporations and individuals, the profession has long offered services that look very different. Back in the ’70s, a former prosecutor named Jules Kroll founded his eponymous firm, catering to law firms and banks, and staffed by former cops, FBI agents, and forensic accountants. The formula, and a generation of copycats, flourished. In the 2000s, Israel became a hotbed for such firms. The country’s mandatory military service, and the legendary secrecy and accomplishment of its intelligence agency, Mossad, created a ready pipeline of trained operatives. The Israeli firms began emphasizing less conventional forms of corporate espionage, including “pretexting”: using operatives with false identities.
Black Cube perfected the formula. It was founded in 2010 by Dan Zorella and Dr. Avi Yanus, who had been on the emails with Weinstein’s lawyers. Zorella and Yanus were both veterans of a secret Israeli intelligence unit. From the beginning, Black Cube had close connections to Israel’s military and intelligence leadership. Meir Dagan, the legendary former director of Mossad, sat on the company’s advisory board until his death, in 2016. Dagan once pitched Black Cube’s services to a tycoon by saying: I can find a personal Mossad for you.
Black Cube’s workforce grew to more than a hundred operatives, speaking thirty languages. It opened offices in London and Paris and eventually moved its headquarters to a massive space in a gleaming tower in central Tel Aviv, behind a jet-black unmarked door. Inside, there were more unmarked doors, fingerprint
readers sealing many of them. In the company’s reception area, just about everything fit a black cube motif, from the plush furnishings to the art on the walls. In other rooms, agents took pretexting to new extremes. A single desk might have cubby holes containing twenty different cell phones, each tied to a different number and fictional persona. Everyone submitted to routine polygraphs to ensure they weren’t leaking to the press. Even the janitors got tested.
The line between Black Cube and Israel’s actual intelligence apparatus could be fine. The private agency was “the exclusive supplier to major organizations and government ministries,” one court document revealed. So it was unsurprising that Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, had recommended Black Cube to Weinstein.
I blanketed Tel Aviv with calls and emails, and soon, a firm that prided itself on silence was beginning to whisper, up to its very highest levels. There was a formal, bland denial, orchestrated by a freelance Tel Aviv flack named Eido Minkovsky, who flirted and flattered his way through calls. “My wife’s seen your pictures,” he said. “There’s no way she’s gonna come to New York. She’s not allowed to. I confiscated her visa.”
“You’re a sweet talker. I respect that,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s my game.”
And then there was a series of more revealing calls that I took alongside Rohde, the editor, huddled in his office early each morning to account for the time difference. These were with two men close to the Black Cube operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity. At first, their party line was denial. They said the agency had only done internet research for Weinstein, and that its operatives had never contacted women with allegations or reporters. “We never approached any of these,” said the deeper of the two Israeli-accented voices, belonging to the more senior of the sources. “I also made sure with my team here, any of these you wrote here: Annabella Sciorra, Sophie Dix, Rose McGowan…” And, when I raised Ben Wallace’s and my suspicions that we’d been targeted: “We don’t generally work on journalists as a target.” They “swore” it, said the more junior man close to the operation, who had a higher, lighter voice. “We’re Talmud Jews!” he continued. “We don’t swear for nothing!” The calls were both ominous and entertaining.
