Harvey Weinstein Hired an Army of Spies to Hide His Sexual Misconduct, Basically Only Fooled Rose McGowan

What do you do if you’re one of the most successful movie producers in the world but the New York Times is about to publish a story on how you’ve been harassing and assaulting women and shrubberies left and right for the last 30 years? If you’re Harvey Weinstein, you hire a bunch of former Mossad guys to put the kibosh on it like you’re some sort of Jewish Vladimir Putin.

Ronan Farrow, who left an MSNBC show that got fewer viewers than he has siblings to become a journalist, broke the story of how Weinstein hired an army of spies to discredit and threaten anyone who might speak out against him and squash the article that eventually ran in The New Yorker.

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.

Jesus Christ, the spy agency is called Black Cube. That definitely sounds like something that would be run by Ernst Blofeld. “Hello, Mr. Bond. This is Black Cube. You have 12 hours to comply with our demands or we will destroy Wyoming!”

I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus here, other than Harvey Weinstein that is, but it seems like everyone approached by Black Cube operatives other than Rose McGowan saw through them pretty quickly.

Filip told McGowan that she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace, and asked McGowan, a vocal women’s-rights advocate, to speak at a gala kickoff event later that year. Filip offered McGowan a fee of sixty thousand dollars. “I understand that we have a lot in common,” Filip wrote to McGowan before their first meeting, in May, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Filip had a U.K. cell-phone number, and she spoke with what McGowan took to be a German accent. Over the following months, the two women met at least three more times at hotel bars in Los Angeles and New York and other locations.

McGowan didn’t realize what the game was until Ronan Farrow showed her pictures of a Black Cube undercover operative that she recognized as Filip. But here’s how Ronan Farrow describes his interaction with her.

A week later, I received an e-mail from Filip asking for a meeting and suggesting that I join her campaign to end professional discrimination against women. “I am very impressed with your work as a male advocate for gender equality, and believe that you would make an invaluable addition to our activities,” she wrote, using her wealth-management firm’s e-mail address. Unsure of who she was, I did not respond.

She met with Ben Wallace as a woman named Anna claiming to have been a victim of Weinstein. Here’s how he described her.

During their second meeting, Anna requested that they sit close together, leading Wallace to suspect that she might be recording the exchange. When she recounted her experiences with Weinstein, Wallace said, “it seemed like soap-opera acting.”

Another Black Cube operative, posing as a freelance journalist, had a lengthy conversation with McGowan about Weinstein. But McGowan wasn’t the only one he called.

He contacted at least two other women with allegations against Weinstein, including the actress Annabella Sciorra, who later went public in The New Yorker with a rape allegation against Weinstein. Sciorra, whom he called in August, said that she found the conversation suspicious and got off the phone as quickly as possible. “It struck me as B.S.,” she told me. “And it scared me that Harvey was testing to see if I would talk.”

They don’t seem all that great at their job as spies, considering they’re ex-Mossad. Maybe Weinstein was a low-priority client and Black Cube sent their equivalent of Cyril Figgis to handle his case while Archer, Lana and Ray did real jobs. McGowan should have more suspicious, though. Who wants a headlining speaker for their event and makes Rose McGowan their first choice. How does that conversation even go? “You know who would be perfect? That actress from Charmed! No, not that one. No, not her, either, are you kidding, we can’t afford her. No, no, not her either, the one who replaced her. Yeah, that’s just who we need, what was her name? That’s right, Rose McGowan!”

Still, the villain of the piece is Weinstein. And he’s gone from a real world sexual harasser villain to a cartoonish movie super-villain, all to avoid goofing off in famous rapist day-care.