In his continued reporting about Harvey Weinstein, Ronan Farrow has found that he has become part of the story.
For The New Yorker, Farrow writes about the complex web Weinstein’s lawyers set up to spy on his accusers, including hiring private investigators. Farrow found that a woman, who called herself Diana Filip, reached out to Weinstein accuser Rose McGowan and posed as a women’s-rights advocate.
After she learned he was working on a story about Weinstein, Filip reached out to Farrow, and to other journalists.
Filip was persistent. In one e-mail, she suggested meeting in Los Angeles and then, when McGowan said she would be in New York, Filip said she could meet there just as easily. She also began pressing McGowan for information. In a conversation in July, McGowan revealed to Filip that she had spoken to me as part of my reporting on Weinstein. 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.
Ben Wallace, a reporter at New York who was pursuing a story on Weinstein, said that the same woman met with him twice last fall. She identified herself only as Anna and suggested that she had an allegation against Weinstein. When I presented Wallace with the same photographs of Black Cube’s undercover operative, Wallace recalled her vividly. “That’s her,” he said.
The story goes on to detail how some journalists, including Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of America Media, which publishes the National Enquirer, fed Weinstein information about his accusers. “I had an obligation to protect AMI’s interests by seeking out—but not publishing—truthful information about people who Mr. Weinstein insisted were making false claims against him,” Howard told Farrow. “To the extent I provided ‘off the record’ information to Mr. Weinstein about one of his accusers—at a time when Mr. Weinstein was denying any harassment of any woman—it was information which I would never have allowed AMI to publish on the internet or in its magazines,” he added.