Harvey Weinstein Hired Private Investigators, Former Spies To Silence Sexual Assault Accusers

A new report from the New Yorker has revealed that Harvey Weinstein employed a number of private detectives, lawyers, and a variety of firms to investigate any potential sexual assault allegations that could be used against him.

READ: Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein Suspended From Company Indefinitely

One of Weinstein's methods included using an agent who posed as a women's right advocate to befriend and spy on Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein's accusers. That same agent also posed as a woman with a possible allegation against Weinstein in attempt to get journalists to share information about other accusers.

Weinstein using investigators on accusers and reporters spanned back more than a decade. As the New Yorker reports:

For years, Weinstein had used private security agencies to investigate reporters. In the early aughts, as the journalist David Carr, who died in 2015, worked on a report on Weinstein for New York, Weinstein assigned Kroll to dig up unflattering information about him, according to a source close to the matter. Carr's widow, Jill Rooney Carr, told me that her husband believed that he was being surveilled, though he didn’t know by whom. "He thought he was being followed," she recalled. In one document, Weinstein's investigators wrote that Carr had learned of McGowan's allegation in the course of his reporting. Carr "wrote a number of critical/unflattering articles about HW over the years," the document says, "none of which touched on the topic of women (due to fear of HW's retaliation, according to HW)."

The report also includes the names of some of the private investigators hired by Weinstein such as Jack Palladino, the attorney who represented R. Kelly when the singer was charged with videotaping himself having sex with an underage teenager.

Source: newyorker.com