Following the 60+ allegations made against film producer Harvey Weinstein, the story has rippled out and women - and men - across the world, across industries, have spoken out about the sexual harassment and abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of powerful men. To some extent, these allegations are being taken seriously. Meanwhile, Weinstein received a week of in-patient rehab treatment and now, well, now, it’s been revealed that a woman has lied about an allegation. Yep, she made it all up. She cried wolf. She told a huge whopping fib.
The thing is, this woman, The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow has found, was a spy working for Black Cube, a private intelligence company hired by Weinstein via his lawyers. Ben Wallace, a journalist who’d been working on a piece for New York to expose Weinstein, was contacted by ‘Anna’, who said she wanted to tell him about an assault at the hands of Weinstein. He said her re-telling ‘seemed like soap-opera acting.’ This same woman then pushed Wallace for details of his investigation into Weinstein, and also contacted Rose McGowan, who would become the first woman to allege Weinstein of rape.
Under the guise of Diana Filip, who worked in a top role at Reuben Capital Partners, this woman pretended to be a woman’s rights advocate, suggested she would invest in McGowan’s film company, and - get this - even tried to get Farrow, the journalist who uncovered multiple allegations of Weinstein’s harassment and abuse, on board her supposed wealth-management firm’s campaign to end discrimination against women! Reuben Capital Partners’ website has now been taken down but was listed on its website as being based in London. When Farrow called the office, he got no response, and when he called the company which leased the shared offices, they had no recollection of Reuben Capital Partners ever being based there...
From the looks of Farrow’s piece, this private investigator’s job was to lie to various reporters and other women who would go onto bravely come forward about Weinstein’s abuse, in order to gain their trust. She secretly recorded conversations with them and reported back to Black Cube, so that Weinstein’s lawyers could get a good picture of how to mount a defence of Weinstein, or, better put, attack these women’s credibility. She wasn’t the only spy building psychological and personal profiles of these women and their supporters in order to discredit them. Some of these spies had been trained by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.
Farrow’s long-read is worth a read, because not only does it seem to show, once again, how Weinstein was fully aware of various women’s allegations against him and therefore how badly he had treated them. It shows he was deliberately trying to crush them and anyone who tried to help them come forward. It shows once again that it’s going to take a lot more than therapy for Weinstein to stop hurting women.
That age-old question of why these actresses didn’t speak up sooner still hangs in the air with every pundit on television, radio or whatever fussing over women who've bravely and matter-of-factly stated what they've been subjected to. Well, in the case of Weinstein's alleged victims, there were government-trained spies working to keep them schtum! And all those pictures which surfaced in certain tabloids, showing women who’d made allegations against Weinstein looking friendly with him after the alleged incidents took place? Farrow's piece shows Weinstein’s team literally wanted everyone to see them so these women who alleged Weinstein’s abuses could easier be discredited. The piece also shows that Weinstein used the old ‘I was writing a book’ defence in order to rope ex-employees into creating lists of actresses and calling them up, over and over.
And, of course, Farrow has proven that on the rare occasion when a woman lies about an assault, the reason why is way more complicated than originally thought.
You might also be interested in:
Why Harvey Weinstein 'Trying To Do Better' Isn't Good Enough
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.