Actress Sues Weinstein and Lawyers, Claiming They Tried to Quiet Her

The lawsuit includes McGowan’s account of attempts to interfere with her plan to publish a memoir, “Brave,” including sending an undercover agent to befriend her and then steal a copy of the manuscript. It also describes efforts to derail the reporting by The New York Times and The New Yorker that ultimately exposed decades of accusations against Weinstein and triggered the #MeToo movement.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, said that Weinstein tapped into a team of professionals whose goal was to “ensure that Ms. McGowan’s story never saw the light of day, and — if it did — that no one would believe her.”

Besides Weinstein, Boies and Bloom, the lawsuit names the lawyers’ firms as defendants, as well as Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence firm that used undercover agents to approach women who had accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct.

McGowan, 46, had reached a $100,000 settlement with Weinstein after accusing him of raping her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. Since 2017, when the The New York Times and The New Yorker published their first articles, McGowan has been vocal in her support of women who stepped forward to reveal that the producer had sexually harassed them or worse. Weinstein has been criminally charged in Manhattan with sexually assaulting two women and has pleaded not guilty.

In a statement Wednesday, Phyllis Kupferstein, a lawyer for Weinstein, said that “Rose McGowan will be shown to be what she is: a publicity seeker looking for money.”

McGowan’s lawsuit says Weinstein offered her $1 million to stay quiet and drop the publication of her book. Kupferstein said McGowan asked for $6 million.

“From the moment she sought a multimillion dollar payout in return for not making these baseless allegations, which we rejected, we knew that she was waiting for an opportune time to begin this,” Kupferstein’s statement said. “We will demonstrate that this case has no legal merit.”

Bloom and Boies have said in the past that they made mistakes in agreeing to work for Weinstein. Edward Evans, a spokesman for Boies’ firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, said in a statement that the “progress of the #MeToo movement is essential” but that McGowan’s lawsuit “inappropriately includes our firm and we have no choice but to defend ourselves against allegations that are simply untrue.”

A lawyer for Bloom, Eric George, said in a statement that it was “inexcusable” that McGowan included Bloom as a defendant. “There is simply no credible factual or legal basis for her claims against my client,” he said.

Representatives for Black Cube did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

More than a year before the first articles appeared, McGowan made it publicly known that she was writing a memoir and in Hollywood, it was widely rumored that the book would include accusations against Weinstein. According to the lawsuit, that is when Weinstein and his lawyers began springing into action.

In late 2016, Boies and his firm hired Black Cube to help Weinstein, according to the lawsuit. In 2017, the suit says, a former Israeli intelligence officer employed by Black Cube started posing as an executive from a London-based wealth management firm interested in paying McGowan for speaking engagements related to women’s rights. The undercover agent gained McGowan’s trust and then covertly recorded McGowan reading the agent excerpts from her book, which the firm later shared with Weinstein and his lawyers, the lawsuit said. McGowan said she believes the agent stole her unpublished manuscript during a meeting between the two during which the agent had access to her laptop.

According to the lawsuit, a British freelance journalist working for Black Cube was directed to interview McGowan under the guise of writing a story about men in Hollywood, when he was actually trying to glean information about the memoir she was writing. McGowan’s book was published in January 2018, and in it she described the alleged rape by Weinstein in detail.

The lawsuit bases some of its factual allegations on reporting in the recently published books “She Said,” by the Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, as well as “Catch and Kill” by Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker writer. The three shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service for their reporting. Farrow has extensively reported on Black Cube’s work and “She Said” recounts how Bloom, a prominent victims’ rights attorney, was working behind the scenes with Weinstein to thwart his accusers and quash the journalists’ investigation.

The lawsuit accuses the defendants of racketeering, fraudulent deceit, and inflicting emotional distress. It said Weinstein and his team engaged in a “diabolical and illegal” effort to silence McGowan that had negative effects on her life.

“Her book sales suffered; her expenses mounted; her job opportunities vanished; and her emotional health cratered,” the lawsuit said. “She has experienced trauma and depression from defendants’ actions, and the deep betrayal will have lifelong effects.”

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