I wanted to do something inspirational for my children.
—Harvey Weinstein, June 17, 2014 (at the launch of Finding Neverland)
I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different.
—Harvey Weinstein, Oct. 5, 2017 (opening statement to his public apology for sexual misconduct)
IT WAS A pleasant June evening in New York, and I was at JFK waiting for a flight to Paris when I remembered that Jodi Kantor was looking for me. I got her by cell, and she told me that she was starting work on what she described as an explosive story about Harvey Weinstein and what he had done to women in Hollywood. She wanted me to know that what she was hearing was extraordinary and grotesque, and we were probably going to get sued because it was the kind of story that could destroy Harvey and The Weinstein Company. I had just spent the better part of a year working with Mike Schmidt and Emily Steel as they tracked down the series of confidential settlements entered into by Bill O’Reilly when he was repeatedly accused of mistreating women at his Fox talk show. I knew the drill for these sorts of stories. We could expect Harvey to ratchet up the pressure, bring in a battalion of lawyers, threaten the accusers, and tell our executives that he was pulling his company’s advertising from the paper. We would print some credible allegations, he would deny them, lawyer letters would be exchanged, life would go on. This is not going to be all that big of a deal, I thought as I paced the JFK waiting area. I told Jodi she should keep me posted.
The Bill O’Reilly saga had started nine months earlier, in September 2016. O’Reilly’s lawyer, Fred Newman, had called and asked to come to talk to me. Fred is the anti-O’Reilly. He is everything Bill is not: understated, drama-free, ever polite. Client-attorney relationships are like some marriages: a mystery to the world beyond, leaving everyone to wonder how these two people ever got together and how they kept it going. It must have worked for Bill and Fred. Over the next 18 months, Emily and Mike pushed forward with a series of articles, finally knocking down the incredible story that O’Reilly had paid $32 million to settle a threatened suit by one of the show’s contributors, barely two weeks after her last appearance on the air. Fred remained O’Reilly’s go-to guy through it all, calling me, meeting with me, sending emails. He did what he could to explain away each of the women’s stories and justify settlements as expedient ways for Bill to resolve dubious claims, all the while asking pointed questions about how Mike and Emily were going about their reporting. But his client hadn’t dealt him much of a hand. Some $45 million had been paid to settle six separate claims. The last article, detailing the $32 million payment, landed two weeks after The Times broke the Weinstein story, sentencing O’Reilly to be linked forever in the public’s mind with the Weinstein scandal.
When Fred first called me in September 2016, I didn’t know anything about any story being done about O’Reilly. As I put it in an email to Emily, “O’Reilly’s lawyer got in touch with me today, concerned about a story they imagine you are doing. Completely polite meeting and I just listened to what the guy had to say. But let’s talk when you have a chance.”
That was my tentative and largely clueless step into the reporting that would help give rise to the #MeToo movement. Over the next year, Emily and Mike (working on the O’Reilly stories) and Jodi and Megan Twohey (covering Weinstein) would break story after story about the sexual misconduct of the two media mega-celebrities. Those stories would, in turn, ignite reporting at The Times and elsewhere that swept across a patchwork of America’s most iconic industries—art, theater, academia, music, fashion, the news media (including The Times itself)—exposing the sexual misconduct of men in power who harassed, mauled, and assaulted their colleagues, students, and employees. The stories quickly went international—France, India, Italy, Japan, England (where the deeply apt and all-purpose term “sex pest” was the label of choice). I spent countless hours talking to reporters about troubling journalistic and legal questions: how they could protect their sources, what might happen to women who would violate the nondisclosure clauses in their settlement agreements if they talked to us, what the reporters could do to push their reporting a little further and make sure their stories were beyond challenge—and, of course, how likely it was that one of the accused men would sue us for libel if we had something wrong (or even if we didn’t).
Before it was all over, I would be dragged into one of the messy dark corners of the Weinstein scandal when The New Yorker magazine reported that a law firm we sometimes used, Boies, Schiller and Flexner, had hired sleazy private eyes on behalf of Weinstein to follow our reporters and try to stop The Times from writing about Weinstein.
Much of what I had to do on our sexual misconduct reporting had surprisingly little to do with the intricacies of the law. The review of the stories was routine—the sort of thing a newspaper lawyer would do with stories about financial fraud or badly made products or mistreatment at nursing homes. These stories just happened to be about sexual abuse. With few exceptions, when lawyers for the accused called me, they were not citing legal cases or threatening litigation but just trying whatever they could to get us not to publish a story, hoping to gin up some doubts about the facts or the sources or the motivation for the story. “The New York Times wouldn’t have done this story a year ago, and my guy will lose his job,” a lawyer told me late one evening in a call to my office. His client was an executive who had a pattern of making inappropriate comments about women’s appearances and touching them at the office or at parties in ways that were unwelcome. I’d never heard of him before, but in his industry he was a major player. At least that’s what I was being told. I couldn’t help the lawyer. He was right. It would not have been a story a year earlier. The conduct was boorish and wrong but sadly common; the guy was pretty much an unknown to the general public. Being unfamous and unexceptional would have meant no coverage in the past. None of that mattered now. The world had turned. And I was not the commissar of newsworthiness or the crown prince of fairness. I told him he needed to have his client get on the phone and make the case to our reporter and her editors. That didn’t seem likely, the lawyer told me. His client was going to lose his job, he repeated. He was right again. The story went up on our website the next morning. A couple hours later the guy was gone.
Other lawyers tried different approaches, novel tactics. I lost track of how many lawyers told me, “He’s not Harvey Weinstein!” One attorney showed up at my office with what he claimed were naked pictures of the woman who was accusing his client of sexual misconduct. He wanted to show them to me. He thought they proved that whatever happened between his client and the woman was voluntary and consensual. I thought they proved that we had a long, long way to go. I didn’t need to see any pictures. Later, as Megan and Jodi were doing a sweeping follow-up story about Harvey Weinstein and those who were complicit in covering up his misconduct, they heard reports that Weinstein had made a female Weinstein Company employee procur his erectile dysfunction medicine. I never imagined that I would have to have a serious dialogue with other lawyers about how penile injections work, whether the reports made sense from the standpoint of medical science, and what damage it would do to Harvey’s reputation if that account was reported. I guess that was where the reputational line was drawn for Weinstein. Not at stories about showing up naked in a bathrobe for business meetings. Not at stories about making young female actors watch him shower. Not at accounts of his groping or exposing himself or sexually attacking women. Getting help with erectile dysfunction? No, that was going too far.
Harvey Weinstein was one of the few to go into full-threat lawyer mode, and even then that came late, long after The Times already had the reporting that would take him down. In September 2017, before the Weinstein sex stories had been published, Megan Twohey got onto a strange story about how Weinstein had used an AIDS nonprofit he supported to raise money for a nonprofit theater company in Boston. The theater happened to be producing a Weinstein production, Finding Neverland. The idea was that Weinstein would arrange to get items for the charity auction of the AIDS nonprofit, but part of the money collected would go to the theater. The theater, in turn, would pay Weinstein and other investors back money they had fronted it to get the show up and running. Weinstein’s failure to disclose the funding arrangement had fractured the board of the AIDS charity, and some board members were seeking a state investigation. Megan and her editor, Rebecca Corbett, wanted to know whether I thought, from a legal perspective, it was a story. I have been around newsrooms long enough to have very good instincts about at least one very important thing: I know when editors and reporters are having a disagreement about a story and think I should be enlisted to take someone’s side. That is an invitation to get blown up. I went into Full Platitude Mode. I liked the story. The funding arrangement seemed dodgy to me. I had served on nonprofit boards, and I had never seen anything like it. On the other hand … maybe you had to be a lawyer to care about the technicalities of nonprofit law. Maybe it was too deep in the legal weeds. At one point, Rebecca stepped out of the conference room, and I privately assured Megan that the funding of the theater had to be some sort of problem, something that needed to be written about. Rebecca, the guiding hand behind our Weinstein coverage, called me later, concerned about how we were going to explain the legal complexity in the story. I agreed with her, too.
A couple of days later the charity story was published. It helped to push forward an investigation by the New York State attorney general. But Megan and Jodi always thought it did something more significant: it showed women who were reluctant to speak about Weinstein’s sexual misconduct that The New York Times was not scared to take him on.
By the beginning of October, Weinstein had surrounded himself with a collection of lawyers—and, as time would show, it was more collection than team. Heavy-hitter lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis were in charge of challenging our reporting on the charity story. There was also David Boies, maybe America’s most famous lawyer, although he was playing more Friend of Harvey than legal counsel. Then there was Lisa Bloom, who had made her name suing sexual harassers but had somehow bolted to the dark side. Lanny Davis, a former lawyer in the Clinton White House, was handling press relations. Charles Harder, who had represented Hulk Hogan in the Gawker case, was waiting in the wings. The draft story of Weinstein’s sexual predations had been in development for days, with various versions coming to my desk day after day. The reporting was solid but the story remained a work in progress. We knew that certain Weinstein employees and others had made accusations and then settled or gone silent or issued supportive statements. I went through a late draft in the first days of October, raising questions about how we were presenting the sometimes ambiguous accounts and whether we were overplaying certain incidents. I was concerned that our language in places may have implied more than we knew on the record. At one point in the story I had five substantive questions in the span of seven paragraphs. Megan called me later with answers. She then told me that everything was going to be fine and I should hold off until I saw the latest version. Ashley Judd had decided to go on the record, she said. I knew right then it was over for Harvey Weinstein.
Maybe Harvey did, too. In talking to the reporters on October 3, he said that he needed at least 48 hours to answer the questions they had posed. The next day, Weinstein unleashed Harder to write a knuckle-dragging letter to The Times, threatening a libel suit, demanding that his client needed two weeks to answer questions, and closing out the letter with pages of demands that we preserve all documents, since litigation was imminent. (A year later, when Harder was representing Donald Trump and threatening Michael Wolff with a libel suit over his scorched-earth account of the White House, Fire and Fury, I learned that the same document-preservation demands were cut and pasted into his letter to Wolff’s publisher.) The idea that Harvey needed two weeks to remember whether he had sexually abused women was absurd. I caucused in an eighth-floor conference room with the reporters, Dean Baquet, and other editors. Harvey had said he needed 48 hours; we weren’t giving him more. In the middle of the meeting, Megan’s phone rang. It was Lanny Davis calling, trying once more to do some damage control for Weinstein. Dean took the phone and told him, in so many words, that we were done having one Weinstein toady tell us one thing and having another Weinstein toady tell us something else. He may have used more colorful phrasing than “toady.”
I went back upstairs to write a response to Harder when I was intercepted by our publisher, Arthur Sulzberger. He wanted me to brief him and his son, A. G., then the deputy publisher, about the Harder letter. We huddled in the Churchill Room, a meeting room on the sixteenth floor that housed Winston Churchill memorabilia, including a painting that Churchill had given to The Times. I assured them that we had the story cold and I would do my best to fend off the Weinstein legal team.
I quickly typed up a letter to Harder, telling him we were giving Weinstein the 48 hours he had asked for, nothing more. Being of the fight-fire-with-fire school, I also included a demand that Harvey and his various functionaries make sure that they preserved their documents, especially their texts and emails. I knew what some of those communications would show: that people in Weinstein’s camp had not toed the company line in talking to our reporters. My document demand was barely two paragraphs long—a shadow of what Harder had cranked out and sent to us, but enough to make my point. A short time later, my letter, bizarrely, became the subject of a story in the Los Angeles Times. Harder had forwarded the letter to Harvey and his associates at The Weinstein Company (with a note suggesting that they be careful with their emailing) but mistakenly added to the address list an LAT reporter.
Our editors were aiming to publish the piece on Thursday, October 5. On Wednesday, Harder was back at it, threatening us again and decrying the unfairness of giving Harvey only two days to respond when the story had been in the works for months. Two things remained unclear to me: why Weinstein had said 48 hours if he needed more time and what exactly he intended to do for those two weeks if he got the extra time—check his appointment book and search his email in hopes of jogging his memory about which women he had assaulted when? We refused to budge from our deadline. We were also aware that downtown at The New Yorker the writer Ronan Farrow was chasing the same story, and we didn’t want to get beat.
On Wednesday evening, the Weinstein crew appeared to go with the oldest trick in the media-relations book: strategically helping out on a preemptive story in another news outlet. That often works if the subject of the story is going to have to admit to wrongdoing anyway. Better to have another publication tell the story in a shallow way and scoop the bigger, more pointed story that is coming later. “Harvey Weinstein Lawyers Up for Bombshell New York Times, New Yorker Stories,” the Variety headline screamed. Weinstein apparently didn’t get the memo about how to do preemptive stories—especially the part about how the strategy only works if the target is going to admit to some things. Without that, the strategic leak becomes something entirely different: a traffic-driving advertisement for the blockbuster story that the other publication is about to publish. Not that Weinstein exactly denied the allegations to Variety. “I’ve not been aware of this,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, honestly.” He let it be known that he was too engaged in making movies to fret:
When asked if the publications had called him for comment, Weinstein replied that he was too busy in the editing room working on The Current War, an upcoming historical drama, to know the answer to that question, adding that he’d had a “crazy day.”
Later, he did get around to giving a comment: “The story sounds so good I want to buy the movie rights.” And lawyer Lisa Bloom got to play the slightly menacing legal heavy: “Harvey Weinstein is obviously excellent at assembling a legal team.” A week later, you couldn’t read those comments without wondering what they were thinking.
On Thursday, with Harvey’s 48-hour deadline ticking down to the last minutes and the story ready to launch, the team at The Times waited for whatever response he would give. Harvey’s statement finally appeared, reading as if it had been delivered by express mail straight from Crazytown:
I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.
I have since learned it’s not an excuse, in the office—or out of it. To anyone.
I realized some time ago that I needed to be a better person and my interactions with the people I work with have changed.
I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it.
Though I’m trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go. That is my commitment. My journey now will be to learn about myself and conquer my demons.
There was more—a botched quotation from Jay-Z, some wacky mention of throwing a retirement party for the head of the National Rifle Association (“I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah”), an announcement he was going to take a leave of absence—but the part that interested me was all at the top: He was apologizing. He didn’t say a word about suing. He never once hinted at there being any factual error in our piece. That was not the statement of a man who was about to turn around and sue The New York Times.
At least that was how I read it. Not Charles Harder, Harvey’s defamation guy. He was still manning the Weinstein legal barricades, proclaiming that his apology-spewing, pain-causing, leave-taking, committed-to-becoming-a-better-man client was going to sue The New York Times for libel. In press accounts, Harder chided the paper for ignoring evidence and relying on “hearsay accounts.” He solemnly vowed that “we are preparing the lawsuit now,” and just in case anyone happened to think that Harvey was a greedy, moneygrubbing Hollywood mogul lacking a social conscience, Harder assured the world that all proceeds from the suit would be donated to women’s organizations.
Back at The Times, we were caught up in the story about the story. Our PR team was encountering a blizzard of requests for comment from other news organizations wanting to know what we thought about Weinstein’s statement, what we were doing about Harder’s litigation threat, and what we had to say about Weinstein’s complaint that he had not been given a fair chance to respond. The usual playbook when litigation is threatened is to say as little as possible. Detailed statements can only come back to haunt you in court someday if it turns out that the statement was wrong on the particulars, or out of context, or missing important facts. But this was different, a bet-the-farm story that had our reputation on the line, and I knew from working with Jodi and Megan that we had only scratched the surface of Weinstein’s terrorizing of women. I wasn’t about to let us lose this one in the court of public opinion. I drafted our response:
Mr. Weinstein and his lawyer have confirmed the essential points of the story. Mr. Weinstein has not pointed to any errors or challenged any facts in our story. Also, Mr. Weinstein should publicly waive the NDAs in the women’s agreements so they can tell their stories. As a supporter of women, he must support their right to speak openly about these issues of gender and power.
We shot it out to all the reporters seeking comments. Jodi sent me one of the best emails I could ever receive as a lawyer. “This brought tears to my eyes,” said the subject line. She had pasted the statement into the body of the email and boldfaced the bit about how Weinstein should waive the nondisclosure agreements and prove he was a supporter of women. At the bottom Jodi wrote, “I cannot wait to tweet the hell out of that.”
In the first 24 hours after the story went live, I was inundated with all things Weinstein. Every columnist in The Times’s universe seemed to be cranking out Harvey-focused pieces. The social media team was promoting the story all over the web. In the newsroom, follow-up coverage was being rolled out. All of it needed lawyering. And for all the buffoonery of Harvey’s statement, I couldn’t ignore Harder’s letter and our duty to preserve documents. My associate Christina Koningisor and I started sending out emails to anyone at The Times who was likely to have emails or texts or story drafts related to Weinstein. It was the least exclusive club the newsroom had ever known.
I was in the midst of all that when a reporter asked, “Did you hear about Lisa Bloom’s interview?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Bloom, who had spent her professional life defending women who were harassed, had somehow ended up in Harvey’s legal camp, where, among other things, she was supposed to be helping him behave better. The day our story ran, she seemed to be in some sort of weird competition with her client to see who could issue the most inappropriate public statement. She initially characterized Weinstein as nothing more than an “old dinosaur learning new ways.” Among those who were questioning what Bloom was doing was her mother, Gloria Allred, the crusading plaintiffs’ lawyer, who told Variety that she was ready to help Weinstein’s accusers: “While I would not represent Mr. Weinstein, I would consider representing anyone who accused Mr. Weinstein of sexual harassment, even if it meant that my daughter was the opposing counsel.” Bloom scrambled for the higher ground, retorting that she would never take a case in which her lawyer mother or her lawyer daughter was on the other side because “I believe in family before business.” Thanksgiving with the Allreds and Blooms was going to be interesting this year. The morning after the story ran, Bloom began tiptoeing toward the exit. She had gone on national television with George Stephanopolous and conceded that Weinstein had engaged in “illegal” conduct.
None of it made sense to us. Wasn’t her legal teammate Harder preparing his big Weinstein v. The New York Times Company lawsuit? Hadn’t he said that The Times’s story was “saturated with false and defamatory statements” (making it sound as if we were not just wrong but a danger to our readers’ cholesterol)? I know well that law is unpredictable, but it was starting to seem very unlikely that women’s organizations around the country were going to be hauling in huge buckets of money from Harvey’s plan to win a suit against The Times and donate the winnings.
By Saturday, Lisa Bloom had quit working for Weinstein. Lanny Davis quit, too. Harder hung around for a few more days and then exited. In the post-O.J. world of lawyering, it was rare indeed to find a client so odious that his own lawyers wanted nothing to do with him. By the time Harder’s departure was made public, The New Yorker and The Times had published more explosive details about Weinstein’s abuse, and The Weinstein Company had fired Harvey, who was purportedly off to rehab.
The floodgates had opened, and accounts of sexual misconduct by Weinstein and then others became a staple of our coverage in October. Reporters came to me and walked through the accounts they were hearing from victims. I read their drafts. Most of what was getting covered were incidents with no witnesses. We developed an unofficial protocol of finding out whether the woman had talked to a friend or family member or colleague contemporaneously with the events, and then interviewing the other people. That shored up the credibility of the accounts. I also realized that with most stories, the legal threat was more likely to come not from the perpetrator but from the minor characters in the pieces—the HR directors who did nothing, the agents who knew what was going on, the supervisors who apparently protected the predator. I wanted to be sure we had those details buttoned up.
At first, it was disconcerting to hear how badly men behaved in so many companies in so many different ways. After a while, for better or worse, with so much repetition of accounts of perverse, hostile, or simply gross behavior, with so much discussion of the bizarre facts and grotesque circumstances, I became more inured to the precise details of the misconduct. An editor called me as I was sitting on a plane at LaGuardia and wanted my take on whether—legally—masturbating on someone was the same as or different from masturbating in front of someone. “I never thought I would have to ask anyone this question,” he began. And I never thought I would have to give a legal opinion about it.
In the background that October, there was some good legal news for the paper and for me, news that had nothing to do with Weinstein—until it did. We had spent the past year dealing with a very difficult libel case brought by a New Jersey mother whose adult daughter had accused her in a Times article of being abusive when she was growing up. The daughter was featured in a piece on her efforts to bounce back from years of drug abuse, prostitution, and crime. The mother had not been interviewed before publication and then sued us, saying there had been no abuse, just caring and love for a very troubled and challenging teenager. Sorting out what happened in the confines of anyone’s home a decade earlier is never easy in a libel case, and the daughter’s checkered past made her an easy mark for attacks on her credibility. Somehow, our very capable outside lawyer, Peter Skinner, had built a compelling case for us, leaving the mother’s lawyers with no option but to withdraw the lawsuit. Peter was a junior partner at Boies, Schiller and Flexner, the firm founded and led by David Boies.
When it had first surfaced that David was representing Weinstein, I was put in an awkward position. The Boies firm had handled occasional matters for The Times for 20 years, beginning before my time in Legal. The firm’s lawyers also represented some of the worst characters in the world: the corrupt leader of Malaysia, ethically suspect Chinese businessmen, Russian oligarchs. They had never sued The Times (they had sued others for libel), but they occasionally wrote us threatening letters when our reporters were doing stories about someone in their rogues’ gallery of clients. David’s approach to lawyering was always a little puzzling. He and his firm had done noble work on behalf of sex-trafficking victims, and he had become famous decades ago representing CBS and 60 Minutes when General William Westmoreland sued for libel over a story accusing the general of lying about how well the Vietnam War was going. I had seen him speak at the NYU law school’s graduation in 2013 when he talked movingly of how, at the end of the day, the source of a lawyer’s power was his or her reputation and how important it was for lawyers to protect that. Getting threatening letters from his firm was irritating, especially given the sketchy clients that the firm was usually fronting for, and other media lawyers couldn’t understand why we maintained a relationship with the firm, but I felt that the connection to Boies Schiller usually worked in our favor, keeping a line of communication open when a Boies Schiller client had a complaint about our reporting.
We were wrapping up the paperwork for ending the mother’s libel case late in the day on November 6 when a Hollywood reporter contacted me and wanted to know whether I had a comment on the breaking piece in The New Yorker titled “Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies.” One section of it, the reporter told me, dealt with how David Boies had hired private investigators to help derail our reporting on Weinstein. I hadn’t seen the story, but what I was being told didn’t strike me as particularly worrisome. I had on a couple of occasions hired private investigators. They are sometimes helpful in finding out background information on people who are suing us. I assumed that was what David had done, hired private eyes to investigate Weinstein’s accusers, and, not to gloat, but that strategy had failed miserably, hadn’t it? I was pleased to see Harvey Weinstein waste his money. Our editors were not worked up about that part of the story either. They were worked up more about getting scooped by Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, who had uncovered some shocking new details about the Weinstein scandal.
Then I got an email from a friend and former colleague, Deirdre Sullivan, who had worked with Boies Schiller attorneys when she was at The Times. She wanted to make sure I had seen the New Yorker piece. She was disappointed by the firm’s double-dealing—Boies had been sending out people to spy on our reporters at the same time we were sending his firm big checks to pay legal fees. I told her I wasn’t sure what the investigators had done or not done. Her response stopped me: “Fwiw, I think I saw mention of a success fee if the article was not published in whole or part.”
I went online and was able to find a leaked copy of the contract that Boies had signed with the investigators, a slimy outfit known as Black Cube, whose leaders bill themselves as veterans of the Israeli intelligence service. It was like no investigator contract I had ever seen before. It was not aimed at merely finding out information about Harvey’s accusers, but was an open invitation for Black Cube’s operatives to do whatever it could to kill our Weinstein story before it saw the light of day. Black Cube, which was not even licensed to work in New York State, was to be paid $200,000 for starters. Then Clause 16 added, “In the event in which Black Cube provides intelligence which will directly contribute to efforts to completely stop the Article from being published at all, in any shape or form, Black Cube will be paid a success fee of USD $300,000.” David Boies would later tell me that Black Cube was just trying to get at the truth so that Weinstein and his cohorts could present our reporters with information that would show our reporting was wrong. Maybe David believed that. Somehow that high-minded concept never made its way into the contract. Black Cube was to get the $300,000 bonus if the story got killed, no matter how that was achieved. The contract specified that Black Cube was to hire someone to pretend to be a journalist, apparently as a cover to get information. We later learned that someone else posing as a women’s rights advocate contacted Jodi seeking a meeting. Another Black Cube dirty trick. (She didn’t fall for it.)
It was impossible to read the contract as anything other than a strong-armed attempt by Harvey Weinstein to keep the truth from ever seeing the light of day. At the bottom of the contract was David Boies’s signature and the date: July 11, 2017. On that day, as David Boies was signing a contract with the aim of interfering with our core work as a newspaper, one of his partners was contacting me about setting up a time for a meeting with our CEO about a business matter the firm was handling for The Times. On the same day, Pete Skinner and I were going back and forth about details of a deposition that had taken place in the libel suit. David would later publicly point out that in hiring his firm we had agreed that his lawyers could take on matters in which they might be adverse to us and that we waived whatever conflict that might present. That was true. We did that at times with big firms with lots of clients. The waiver provision envisions that the firm will file a public suit that names us as a party or is contrary to our interests or will contact us on behalf of a client who has issues with us. At that point we would be free to decide whether to continue with the Boies firm or walk away. That was not what the Black Cube deal was about. It was secret, and it sanctioned interference with our business through an investigative firm whose calling card was duplicity and dishonesty. Don’t talk to me about the conflicts rules that apply to legal representation. Let’s talk about what’s right and wrong.
On the evening of November 6, as The New Yorker story was breaking, we had issued a mild-mannered comment, noting that David Boies had not represented us but that we had matters with other lawyers in his firm. As I sat in my office reading the Black Cube contract, I knew we were about to get killed in the media unless we did something. We were going to look as if we were fine with what Boies had done and this was all just business as usual in New York law circles. I madly typed out a statement and asked our communications people to start pushing it out. It read:
We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters. We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable, and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies.
By 10:30 that night, I was on the phone with Jim Rutenberg, our media columnist. The newsroom decided that The Times couldn’t ignore the escalating Boies-Times fight, which was cascading across social media. Jim’s story went up later that night.
Early the next morning, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. called me into his office to talk about what had happened. I fumbled around trying to explain how we got ourselves into this messy sideshow. It was my fault. I knew we were playing with fire when we hired the Boies firm. I thought I could make it work. I shouldn’t have done it. Arthur wasn’t really interested in assigning blame. He wanted to make sure that I realized we needed to end our relationship with Boies Schiller. I shifted on his couch. Of course, I said, but there was just one problem. It was the libel case by the New Jersey mother. We were waiting for her lawyers to send us the papers withdrawing the suit. The papers were supposed to come that morning. If we fired our attorneys now, it could get complicated and give the other side an incentive not to go through with the withdrawal. Maybe we could wait a few hours and terminate the firm later once we had the papers in hand?
So we waited, caught up in the red tape and minor strategic decisions of litigation, awkwardly sidestepping press inquiries about whether we intended to dump the Boies firm. It was pretty clear that people were looking for some big Trumpian moment from us in which we would instantly proclaim, “You’re fired!” We weren’t going to be able to give them the satisfaction. I felt bad for Pete Skinner, our lawyer at Boies Schiller who had done such a tremendous job on the libel case and was just collateral damage of The Times’s skirmish with his boss. The withdrawal papers from the mother’s lawyers showed up early in the afternoon, I fired Boies Schiller, I entered the case as the new counsel of record, I filed the papers, and the case was over a few minutes later.
Maybe I should have spent some time at that point contemplating what lessons were to be learned from the whole sorry episode with Boies—what it taught me about hiring lawyers, and being a lawyer, and the moral ambiguities of practicing law. But one of our editors in the culture department needed to talk to me urgently. We had learned that the comedian Louis C. K. liked to masturbate in front of women who worked with him. There were new stories coming and legal questions that needed to be answered.