According to The New York Times, Rose McGowan has filed a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein and his lawyers David Boies and Lisa Bloom, accusing them of “racketeering, fraudulent deceit, and inflicting emotional distress” in their alleged attempts to discredit and undermine her sexual assault claims against the now-disgraced movie mogul. McGowan says Weinstein and his team sent an undercover agent to befriend her and try to steal a copy of the manuscript for her memoir Brave and used—as the New York Times puts it—a “team of professionals” to try and dig up dirt on McGowan and pressure her to stay quiet about her allegations and/or ensure that nobody would believe them.
This ties in with reports we’ve been hearing about Weinstein for years, including a Ronan Farrow story from 2017 that said Weinstein hired private security groups with ridiculously self-serious names like Black Cube and Kroll to collect information on Weinstein’s accusers and find out which of them were considering talking to the press. Farrow even said that someone posing as a Weinstein-accuser contacted him to try and gauge what he had been told and by whom, and his report corroborates McGowan’s claims about being specifically targeted by these covert agents. Farrow also said that Weinstein supposedly used this investigators for years before the allegations started to become public.
McGowan’s lawyer says Weinstein’s camp offered her $1 million not to publish her book, but one of Weinstein’s lawyers says that McGowan was actually demanding a “multimillion dollar payout in return for not making these baseless allegations,” saying she’s just a “publicity seeker looking for money” and that her case has “no legal merit.” Also, the Times story says that both Bloom and Boies have stopped working for Weinstein, with Bloom later saying it was a mistake to do so in the first place (but won’t elaborate due to attorney-client privilege) and Boies saying that he should’ve tried to “more closely monitor Mr. Weinstein’s use of the firm Black Cube.” So… it seems like he probably used the intelligence/security firm Black Cube to do something.
The lawsuit says that, due to Weinstein’s alleged machinations, McGowan’s “book sales suffered; her expenses mounted; her job opportunities vanished; and her emotional health cratered.” It also reportedly utilizes research from She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey and Catch And Kill by Farrow—two books written by the journalists credited with breaking stories about the Weinstein allegations.