The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow has another major story on Harvey Weinstein up. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll highlight one particularly unsettling passage here. It involves longtime Weinstein attorney David Boies, who was involved with the legal team that hired a firm called K2 to dig up dirt on Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in 2015. K2 employs a number of individuals who previously worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which ended up deciding not to charge Weinstein, and the firm passed unflattering allegations about Gutierrez on to prosecutors. For his part, Boies personally knows the DA who made the decision (Cy Vance) and has donated to his campaigns. Here’s Boies’ take on the whole sordid affair:
“The idea that my contributions to Cy Vance’s campaign had any relationship to that investigation, I think, is absurd,” Boies told me, adding that he had a close relationship with Vance but never called him about the Gutierrez case. Boies argued that Vance’s office had made a reasonable decision and accused Gutierrez of engaging in prostitution in Italy. “There were transcripts of Italian proceedings where it was described how for years she had performed various sexual acts for various specified amounts of money,” Boies told me.
Well, that’s certainly one way of looking back on the time you attempted to discredit someone whose accusations have since been echoed by more than 70 (!) other women! (Gutierrez, to be clear, denies having worked as a prostitute and says the suggestion that she did was concocted to smear her because she was a witness in a previous case involving notoriously sleazy ex-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.)
