Harvey Weinstein lawyers battling N.Y. Times, New Yorker over potentially explosive stories (exclusive)

Is The New York Times about to expose damaging information on Harvey Weinstein?

The Weinstein Co. film and television mogul has enlisted an army of attorneys and crisis managers in recent weeks and has unleashed them on The Times over a planned story on his personal behavior, multiple sources familiar with the behind-the-scenes battle tell The Hollywood Reporter.

It’s unclear what the Times is planning to report, but sources say the newspaper has been calling dozens of current and former employees and associates of Weinstein, going back as far as the executive’s days running Miramax more than two decades ago. The reporting team is also said to have procured internal human resources documents during the investigation.

And the Times isn’t the only media outlet aggressively pursuing a story on Weinstein. NBC News correspondent Ronan Farrow also has been digging into the mogul’s past for approximately a year, and Farrow is now said to be working with The New Yorker magazine on a "lengthy" piece.

Reuters

Reps for Weinstein and the Times declined to comment. A spokesperson for The New Yorker told THR, "We don't comment on pieces we haven't published."

Weinstein, 65, is a polarizing figure in Hollywood. A master movie producer and marketer and a regular at the Oscars, he also is famously brash and controlling. Down and Dirty Pictures, a 2004 book on Weinstein by author Peter Biskind, described Weinstein's behavior toward employees and others in his orbit as bullying and called him an artist of "anger.”

Weinstein, who runs the New York-based Weinstein Co., is no stranger to litigation, but in this case he has lawyered up in an unusually significant way.

In addition to his usual attorney David Boies, Weinstein also has engaged Lisa Bloom, a Woodland Hills, Calif.-based lawyer and television personality specializing in sexual harassment cases (and the daughter of Gloria Allred), as well as Charles Harder, the Beverly Hills-based litigator who represented Hulk Hogan in the invasion of privacy trial that brought down the Gawker website. Other lawyers also are said to be advising the mogul.

Several crisis PR consultants also are involved, according to sources.

The subject of the media outlets’ reporting is said to be Weinstein himself and not the business operation of the Weinstein Co. Whether either or both publications ultimately publish a story in the face of an onslaught of pushback from Weinstein's lawyers remains to be seen.