Harvey Weinstein pressured a young model into taking $1 million in hush money backed by a nondisclosure agreement that she barely understood, according to a new report.
Weinstein paid the sum to Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez in 2015 so she wouldn’t talk about an incident in which he allegedly groped her breast and tried to reach up her skirt, The New Yorker reported on Tuesday.
“I didn’t even understand almost what I was doing with all those papers. I was really disoriented. My English was very bad,” the model said. She realized the gravity of the situation when she saw Weinstein’s lawyer’s hands shaking, she said.
“The moment I [signed] it, I really felt it was wrong,” she added.
She accepted the deal after working with the NYPD to secretly record Weinstein admitting to groping her. As part of Weinstein’s payout, Gutierrez was also made to sign a statement — to be released if she ever broke the non-disclosure agreement — which stated that the behavior Weinstein to which admitted on tape never happened.
An attorney familiar with the agreement called it “the most usurious one I have seen in decades of practice,” according to New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow, who did not name the lawyer.
Farrow, among the first to report the Weinstein scandal, also laid out connections between the private-investigation firm K2, which Weinstein hired to dig up dirt on Gutierrez, and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who declined to prosecute the producer.
Some of the K2 investigators working the case were former employees of the DA, in what two unnamed PIs described to Farrow as a “revolving door” culture between Vance’s office and private investigators.
The NYPD was so confused when Vance’s office declined to prosecute for lack of evidence that it reviewed 10 recent criminal complaints similar to Gutierrez’s in which arrest warrants were issued despite far less evidence than in the Weinstein case.
“They didn’t have a quarter of the evidence we had,” a law-enforcement official told Farrow, referring to the 10 cases. “All of them resulted in arrests.”
Farrow — the estranged son of Woody Allen and whose mom is Mia Farrow — also reported that Weinstein hit up brother Bob when he needed cash to silence accusers because he did not want a big withdrawal from his own accounts to raise red flags with his wife.
Bob cut a roughly $600,000 check that was split between former Harvey assistant Zelda Perkins and her own assistant after Perkins filed a notice of impending legal action against Harvey. Bob told Farrow he did not know about the sex-assault allegations.