Just when you thought previous reports covering Lisa Bloom’s appalling behavior could not get any worse, you learn that in order to protect Harvey Weinstein, the Daily Beast reports that the feminist attorney was prepared to leak files about actress Rose McGowan’s sexual history.
If you recall, back in 1997, Weinstein reportedly settled a sexual misconduct suit with McGowan for $100,000. McGowan claims Weinstein raped her at the Sundance Film Festival (Weinstein denies every one of the dozens of allegations of non-consensual behavior).
Flash-forward 20 years and what you have is one of the few heroes of this story, Ronan Farrow, leaping over decades of cover-ups and even his own “news” network, NBC, (that spiked the publication), in order to finally give Weinstein’s accusers a voice. And who is engaging in a bitter, underhanded battle to silence those voices? A wolverine named Bloom who wears the sheep’s clothing of a women’s rights advocate.
According to the Daily Beast, although legal concerns kept her from appearing in Farrow’s final Pulitzer-worthy report, McGowan nearly did. And when Weinstein’s attorney, Bloom, discovered this, she offered Farrow a file that contained details of the Scream actress’s sexual history:
Ronan Farrow was stunned and disgusted early this year when famed feminist lawyer Lisa Bloom phoned him, in the midst of his investigation for NBC News of widespread allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein, and offered to share opposition research on one of Weinstein’s accusers.
“I don’t know if you’ve talked to Rose McGowan, but we have files on her and her… history,” Bloom told Farrow, according to knowledgeable sources inside and outside NBC.
Moreover, in order to gain his confidence and gather information, she apparently did not disclose to Farrow that she worked for Weinstein.”She did not let Farrow know she was working with Weinstein however, and the journalist also kept quiet about the subject of his story at first,” the Daily Mail reports.
The Daily Beast reports that after Farrow — who had no idea she represented Weinstein and still saw her as an ally, a women’s rights advocate — confided in Bloom about his story and “swore her to secrecy,” she betrayed that confidence, and what followed was an avalanche of pressure on NBC News to kill the story:
Yet no sooner had Farrow divulged to Bloom his interest in Weinstein than executives at NBC and Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency, Farrow’s professional representatives, began to receive a barrage of calls and letters, as the movie mogul (a longtime pal of NBC Universal Vice Chairman Ron Meyer and others at the company he’d done business with) sought to wield every ounce of leverage to stop Farrow’s investigation.
Weinstein attorney Charles Harder, Hulk Hogan’s former lawyer who famously helped bankrupt Gawker Media, was especially aggressive, threatening to sue Farrow personally, in what one recipient of Harder’s letters (which listed Bloom as his co-counsel) described as a campaign to discredit the messenger.
To NBC’s everlasting disgrace, the pressure worked and Farrow ended up publishing at the New Yorker.
At this point, Bloom and her Weinstein co-counsel Charles Harder, also got personal with Farrow through letters that berated the reporter with the claim that Farrow could not be objective “due to his own family’s history of sexual misconduct allegations[.]”
If this is indeed the case, and although Farrow’s sister claims to be a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, filmmaker Woody Allen, these letters portray Farrow’s family, not as victims, but as having a “history of sexual misconduct allegations.” Man alive.
For her part, Bloom responded to all of this with a denial in the form of a cryptic tweet and the claim she is the real victim here:
Ed Morrissey‘s story on this opens with a rhetorical question, “Why don’t more women come forward when they experience sexual harassment and even assault in the workplace?”
If we have learned nothing over the last few weeks, it is that one of the answers to that question is a world filled with mercenary scavengers like Lisa Bloom. This is a woman who has spent decades posing as an advocate for vulnerable women exploited by the powerful, and who then, in an unbelievable act of betrayal, used that credibility to try and shield a Harvey Weinstein, a monster facing more than 50 accusations that range from harassment to flat-out rape.
Yes, everyone deserves the best defense they can get. No one is arguing that attorneys like Bloom should not defend a Harvey Weinstein. That would be un-American.
But if you assume that the above story — and those linked below — are true, just look at how Bloom went about it. Like the villain in every movie about rape ever made, here is Bloom attempting to humiliate an accuser into silence using the irrelevant character assassination of her sexual history.
And that is just the latest in an ongoing series of charges against Bloom’s competence and ethics. Make sure to read here, here, here, and here.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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