UK Oleh turned Weinstein spy: We didn’t know he was accused of rape
The day after Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was
sentenced to 23 years in prison in New York for third-degree rape and
first-degree criminal sexual act, Seth Freedman, the Israeli-English spy who
spoke to some of Weinstein’s accusers said last week that he wouldn’t have done
anything differently.
The reason for his lack of regret, Freedman said, is because
he didn’t know Weinstein was trying to cover up rape accusations. And once he
did, both he and his former employer Black Cube said, they dropped the job.
Freedman grew up in London, and started working in the
city’s financial district when he was 18. After growing disillusioned with the
work and developing a drug habit, he moved to Israel in 2004 at age 24 to
enlist the IDF. He served for fifteen months in a Nachal combat unit. When he
completed his service, he lived in Jerusalem, briefly worked on The Jerusalem
Post’s business desk, and wrote features for the Post’s In Jerusalem magazine.
“I kept a diary in the army and always enjoyed writing.
Someone got me on the business desk, because I used to be a trader in London.
And I wrote magazine pieces, like one about the local boxing club I was a
member of…I loved it,” he recalled.
Freedman jumped from the Post to The Guardian, where he
wrote opinion columns for over four years. His IDF service, most of which he
spent stationed in the West Bank, had made him jaded yet again, and very
left-wing; Freedman says he’s since shifted away from those views. He became
notorious in UK pro-Israel circles for his articles that were highly critical
of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
In 2011, Freedman moved back to North London to start a
family, but he didn’t just settle into a quiet life. Working in the commodities
market, he had his first spying experience as a whistleblower wearing a wire
for the regulators and ended up exposing what he called “serious manipulation
in the gas market.” That led to an investigations job for “a shipping tycoon”
in the UK who had also acquired the services of Black Cube, which then hired
him.
Freedman recounted how he first found out about the
assignment to spy for Weinstein.
Freedman was told “there’s a big Hollywood producer whose
brother wants him out of the company, and the job is to see if there’s a plot
against him.”
“It’s not how it’s been presented,” he said. “This wasn’t
Harvey Weinstein saying ‘I’ve been accused of rape, now go out and intimidate
people.’”
Former prime minister Ehud Barak, who connected Weinstein to
Black Cube, made a similar statement about his role in the saga; he thought it
was a corporate espionage job and knew nothing about sexual misconduct by
Weinstein.
Freedman called people from a list Weinstein compiled,
saying that he is a journalist doing a story on life in Hollywood, without
bringing up Weinstein’s name.
“If they don’t bring his name up to a journalist, then
they’re probably not accusing him of things,” Freedman posited.
At first, he was given a list of six or seven people to
contact, Freedman recounted, most of whom were men. The list eventually
ballooned to 91.
“They were people like Steve Mnuchin, who’s now the
Secretary of the Treasury but was in movies, Kenneth Cole, the shoe designer,
was on the board of an AIDS charity with Weinstein, big, powerful
executive-level men, a few women at that top level and a couple of actresses,”
he said.
Most of the people were in the US and Freedman was based in
London, so his work was done via e-mail and phone calls.
Freedman said he did not pick up on the reason Weinstein
hired Black Cube, his employer, for a long time.
"At the time, there wasn’t any ‘me too’ or publicity
around this,” he said. “I was talking to a lot of people and you could see some
people had an axe to grind against him and some were quite praiseworthy of
him.”
Only two of the people on Freedman’s list of people to
contact accused Weinstein of assault in his talks with them, actresses Rose
McGowan – one of the highest-profile accusers – and Katherine Kendall. Over 50
women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct.
Freedman started the work in October 2016, and spoke to
McGowan in January of 2017 and Kendall in July 2017; the stories they told made
him “uncomfortable,” he said.
McGowan told him she had been raped by a “big Hollywood
producer” and that the details would be in her book. “It was obvious” that she
meant Weinstein, Freedman said.
Freedman takes issue with how McGowan presents the call:
“She told Ronan Farrow I pretended to be an abuse victim. I have all the tapes,
I didn’t say that. I didn’t bring up abuse. I talked about life in Hollywood and
she brought up abuse. She’s embarrassed that I got one over her.”
During the call, Freedman said he had the impression that
McGowan was a “very unstable person.”
“She didn’t make sense in the call and she compared herself
to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. I don’t know what did or didn’t happen.
No one was asking me if I think it’s true,” he said.
“Then in July, Katherine [Kendall] accused him of the same
thing,” Freedman recounted, and said he found Kendall to be “entirely
credible,” to the extent that they have been in touch more recently and she
asked Freedman to help her in Weinstein’s pending trial in Los Angeles.
Today, Freedman says he does not feel differently about his
work than he did when he was doing it.
“Now he’s a convicted rapist and sent to jail – that
happened in the last two months. In 2017, there weren’t any accusations. The
idea that we should have known what was going to come – we just didn’t know,”
he said.
Freedman says he is not interested in testifying in any of
the trials against Weinstein.
“I was called as a witness in the first trial. They said
they really want me, but I said I don’t want to unless compelled. It’s a very
toxic atmosphere and you get worried for your safety from all kinds of lunatics
out there…I don’t see what benefit the prosecution gets [from calling me]. I
never even spoke to [Weinstein], never dealt with him, it was all through
intermediaries,” he said.
Freedman said he thinks Weinstein’s conviction and sentence
were justified: “He’s been convicted of rape and he should stay in jail.”
But the spy is concerned about his own situation, and railed
against “the subplot where everyone is writing books where they have to distort
[the facts] to maximize their reach.”
Freedman opened up to the media in recent weeks about his
role in the Harvey Weinstein story, after Ronan Farrow, the journalist who won
a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in The New Yorker on the assault allegations
against Weinstein, named him in his book.
The former spy, who still works in private intelligence,
provided a recording of someone who sounds like Farrow saying he told his
editor: “We cannot burn him, we can never reveal that we got anything from Seth
or that he had been a source for us.” Farrow’s publisher did not reply to
e-mails asking to confirm the recording’s veracity or to respond to Freedman’s
claims.
“I have to go public, or my name gets dragged in the mud and
I haven’t got the right of reply,” Freedman lamented.
In the excerpt from Farrow's book published in The New
Yorker in October 2019, he describes Freedman as implicitly threatening him
with a libel suit. Once the news of the allegations against Weinstein came out,
Freedman provided Farrow with materials, including a "list of
targets" - the people he called for Weinstein. He also admitted to Farrow
that he was working for Black Cube.
Freedman was very focused on his role as a corporate
intelligence agent.
“As long as you’re not breaking the law, it doesn’t matter
what the client did or didn’t do,” he said. “It’s a totally normal job to have
two executives fall out and one hires Black Cube to find out what the other was
up to. What’s different here is that we’re dealing with celebrities…It looked
on paper like [Weinstein] thought someone like his brother [Bob Weinstein] was
asking people to smear him so he can turn to the other board members and say
[Harvey Weinstein] is bad for [The Weinstein Company].”
Freedman made similar comments to Farrow, quoted in The New
Yorker: “We thought this was . . . the normal kind of business dispute you have
with Oligarch 1 against Oligarch 2, the equivalent in
Hollywood…It turned out that it was actually about sexual
assault. We pulled back and we said there’s no way we’re getting involved with
this. How do we extricate ourselves? Because he’s hired us.”
Freedman insists his work is “just litigation support” and
that the reporting and books on the subject make it sound more “sinister.”
“We’re trying to find information on behalf of a client.
When you boil it down to that, people don’t sound that bothered. Ronan [Farrow]
needs it to sound like a sinister and scary operation…because he wants you to
buy his book,” he argued.
Freedman has boasted in some of his other interviews, like
with the BBC, that because he’s a spy, “you've got no idea if I'm telling the
truth.”
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