New Book Says Lisa Bloom Offered to Damage Rose McGowan's Reputation to Help Harvey Weinstein

A new book exploring the allegations against Harvey Weinstein says attorney Lisa Bloom offered to help portray actor Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s accusers, as “increasingly unglued” in an effort to discredit her. Bloom also apparently attempted to smear other Weinstein accusers, including Ashley Judd.

The New York Times published a long look at She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who published the first New York Times exposé on Weinstein in October 2017. It sounds like there’s a lot in here—Kantor and Twohey report, for instance, that Weinstein’s brother, Bob Weinstein, attempted to convince Weinstein to get medical treatment to fix what he categorized as “misbehavior” that had “brought shame to the family and [Weinstein’s] company,”and that the first Weinstein whistleblower was Weinstein Company executive Irwin Reiter.

She Said also reveals the identities of another Weinstein accuser, Rowena Chiu, who was an assistant at Miramax in the 1990s and allegedly sexually assaulted by Weinstein in a hotel room in 1998.

Then, there’s this detail (emphasis mine):

Allred’s daughter, the lawyer Lisa Bloom, a prominent victims’ rights attorney, was working behind the scenes with Mr. Weinstein — at a rate of $895 an hour — to quash the journalists’ investigation and thwart his accusers. In a confidential memo to Mr. Weinstein that Ms. Bloom wrote in December 2016, which is reproduced in “She Said,” she offered to help him damage the reputation of one of his accusers, Rose McGowan, and portrayed her background as a victims’s rights advocate as an asset.

“I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them,” Ms. Bloom wrote, before laying out a multistep playbook for how to intimidate accusers or paint them as liars. One of Ms. Bloom’s suggested tactics for undermining Ms. McGowan: “We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”

Bloom resigned as Weinstein’s attorney shortly after Kantor and Twohey’s first bombshell piece came out, claiming she was “over the hate” and touting her record as an attorney for victims of sexual assault. And yet:

Ms. Bloom accompanied Mr. Weinstein on a surprise visit to the Times the day before the initial article was published, to present the journalists with information intended to portray several accusers — including Ashley Judd, the first actress to go on the record — as unreliable and mentally unstable.

Bloom later apologized for working with Weinstein, claiming she “deeply regretted” representing him. On Sunday, shortly after the Times published their story on She Said, Bloom released a statement reiterating her apology and and outlining some of the work her firm has done in the years since: