How Much Does It Cost to Keep Your Name Out of the News?
Until last year, most Americans were not familiar with the phrase catch and kill, which refers to a media company’s buying a potentially damaging news story and then not publishing it to save the subject from embarrassment. The term entered the national lexicon in 2018 thanks to revelations of the way the tactic was employed (ultimately unsuccessfully) by National Enquirer publisher David Pecker to bury stories about his close friend Donald Trump.
In December, Pecker’s company, AMI, admitted that in 2016 it gave $150,000 to a former Playboy model who claimed she’d had an affair with Trump, “to suppress the woman’s story” and “prevent it from influencing the election.”
Nor would most recognize oppo, shorthand for opposition research, which is the hiring of private investigators to dig up dirt on one’s enemies-a technique Harvey Weinstein allegedly used to try to discredit the many women who accused him of sexual assault. And who would imagine that something called an “avoid the press” plan could be part of a federal prosecutor’s settlement negotiations with an accused pedophile before reading about the deal multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein struck with a U.S. district attorney?
From unethical business practices to #MeToo scandals and felony convictions, it has never been more challenging to keep dirty secrets out of the spotlight. Which is why the embattled parties-whether guilty or unfairly accused-turn to an army of fixers, who help them avoid becoming the day’s headline.
As a former columnist for the New York Daily News, managing editor of the gossip site TMZ, and longtime contributor to the New York Times, I have dealt with many of these fixers and witnessed their machinations firsthand. Be warned: Their services don’t come cheap.
There is a handsome living to be made these days for attorneys skilled in the art of image control, including preemptively shutting down unfavorable media coverage by threatening journalists or their sources with ruinous lawsuits. It’s a potent deterrent, done for the cost of a saber-rattling letter. This method was perfected by the legendary entertainment lawyer Bert Fields, who represented such targets as Michael Jackson (during his trial for child molestation) and perpetual innuendo magnet Tom Cruise.
More recently, a firm turning up on high profile clients’ speed-dials is Clare Locke, based in Alexandria, Virginia; it has a confidential client list that reportedly includes former 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager and ex–Today host Matt Lauer. The firm’s website highlights its successful defamation suits by noting that “some of our biggest victories are the flawed stories that never get published and the scandals you never read about in the news.”
“They have perfected a way of slowing the process down by poking small holes in stories,” says Daily Beast senior reporter Lachlan Cartwright, whose beat is the intersection of crime and celebrity. “Writers have to keep going back to the sources to check stuff, and back to their editors. It’s incredibly effective in delaying or killing a piece.”
Another increasingly prominent legal attack dog is Los Angeles lawyer Charles Harder, who famously sued the gossip website Gawker into extinction on behalf of the nominal plaintiff, Hulk Hogan. (Gawker had unlawfully posted a video clip of the celebrity wrestler having sex.) The case, along with a raft of other lawsuits against Gawker, was financed by billionaire Peter Thiel, with Harder representing all comers-a class action of sorts by the irritated and/or embarrassed.
Lately Harder has represented a slew of figures connected to the current administration, including Melania Trump, who successfully sued the Daily Mail, as well as actions targeting such anti-Trump authors as Michael Wolff and Omarosa Manigault-Newman.
How to hire:
They may not advertise on daytime television, but these lawyers aren’t trying to hide from your money. A phone call will start the process.
If recalcitrant journalists or their sources don’t bow to legal threats, the aggrieved can go on the offensive-in other words, get down and dirty. In real life, Hollywood fixers are neither as good-looking nor as well dressed as Ray Donovan. But such operatives, who pursue their clients’ goals through a variety of -methods-some entirely aboveboard, others less so-do exist.
The field’s most famous cautionary tale is that of Anthony Pellicano, a Hollywood private investigator whose client list in the early 2000s included Creative Artists boss Michael Ovitz and the action film star Steven Seagal. Pellicano, who charged a $25,000 retainer, went to jail after his attempts to intimidate a journalist led to an LAPD investigation that uncovered a cache of illegal weapons and explosives, as well as hundreds of hours of illegal wiretap recordings involving a who’s who of Hollywood players.
Today clients looking for a private investigator have more sophisticated options. Their first stop, Cartwright says, might be one of the big investigative and risk management firms that specialize in assembling dossiers of what political campaigns call oppo-the type of work engaged in by Fusion GPS, the company behind the infamous Steele dossier of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The ultimate goal is to get a hold of compromising or embarrassing information that can be used as a bargaining chip or to discredit an individual’s character or motives. In the end, that person may choose to stay mute rather than risk his or her own secrets becoming public. “It’s basically, ‘Okay, if you’re going to tell them this about me, then I’m going to tell them that about you,’” says Arthur Aidala, a veteran New York attorney whose scandal-tarnished clients have included the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes and former congressman Anthony Weiner.
One go-to company in this arena is Black Cube, which was founded in 2010 by former members of Israel’s Mossad spy agency. Black Cube says its services let clients “adopt a proactive approach to litigation and conflict resolution by providing intelligence that can be later used as evidence in court, while conducting closed room negotiations, or with any other third party or authority.”
Until recently Black Cube counted among its clients Harvey Weinstein. According to a report in the New Yorker, Black Cube operatives used false identities to attempt to trick the actress Rose McGowan, who claimed that Weinstein raped her in 1997, into revealing whom she had talked to.
Indeed, a range of counteroffensive tactics can be used against journalists in possession of damaging information. One of the most effective ways to get a nosy reporter to drop a story is to offer something better. I observed firsthand a colleague spiking an item about Weinstein’s infidelities in exchange for a juicier tale from him about one of his Hollywood rivals.
To supply his stream of scoops, Weinstein employed onetime tabloid columnist and gossip show host A.J. Benza. Starting in 2003, Benza used his network of contacts to dig up stories he knew newspapers would love and handed them over to Weinstein. Benza recounted to the New York Times that he had told Weinstein, “I could supply your PR girls with a lot of gossip-a lot of stories. And if people come at them with the ‘Harvey’s having an affair’ story, they can barter.” For these services, Benza claimed that Weinstein offered him a retainer of up to $20,000 a month.
How to hire:
Top investigators, like top attorneys, choose which cases they want to take on. To increase your chances of landing the best, it helps to already be represented by a well-known lawyer, preferably one who has worked with the investigation firm before. Bonus: Having an attorney handle the transaction means you can plausibly deny knowledge of the tactics employed.
When embarrassing information or legal threats don’t work, people with power and financial means often turn to old-fashioned payola. Sometimes this manifests as offers of professional opportunity, as was the case when former CBS chairman Les Moonves allegedly attempted to get acting jobs for Bobbie Phillips, a woman he is accused of sexually assaulting in his office in 1995. Other times it’s a cash transaction.
Weinstein, for example, is alleged to have made payments to multiple women going back at least 20 years, including one for $100,000 to McGowan. While some of the accusers may have wanted to keep the incidents private for personal or professional reasons, Weinstein’s motive was clear: He was buying their silence to protect himself.
Typically such settlements entail making a payment to an accuser in exchange for his or her signing a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). “Right after the amount of money is agreed upon, the next thing negotiated is the confidentiality agreement, which spells out what happens if someone breaches the terms,” Aidala says.
Take the 2016 settlement Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen negotiated with adult film star Stormy Daniels to conceal her alleged affair with the president a decade earlier. Her NDA stipulated that if she spoke publicly about the relationship, she would not only have to return the $130,000 payment but would be liable for penalties of $1 million per infraction.
According to Aidala, in today’s climate, whether an allegation is true or false, accused individuals are more inclined to settle. “Nothing goes away on the internet, so there is no more, ‘I am going to fight this with my last breath,’” he says. “Now if someone comes in, they’re looking to settle. So it really is all about keeping it quiet.” But paying people to keep silent, as both Trump and Weinstein learned, is not foolproof. “NDA breaches have become more frequent, and as a result these arrangements are becoming less common,” says Harder, who uses them only occasionally with his clients.
And NDAs can be hard to enforce in a courtroom, not to mention in the court of public opinion. “They are most effective when they hold the other party to a long-term commitment, like receiving payments over time.”
How to hire:
Through an attorney, who will draw up the most binding agreement, litigate any breaches, and be able to claim attorney-client privilege if questioned.
For the very rich who don’t have high-placed friends in the media, like the president’s protector at AMI, David Pecker, there is yet another tactic. They can buy their own media properties, an increasingly viable proposition in an era of struggling newspapers and magazines. After billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts bought the Gothamist websites in 2017-for a rumored low seven figures-he promptly had unflattering stories about him deleted from the sites’ pages. And then there’s casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who scooped up the Las Vegas Review-Journal for $140 million in 2015 and turned what had long been a bastion of free reporting-and an occasional thorn in the side of his Nevada gambling empire-into a friendly voice.
How to hire:
Inform your board of directors about the new acquisition.
This story appears in the February 2019 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Now
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