CNN Exclusive: She says Harvey Weinstein assaulted her. Now she sees parallels between the fallout and the Trump hush money trialIt was 2015 when the Italian model says she was assaulted by then movie mogul Harvey Weinstein during a casting meeting. She immediately went to the police to report what happened, assuming law enforcement would help her.
During Trump’s trial, tabloid king David Pecker – who oversaw American Media Inc., the parent company to the influential supermarket magazine, The National Enquirer – testified to buying and suppressing negative stories to help his friend, Trump, win the presidency. She tells CNN that she received an offer of US$150,000 from The National Enquirer in 2015 to buy her story. She declined the large sum of money.
Pecker and The National Enquirer’s parent company did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. But during Trump’s trial, Pecker testified to engaging in “catch-and-kill” practices, paying for stories so they would never come to light. Weinstein’s spokesperson, Juda Engelmayer, told CNN in a statement, “Ms. Gutierrez’ lawyers controlled those meetings and set the terms for it.”
Eventually, Battilana Gutierrez did sign a non-disclosure agreement with Weinstein’s legal team. She said she felt she had no choice, after her brother back in Italy was randomly approached by strangers inquiring about her, and she was concerned that her family’s safety was in danger. Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan DA at the time, told CNN via email that he assigned the head of the sex crimes unit to examine Battilana Gutierrez’s case and believed she conducted “a full and detailed investigation” before recommending against prosecution for a number of reasons.
He doubled down on that claim, telling CNN, “I learned that a top lawyer at AMI, in 2015, had been in touch with the Manhattan DA’s Office and that person had effectively flipped the script and had been telling the DA’s Office that Ambra was trying to sell her story to the National Enquirer, which was the complete opposite of what was going on.”
“Both Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump were ‘FOPs’ – Friends of Pecker,” Cartwright told CNN. “The Ambra Battilana story is almost a ‘catch-and-kill’ in that I think if she had have agreed for her story to be sold, I don’t think the intention was to publish it. I think the intention was to make sure it wasn’t published.”
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