Exclusive: Donations from "Harvey Weinstein's Lawyer" Roil Top House Races
New York State is a top battleground in the House map; these donations could complicate the map for Democrats
Donations from David Boies — known as “Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer” — to top Democratic candidates are roiling tossup House races across New York State in the final weeks of the 2024 election.
Throughout this cycle, Boies has donated thousands of dollars to Democratic incumbents and challengers, primarily located in the Empire State. Recipients include Laura Gillen, who is challenging Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (D., N.Y.); Josh Riley, who is challenging Rep. Marc Molinaro (R., N.Y.); both Josh Lafazan and Scott Livingston, who unsuccessfully ran against now-Rep. Tom Suozzi (D., N.Y.) in a Democratic Party primary; and Rep. Pat Ryan (D., N.Y.).
Boies’s unsavory tactics have given Republicans plenty to work with. Savannah Viar, a spokeswoman at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) remarked that “New York Democrats love pretending to support women, but when push comes to shove, they will always side with donors over actually helping people.”
Viar is onto something — Gillen, for example, has placed an emphasis on fighting “for women’s freedoms” in her campaign against D’Esposito.
For years, Boies was the darling of the left, but his representation of both Boies and Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos saw his reputation take quite a hit in recent years.
At the height of the #MeToo movement, the New York Times reported that “the Times publicly fired Mr. Boies’s firm, which had been representing the newspaper, after learning that he had been personally involved in an undercover operation to smear [Harvey]. Weinstein’s victims and deceive Times reporters.” The Gray Lady added that “The Manhattan district attorney is looking into the matter and Mr. Boies’s role.”
The Times’s then-editor-in-chief Dean Baquet said of Boies at the time of his scandals that “we were outraged. A guy [Boies] who was working for us was essentially trying to hurt us. It’s not like he was just representing Harvey Weinstein. He was hiring private detectives to deceive journalists. You’d think he’d be ashamed of that.”
As early as 2002, the Times noted, Boies had “talked The New Yorker out of publishing allegations of sexual harassment [against Weinstein].” According to TMZ, the contract Boies’s firm negotiated for Weinstein at one juncture “allowed for sexual harassment.”