Thirteen years before Bill Cosby was convicted, TMZ’s Harvey Levin worked with Cosby’s team to smear the woman who would take him down.
Here’s what I found.
Just months before the launch of TMZ.com in November 2005, and two years before its syndicated series cursed our televisions in September 2007, founder Harvey Levin was wrapped up in another celebrity project.
For nearly three years, Levin had served as the executive producer of Celebrity Justice, a spin-off of the Warner Bros. syndicated Extra, dedicated to the legal mishaps of the rich and infamous. Like TMZ, the series was accompanied by a website, a bulk of which depended on raw legal documents and the occasional celebrity spin.
First airing on September 2nd, 2002, Celebrity Justice - or “CJ,” as it was affectionally dubbed by its correspondents - bore an unsavory resemblance to what TMZ would later become. Years before TMZ cameras chased a manic Britney Spears in-and-out of custody hearings, or a sobbing Paris Hilton as she kicked and screamed her way to the pokey, CJ camped outside the courts housing the celebrity trials du jour. From Kobe Bryant to Phil Spector, Celebrity Justice followed it all. (During the jury selection process for Spector’s murder trial, a questionnaire even asked prospective jurors if they were familiar with Celebrity Justice’s coverage of the case.)
Billed as the “anti-Enquirer,” CJ sought not to “expose” Hollywood’s finest, like TMZ would later pretend to do, but serve as a “safe haven for celebrities who come to set the record straight,” according to producerLisa Gregorisch-Dempsey. When Sharon Osbourne was slapped by an agent, she raced to show the bruise on CJ. And as Whitney Houston’s father lay dying, he granted the show an exclusive interview, pleading with his estranged daughter to settle a pricey breach-of-contract suit.
Produced by Telepictures - the company responsible for the original seasons of the People’s Court, which Harvey Levin would later host, as well as TMZ on TV - the daily half-hour series featured a slew of segments, ranging from breakdowns of stars’ trial style to celebrities’ craziest contractual demands, coincidentally titled “Art of the Deal.” The show also promoted flattering profiles of top Hollywood litigators as part of a “Power Players” bit, most of those featured being friends of Levin’s.
The schmoozing, legalese, and sleaze - key ingredients behind TMZ - were all there. Like Levin’s future gossip project, Celebrity Justice was celebrity fluff in journalistic drag. And unsurprisingly, it would be a case arising toward the end of CJ’s brief run that would best serve as a precursor to TMZ’s tactics, as well as a decade of Levin’s self-aggrandizing, ass-kissing, and defense of Hollywood’s most reprehensible.
On January 27th, 2005, Levin sent out an email blast. Attached was a document stamped as “confidential.” Inside was an internal police report from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Special Victims Unit.
It was about Bill Cosby.
Two weeks earlier, Canadian police had spoken with Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee who claimed Cosby had “drugged” and “fondled” her at his Elkins Park home a year earlier. The allegations were swiftly passed onto U.S. authorities, who then spoke with Cosby. In a January 26thpolice interview, Cosby confirmed he had a sexual encounter with Constand, but maintained it was consensual. As for the pills Constand accused him of giving her prior to the assault, Cosby claimed it was just Benadryl.
From the day the claims surfaced, first reported by a Philadelphia TV station, Celebrity Justice was skeptical. “Why did the woman wait a full year after the alleged incident took place to go to police?” queried Levin in response to the initial January 20th story.
The following day, CJ ran a piece accusing Temple of “distancing itself” from Cosby, citing missing photos of Cosby from the university’s website as proof. As part of the story, CJ spoke with a “public relations pro,” Gillian Sheldon, who expressed sympathy for the accused. “I feel sorry for Bill Cosby, because he has been so supportive of the university.”
Days later, Levin struck again.
On the afternoon of January 27th, CJ broadcasted a confidential police report containing Constand’s account of events - proudly displaying the document on its website, as well as sharing it with fellow media outlets. There was one notable detail about Levin’s discovery, though: he didn’t redact Constand’s name.
Constand’s attorney, Dolores Troiani, slammed Celebrity Justice for violating her client’s privacy. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson promised an investigation into how CJ obtained the report. Facing backlash, Levin quickly defended himself, blaming the snafu on his “staff” and maintaining he took the report down as soon as he discovered the “mistake.” To dodge further blame, he insisted Constand’s name had already “gotten out there” before Celebrity Justice leaked it.
The following day, however, in a report titled “Cosby Case Twists: His Admission, Her Request,” Levin went back to bragging about the confidential memo, and noted Constand had went to a Philadelphia civil lawyer before contacting police.
The website also quoted “sources” who alleged that months after the assault, Constand “asked Cosby for tickets for her and her family” to a performance of his at Ontario’s Casino Rama. “Is the allegation about justice or money?” CJ asked its readers.
A week later, the website aired yet another “exclusive.” Under a February 7th“Breaking News” bulletin, Celebrity Justice continued its earlier skepticism, questioning Constand’s motives for coming forward with her story once more. “Money on Her Mind?” the website buzzed.
In his latest piece, Levin once again cited “sources” who claimed that prior to Constand contacting the police, her mother asked Cosby to “make things right with money.” Levin went on to claim that the comedian and Constand had a “cordial relationship” following the assault, until Constand’s mother called Cosby in January 2005 and “complained.” The conversation, CJ noted, “occurred before the accuser ever contacted police.” Levin closed the story with a comment from a Cosby rep calling the situation a “classic shakedown.”
What Harvey failed to note in his piece were the identities of the unnamed “sources” … which court documents would later reveal as being from Cosby’s own team.
In a February 2006civil complaint filed by Constand against Cosby’s attorney, Marty Singer, and the National Enquirer, Constand accused Singer of conducting a smear campaign against her, citing a February 2005 interview Cosby did with the Enquirer, in which the entertainer accused Constand of trying to “exploit him,” as well as statements made to Levin’s Celebrity Justice. (In an October 2010 interview, Levin gushed to CNN: “When Marty [Singer] calls, you listen… I respect him.”)
While Cosby’s deal with the Enquirer has received media attention since the documents from Constand’s civil case were unsealed in 2014, his collaboration with Harvey has yet to be noted by any media outlets. (Aside from Constand, Cosby accuser Tamara Green has also been the target of attacks by Levin. In a February 10th, 2005 story, titled “Second Cosby Accuser’s Troubled Background,” Celebrity Justice bragged of uncovering a “paper trail” that tossed Green’s claims into jeopardy, including a past DUI charge and negative comments from a past acquaintance of Green’s. “Is Tamara Green credible?” the website asked.)
Levin’s influence on the Cosby saga doesn’t end there, though.
Over a decade later, shortly after a judge declared a mistrial in the first Cosby case, TMZ photogs ‘bumped into’Michael Jackson trial alum Tom Mesereau on the streets of Hollywood.
Mesereau, a self-proclaimed champion for the “underdog” and those “railroaded” by the legal system, carries with him a rich history of vulgarity and twisted tactics, dating back to his earliest celebrity cases.
In August 2001, Mesereau convinced San Bernardino County prosecutors to ignore fresh allegations made against convicted rapistMike Tyson after a woman accused the boxer of sexually assaulting her at his home a month prior. Mesereau’s approach, which he’d incorporate into his later cases, was to destroy the credibility of Tyson’s accuser. “Do an investigation. Find out who the accuser is. Interview people who know them, find out about false complaints,” the attorney bragged to CBS.
And in 2003, Mesereau reapplied his victim-blaming strategy to the case against another high-profile client, Robert Blake. As the actor faced charges of murdering his wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, Mesereau hired private investigator Scott Ross to dig up salacious information about the slain woman, including Bakley’s past involvement in a mail-order pornography business, as well as her numerous sexual encounters. In pre-trial hearings, Mesereau slammed Bakley as a gold-digging “celebrity-stalking grifter” who invited her own murder, setting the groundwork for a defense that would be crucial in winning Blake’s acquittal in March 2005. (Mesereau left Blake’s legal team in February 2004, citing “irreconcilable differences.”)
Amidst his work for Blake, though, Mesereau received a request from yet another celebrity in distress: Michael Jackson. In November 2003, shortly after police raided Neverland Ranch in connection with new charges of child molestation against Jackson, the spiraling pop star approached Mesereau to join his defense. At the time, the attorney turned Michael down, maintaining he didn’t want to “shortchange” Blake. However, the following April Mesereau officially joined Jackson’s legal counsel, just after parting ways with his other star client. (Mesereau was initially recommended to the Jacksons by one of Michael’s attorneys from his prior child molestation case, Johnnie Cochran.)
As Jackson’s attorney, Mesereau pulled the same tricks he’d used in representing Tyson and Blake, again hiring P.I. pal Scott Ross as part of a vicious campaign to discredit Jackson’s 13-year-old accuser, Gavin Arvizo, and his family. (Ross recalled Mesereau telling him: “I want you to do to [the accuser’s mother] what you did to Bonnie Lee Bakley.”) Again, Mesereau set out to portray his client’s accuser as a lying grifter, scrutinizing the teenager’s inconsistent statements to his school teacher and police, and treating the boy, as one journalist described it, like a “hardened criminal” on the stand. “Mr. Mesereau was as abusive, was as mean-spirited, and was as obnoxious, frankly, as you could be to a child witness in a case,” recalled prosecutorTom Sneddon. At one point, Mesereau even slammed Arvizo’s mother, Janet, for her ingratitude to Jackson after all he had done for her family, ignoring the fact his client had allegedly molested her son.
Like Blake, Jackson was acquitted.
Prior to his run-in with TMZ photogs in July 2017, during which he slammed the case against Bill Cosby as “weak,” Mesereau had already established a relationship with Harvey Levin. (Aside from Blake, Tyson, and Jackson, Mesereau’s also gone to bat for a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army - the group best known for kidnapping, torturing and raping Patty Hearst - as well as meeting with Charles Manson in the mid-'90s to consider representing the jailed cult leader.)
During Levin’s Celebrity Justice days, Mesereau was the subject of one of the show’s legal puff pieces. In September 2004, months after the attorney joined Jackson’s legal team, Levin sent a camera crew to Alabama to cover Mesereau’s pro bono work on a capital murder case. And throughout Jackson’s 2005 trial, Levin published a slew of pro-Jackson pieces, attacking the credibility of Michael’s teenage accuser, as well as dubbing the decades-long accusations against the pop star a “witch hunt.”
Following the launch of TMZ, Mesereau continued his friendship with Levin, frequently speaking to TMZ on Jackson’s post-mortem legal drama, as well as calling intoTMZ Live - a spot often reserved for Levin’s friends. The website’s adoring descriptions of Mesereau have ranged from “a force to be reckoned with” to “one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country.” And interestingly enough, just a month after the attorney spoke with TMZ, Cosby added Mesereau to his legal counsel. The following day, TMZshared a picture of the “legendary” lawyer accompanying Cosby to court. The headline? “Bill Cosby: Your Honor, Meet My New Lawyer - He’s The Bomb”
When it came time for Cosby’s retrial this past April, Mesereau brought his long-established brand of callousness to the courtroom: briefly falling asleep as the judge spoke to the jury, rolling his eyes during the testimony of one of Cosby’s accusers, and slamming Andrea Constandas a “con artist” and a “pathological liar” - even dubbing her previous civil settlement from Cosby as “one of the biggest highway robberies of all time.” (In one of the more ironic moments of the trial, Mesereau accused publisherJudith Regan, who’d printed Cosby accuser Janice Dickinson’s memoir No Lifeguard On Duty, of putting untrue information in her books. Regan later revealed to the Daily Beast that two years prior, Mesereau had spoken with her in hopes of publishing a book of his own.)
In spite of Mesereau’s sleaziest efforts, the TMZ-named “top lawyer” lost. Cosby was convicted.
But Levin’s relationship with Mesereau is hardly the first time a legal pal’s influenced his celebrity coverage. Long before helming his own website and TV program, Levin, then a reporter for KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, lied in defense of the star clients of his friend, Hollywood attorney Howard Weitzman.
Coincidentally, one of those clients was Michael Jackson.
Amidst the first round of child molestation allegations against Jackson, Levin reported Michael’s 13-year-old accuser, Jordan Chandler, had been given the drug sodium amytal by his dentist father, Evan, and Evan’s anesthesiologist friend Mark Torbiner. Levin alleged that while under the drug’s influence, Jordan “came out” with allegations that he’d been molested by Jackson, suggesting that Chandler and Torbiner had planted false memories of abuse in Jordan’s head.
There’s just one catch.
To obtain sodium amytal legally, Torbiner would’ve been required to fill out forms with the DEA, and no such form was on file with the agency. Additionally, the possibility of illegally obtaining the drug would’ve been slim to none. (Jackson’s fans have often insisted Evan Chandler confessed to using the drug. Chandler has only admitted to using “a” drug during the extraction of his son’s tooth in 1993, but never said it was sodium amytal.) Unsurprisingly, Levin never revealed the sources for his May 3rd, 1994 story, seemingly fed to him by Weitzman, but his wild claims would be picked up by GQ writer Mary Fischer in an October 1994 cover story: “Was Michael Jackson Framed?” (Fischer’s piece omitted Levin’s name, referring to him only as a “newsman at KCBS-TV.”)
The article, as well as Levin’s baseless brainwashing claim, have gone on to become the cornerstone of the defense against Jackson’s accusers by his fans. (Ironically, statements from Tom Mesereau would later contradict Levin’s claims. During a 2005 Q&A at Harvard University, Mesereau said he had witnesses for the trial that were prepared to testify Chandler had admitted to “never” being molested by Jackson, and that he’d been forced to make the accusations by his parents. If Chandler had truly been brainwashed into believing he’d been molested, as Harvey Levin had claimed, he wouldn’t have known the accusations were untrue.)
And within weeks of lying for Jackson, Levin would strike again, nearly jeopardizing a case in the process.
On June 13th, 1994, just a day after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark arrived at O.J. Simpson’s Rockingham estate. A search warrant had been signed by a judge at 10:45 AM. Covering the case for KCBS-TV, once again, was Harvey Levin.
In what he dubbed a “bombshell” story, Levin accused Clark of searching Simpson’s home prior to the signing of the warrant by a judge, putting prosecutors in hot water and igniting a media firestorm. His proof? A tape of the search stamped 10:28.
Levin was so confident in his story, in fact, that he immediately did a press tour, boasting about his find during one radio interview and proclaiming himself to be a “constitutional police officer” whose discovery would become “an important element” in the case against Simpson.
But, once again, there was a catch.
As KCBS continued to air Harvey’s story, calling it a station “exclusive,” the district attorney’s office vehemently denied Levin’s claims, maintaining that Clark did not arrive at Simpson’s estate until after noon on the day of the search. Upon further review of the footage, they were right.
Rather than referring to the morning of the search, the 10:28 timestamp on Levin’s footage actually referred to the evening the tape was filed. Embarrassed, KCBS forced Levin to apologize on air for his bogus report, but Levin snidely remarked: “I don’t apologize for being an aggressive reporter.” In typical Harvey fashion, he also pushed blame onto his coworkers.
While the story seemed to have been a simple mistake on the surface, it’s worth noting Simpson’s attorney for the first several days after the slayings, including the day of the search, was none other than Levin’s pal Howard Weitzman. (Less than a week after the murders, Weitzman stepped down, immediately replaced by Robert Shapiro.)
While it all could be written off as a coincidence, within the span of a month Levin had twice lied while reporting on high-profile cases - both involving Howard Weitzman.
In 2011, Michael Jackson’s dermatologist, Arnie Klein, pointed out the Weitzman-Levin relationship during a Facebook rant, as Weitzman had then been given the task of representing Jackson’s estate following the star’s passing. In his post, Klein attacked TMZ’s critical coverage of him, comparing Levin to infamous Trump attorney and mentor Roy Cohn, and alleging Harvey “would always lie for Weitzman” - even citing the infamous Simpson snafu as proof.
Another Weitzman client that’s benefitted from Levin’s coverage is Cindy Crawford’s husband, Rande Gerber.
When Gerber was accused of sexual harassment by two former employees in 2009, TMZmocked the allegations, writing: “He’s married to Cindy Crawford, for cryin’ out loud…” After Gerber’s friend, George Clooney, who’d been with Gerber the night of the alleged incident, dismissed the women’s accusations as lies, TMZ wrote that “the chicks… may as well fold now.” Finally, in a statement to the website, Weitzman slammed the allegations as an “extortion case” and promised to file charges of “malicious prosecution” in return. To that, TMZ wrote: “Case closed.” Unsurprisingly, the website failed to cover claims made days later by a third employee who recalled Gerber trying to sleep with her during a hotel opening in 2000. Not long after resisting Gerber’s advances, the employee was fired from her job. (Other Weitzman clients have included Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Axl Rose and Courtney Love.)
And even in recent years, Levin’s continued to run positive coverage for Weitzman’s clients, particularly Michael Jackson’s estate.
After coming forward with molestation claims against Jackson in 2013, Wade Robson faced scrutiny similar to Jordan Chandler and Gavin Arvizo - scrutiny led, of course, by Levin. In one TMZ piece, titled “Wade Robson – Life’s A Beach,” pictures of Robson in Hawaii with his wife and son were accompanied by a snarky caption attacking Wade’s “'Michael Jackson molested me as a kid’ media blitz.” And in a questionnaire posted the following day, TMZ asked its readers to “be the judge,” polling opinions on whether or not Robson was “truthful” or a “big fat liar,” and if his motives were rooted in “justice” or “money.” The website prefaced the questions by noting “lots of people think [Wade’s] lying through his teeth.”
Speaking to TMZ Live, Tom Mesereau slammed the allegations as “ridiculous.”
While Robson’s case was dismissed in 2017, the credibility of his claims was never ruled on - simply whether or not Jackson’s estate was liable. However, in the court of public opinion, shaped by TMZ’s undeniable media influence that has only grown greater in recent years, Robson’s been filed away as a liar like Jackson’s previous accusers, Rande Gerber’s accusers, and much like Bill Cosby’s accusers once were, Andrea Constand and countless other women only finding public redemption a decade after their stories were picked apart and laid to waste by Harvey Levin’s carefully-connected gossip machine.
But who else has Levin lied for? What other celebrities have benefitted from his media manipulation? And who else has been silenced, or their credibility destroyed by Levin’s decades-long system of intimidating those who stand against Hollywood’s most powerful?
From Tinseltown’s top stars to the tabloid-bred reality-star-turned president, the list of Levin’s connections runs deep, but don’t fret, I’ll be breaking down every single one. From attorneys to publicists, and the celebrities thriving from it all, no name will be spared. This post is just the beginning.
Gifs & Graphics:batfleckwayne& calebstark
Special thanks to Nicole Weisensee Egan for her excellent coverage of the Cosby case spanning the past decade.