Hard-boiled Hollywood mysteries usually start with a woman.
This one was 19, with big eyes, blond hair, and the ability to turn on the charm when she wanted something. And what Charlotte Sophie Kirk wanted more than anything was to be a movie star.
It was 2012, and Kirk had just landed in New York City “to network,” as she told a friend. Which is how she’d met the older man at her side. He wanted to help her with her career, so he introduced her to a lawyer named Ray Markovich who had produced a few low-budget movies. One look at Kirk, and Markovich wanted to get her work too. “I needed someone for one scene,” he says. “And she said, ‘Great!’ I tried to help. I just remember she had a lot of drive and she was very prepared.
“It’s a Rolodex and a relationship business,” he continues. “You can’t make a living as an actor doing low-budget indies. You have to have a second job. I think she was doing some modeling. It’s all about building, building, building.”
Markovich assisted in getting her cast in a film he was coproducing called Black Dog, Red Dog, organized by the actor James Franco, who was teaching at NYU. Kirk had only one line, and her tiny scene was cut from the film, but it gave her the opening she needed. “I will be in L.A. from tomorrow so what do i need to do to be in sag,” she emailed a producer on June 19, 2012. A Screen Actors Guild membership was the key to getting more roles and being taken seriously as an actor.
The daughter of a television and video engineer, Kirk grew up in the suburbs of London. She was diagnosed with Asperger’s at age eight. “I wasn’t a natural academic and didn’t enjoy school much,” she would say. Then, at 11, she saw the movie that would change her life: Gone With the Wind, with its headstrong hero, Scarlett O’Hara. “So after graduating from drama school, aged 19, I packed up and moved to the U.S.” She arrived in New York City, armed with headshots and modeling photos produced by yet another man eager to jump-start her career. In addition to shooting her portfolio gratis, the London photographer had built her a free website in hopes that she would “go on to be famous and make the images worth publishing,” he says today. “As you know, a beautiful picture is nice, but you’ve got to have a reason to publish the picture.”
Kirk soon had a reason, emailing the photographer dispatches from her exciting new life on the rise. She’d met some industry people at a party. She had been “invited” to Los Angeles. She was going to be a star! “She was more determined and ambitious than I realized at the time,” he says.
Before long, Kirk had amassed quite a collection of beaus as well. There was the billionaire Steve Tisch, scion of the New York Giants football family and producer of movies including Forrest Gump, who had a relationship with Kirk shortly after her arrival in New York, according to the Hollywood Reporter. There was an even richer billionaire, the Australian casino magnate James Packer, who reportedly took up with Kirk in November 2012.
And there was Kevin Tsujihara, at the time the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment. He and Kirk crossed paths, briefly but fatefully, in 2013. Their collision exploded into view in March 2019, when someone released a trove of astonishingly explicit text messages indicating that, seemingly in exchange for sex, the studio executive had helped Kirk secure a small part in 2018’s Ocean’s 8, among other roles. Within days of the leak, Tsujihara, though he denied the allegations, was forced to resign from Warner Bros.
If that was a surprise, what came next was downright shocking. Tsujihara may have been a powerful executive in Hollywood, but NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer was a living legend. On August 18, 2020, Meyer released a stunning statement: “I recently disclosed to my family and the company that I made a settlement, under threat, with a woman outside the company who had made false accusations against me. Admittedly, this is a woman I had a very brief and consensual affair with many years ago. I made this disclosure because other parties learned of the settlement and have continuously attempted to extort me into paying them money or else they intended to falsely implicate NBCUniversal, which had nothing to do with this matter, and to publish false allegations about me.”
It didn’t take long for Hollywood sleuths to determine that the woman in question was none other than Charlotte Kirk. She and Meyer had met in London on May 4, 2012, at the after-party for the London premiere of Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman. As Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart, and Chris Hemsworth mingled with the rest of the cast and crew, the all-powerful Meyer, 67, was introduced to the unknown Kirk, 19. “She said she was going to be in L.A. and asked if she could call him,” says a source close to Meyer, while some say that he suggested she call him.
Soon thereafter, they had two liaisons in discreet locations in New York and L.A., careful never to be seen in a public place. Meyer was married, after all.
Then, eight years later—just like that—Meyer’s quarter-century career at Universal was over in a flash. “The most beloved member of a group who once owned Hollywood as much as anyone has ever owned anything: out in one phone call,” wrote veteran Hollywood chronicler Richard Rushfield. To him, Meyer’s sudden fall from grace was “a genuine Hollywood mystery” that seemed straight out of, well, a movie.
At the center of the saga was Kirk, who shot overnight from obscurity to notoriety. Two more of Kirk’s lovers, the British-born directors Joshua Newton and Neil Marshall, soon appeared in press accounts as having been accused of extortion—a charge they vehemently deny.
As Marty Singer, Hollywood’s fiercest attorney, sees it, she was a “honey trap,” his reference to wartime spies known to use sex to ensnare their targets. Although Kirk herself, due to a court order, is prohibited from commenting, to hear those around her tell it, she was nothing of the kind. Instead, she was one more woman drawn to the bright lights of Hollywood, only to be deceived, swindled, and abused. Indeed, this October, a group of demonstrators protested outside an L.A. courthouse, hoisting signs that said “Let Charlotte Speak!” to draw attention to Kirk’s case, turning her, in effect, into the latest face of #MeToo.
He got into the business, as they used to say in pictures, for the action.
A Marine stricken with a case of the measles, Ronnie Meyer was alone in a military hospital when a care package arrived from his mother, Edith. She and her husband, Edward, were German Jews who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, eventually settling in Los Angeles. Dad became a traveling salesman of ladies’ dresses (“a schlepper of bags,” Meyer once said), and Mom “a guilt-free Jewish mother,” as he recounted in a 2016 WSJ magazine story by Ned Zeman entitled “Hollywood’s Mr. Nice Guy.” The Meyers dreamed that their only son would go to college, earn a degree, and find a decent job. Instead, he dropped out of high school and became a minor-league hoodlum with a couple of arrests for petty crimes. At 17, he signed up for a stint in the Marine Corps. Quarantined and going nowhere, he opened the care package from his mother. Amid the cards and cookies was a book: The Flesh Peddlers: A Novel About a Talent Agency, by Stephen Longstreet. “I had never really read a book at that point in my entire life,” Meyer would later say.
Alone in that empty hospital ward, the young Marine lost himself in the rollicking tale of COK (Company of Kings), a Beverly Hills talent agency where “adultery, fornication, alcohol, gambling, gluttony, sport had to be fitted into a busy, demanding company life.”
“It was about a guy in the agency business who drove a fast car, and went out with beautiful women and lived what I thought of as a glamorous Hollywood life,” Meyer would recall. “I thought, Wow, when I get out…”
Upon leaving the service, he went door-to-door to every talent agency in town but got nowhere until a slim connection—“my mother’s best girlfriend’s husband’s sister,” he told WSJ—scored him a grunt job at the Paul Kohner Agency. From there, the messenger boy with the Marine tattoo on his arm made a fast ascent. By age 25, he was an agent at William Morris, living his dream of big money, fast cars, and free love. “One day we saw Geneviève Bujold idling her Mercedes in the office parking lot,” his fellow agent Michael Ovitz wrote in his 2018 memoir. “Ron was obsessed with Geneviève, a Morris client and a very hot actress at the time…. Ron walked over to introduce himself as one of her agents. He told her how great she was and said he’d love to get to know her better. Then he asked if he could buy her an ice cream cone someday. I saw Geneviève nod and smile—they had a date! Ron’s invite was so innocuous it worked.”
In 1975, Meyer and four other young renegades, including Ovitz, decamped to found the powerhouse agency of the future, which would fuel movies, television, sports, and music for decades to come. They called it Creative Artists Agency, but, like the Company of Kings, it became known by its initials: CAA. Then and now, CAA was a star factory, “packaging” its clients in projects that the agency controlled. Its clients—Redford, Hanks, Murray, Hoffman, Bullock—became superstars, and its agents became power brokers, with Ovitz and Meyer at the top: Meyer the good cop, Ovitz the bad. As Ovitz would later write, “Ron was the soul of CAA, to hear everyone tell it, and I was the ass-soul.” Meyer was consigliere, confidant, and champion of the era’s biggest directors, screenwriters, and actors: Cruise, Stallone, Streisand, Streep, Cher, De Niro...
In the mid-1990s, Ovitz and Meyer planned another power move: They would decamp from CAA to become the bosses at Universal, the studio conglomerate Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. had just bought for $5.7 billion. Ovitz would run the company and Meyer the studio. A financial disagreement between Ovitz and Bronfman almost doomed the deal until DreamWorks cofounder David Geffen stepped in to advise Bronfman that there was only one genius who could run it all: Ronnie Meyer.
As COO, Meyer soon turned Universal into a juggernaut—hit movies, bustling theme parks, and profits, profits, profits—and remained in power for 18 years, a record tenure for a modern-era studio boss. In 2013, he stepped down, but not out, into a hands-on advisory role, becoming Universal’s vice chairman, as the studio pumped out hit movie franchises like Fifty Shades of Grey and licensed the Harry Potter novels and other attractions, catapulting Universal’s theme parks in Los Angeles, Orlando, Japan, and Singapore to success.
Now 75 and reportedly earning as much as $25 million a year, Meyer had become the “old guy in the company,” as he once put it. But, as recounted in the WSJ profile, he still worked as fiendishly as ever from his office in Universal City, where, with three assistants, he began fielding his usual 100 calls a day. Days, nights, weekends, Meyer was always on call. “We had a major fire on the back lot, destroyed the film vault, and he jumped in his own car and drove over late at night,” says former Universal executive Mike Sington. “I saw him on-site directing what was going on with the firefighters.”
Nice guy Ronnie had long ago traded power suits for cardigans—jet-black instead of Mr. Rogers red. He was the calming, cheerleading éminence grise who urged The Rock to move from professional wrestling to acting in the 2001 Universal film The Mummy Returns and gave Angelina Jolie her shot as a first-time director on a major Hollywood film, Unbroken, in 2014. “Here’s the deal—in order to be successful in Hollywood, you don’t need to be an asshole,” he told WSJ after signing a contract extension that would keep him on through 2021.
With more than 50 years in the business, and with a world of connections, he had become one in a very small group of moguls who could put out fires and get things done. “Ronnie is the fixer,” says longtime journalist and Deadline Hollywood founder Nikki Finke, who came out of retirement to speak about Meyer for this article. “It wasn’t just at CAA or Universal. If Warner Bros. or another agency was having trouble, they would get Ron to fix it.”
He is a rarity in a town “where everybody loves to pretend that they’re so fucking important, and they don’t have time for people or problems,” says Finke. “People knew they could call him at three in the morning on a Sunday, and he would immediately have a solution. If somebody was threatening to sue, if someone was messing up a movie or a TV show, if an executive was in trouble, he fixed it.”
And yet the man whom one friend describes as “a piece of solid steel” also had another career, which was not so nice, as a high-stakes gambler. Over time, he became a member of the most rarefied category of gambler: a whale, among the top in the nation.
In his memoir, Ovitz wrote: “One morning in 1987, Ron came into my office, shut the door, and said, ‘I’ve got a problem.’ ” He’d lost $5 million in a poker game and said, “ ‘I can’t pay up.’ ”
Several days after work each week, he’d fly to Vegas, where he would gamble all night, then return to L.A. “in the morning and [work] his ass off as usual.” Ovitz wrote that he was floored by the revelation, but CAA loaned Meyer $1 million, only to have him return a year and a half later with “an even bigger loss: $6.5 million.”
“I felt like he’d smashed me with a baseball bat,” Ovitz wrote. “Who was this man?”
At one point Meyer was “in the hole for several million,” and not to Hollywood card sharks like those his former son-in-law Tobey Maguire gambled with. “This wasn’t some casino on the strip,” the journalist James Andrew Miller wrote in Powerhouse, an oral history of CAA. “The ‘guys’ Meyer was on the hook to only swam in the deep end of the pool.”
Forever an agent, Meyer negotiated with his creditors, which enabled him to leave “that meeting alive, both legs operative, genitalia intact,” according to Powerhouse.
But the gambling only grew, until he was “one of the biggest craps players ever,” a source recently told the Daily Mail. Casino player-development executives reportedly baited him with credit and kept him at the tables with perks like helicopter flights to private gambling palaces, until he had racked up almost unfathomable losses. (A source close to Meyer says he hasn’t gambled in almost four years.)
By this August, Meyer had become divorced from his wife, Kelly (2018), and sold his magnificent Malibu home for $100 million (2019).
But the hardest blow was yet to come.
On the other side of town from the moguls and the movie premieres, Charlotte Kirk was pouring her heart out onstage from 9 p.m. till past midnight at the Hollywood Actor’s Showcase in the San Fernando Valley.
“I flew from England to Hollywood to become a star,” a colleague recalls Kirk announcing from the stage at the Thursday-night Industry Showcase, where aspiring actors parade their talents before an audience dominated by directors, producers, and casting professionals. “It sounds almost cliché, but that’s almost verbatim. It wasn’t like, ‘I want to be a working actress,’ it was ‘I want to be a star.’ ”
In 2012, stardom was still a distant dream for Kirk, but her first taste of success, with the -never-widely-released film Black Dog, Red Dog, had only whetted her appetite.
“She was a ‘must hire,’ ” says one of Black Dog, Red Dog’s producers familiar with the decision to give her the nonspeaking role of “the intern,” even though another actress had already been cast. The switch was supposedly made over the objections of the director. “They told me that she had to be cast, she had to be given a line in order to be given a SAG card, even though she didn’t have any screen credit,” says the producer.
“I dreamed of being Vivien Leigh kissing Clark Gable,” Kirk told Authority Magazine in 2018, in a rare interview she gave about her career. “And I certainly hoped to emulate Hilary Swank stepping up onstage to collect her Oscar. But Hollywood seemed a million miles away to me then.”
“It’s not been an easy journey,” her mother, Angie Kirk, told the Daily Mail in 2019. “From her working class roots she’s had to overcome many hurdles along the way. Diagnosed with Asperger’s as a young girl, she struggled at school, but she’s tough, she’s a fighter, she always has been.”
In the beginning, modeling became her ticket. In 2008 and 2009, when she was 15 going on 16, she began chronicling her far-flung life on Facebook. “Getting ready to go to London,” she posted. “Getting ready to go to Mexicooo…gotten new pics…it’s all about sex on fire!...fucked up last night….” On March 30, 2011, when she was 18 soon turning 19, she wrote, “In Dubai.” April 9, 2011: “in las vagus!” April 9, 2011: “change of plan right now in milwaukee!!!” “Would i lie to you baby!” she wrote in 2009. “Wicked song very old! but still the older the better like men LOL.”
Back home in the London suburbs, she began taking the train to the city to study acting. “After graduating from drama school…I packed up and moved to the U.S.,” she would tell her interviewer. Once there, Kirk not only survived but thrived.
“Charlotte always wanted to advance her career on the merit of talent,” says a colleague. “But she saw an environment where men were behaving in a predatory way, and she played prey, on purpose, to say, ‘Hey, if these men are going to rise to power by cheating, by scheming, by taking advantage of people, I’m going to play their game the only way I can, which is to use my feminine power to turn them into putty…. If they’re going to reject me unless they feel they have a chance with me sexually, then I’ll go ahead and take advantage of that.’ ” (A knowledgeable source with access to court filings and other evidence insists that “there is no credible evidence that Charlotte Kirk ever said such a thing.”)
The website for the Hollywood Actor’s Showcase, run by the acting coach Bobbie Chance, claims credit for launching many a young actor’s career, and its signature event is its Industry Showcase. Every Thursday night, actors vie for attention before an audience of professionals, with cocktails to follow for many at nearby Casa Vega, the old-school Mexican restaurant featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
“The girls network aggressively,” says Jana Grazer, a producer who participated in the showcase as an actor and later attended with her husband, director Gavin Grazer, brother of Imagine Entertainment cofounder Brian Grazer. “My husband went there when he was single to pick up girls. I’m pretty much the only woman who goes in there, basically to keep watch over what goes on.”
The evening begins with an announcement introducing the industry pros in attendance. Then the performance begins. Grazer vividly recalls watching Kirk, who was wearing “black pantyhose and a short, tight black dress. She did a scene with a gun and wrestled her scene partner to the ground. She reminded me of a young Nicole Kidman.” Grazer was impressed, she says, until “she attempted to hit on my husband.”
After the acting ends, the networking begins. “They rush over and give out their headshots and résumés,” recalls Grazer, who says that on the night in question, she returned from the restroom to see Kirk with her husband, “grabbing his arm” and handing him her résumé, headshot, and contact information. “I was like, Who the hell does she think she is? They announced that we’re married!” She snatched Kirk’s résumé and headshots out of her husband’s hands. “That was enough for me not to let Gavin go to the showcase anymore.” (A knowledgeable source says that Grazer’s account is “entirely false.”)
Kirk met another potential connection at the showcase. Joshua Newton was a fellow Brit who had directed the revenge thriller Iron Cross. He was more than 20 years older than Charlotte, and he quickly tried to help “make her a star,” says the fashion photographer Jacques -Silberstein, who often photographed Kirk. “When he met her, she had absolutely no experience. She wanted to become a singer, and he put her in a video. She wanted to be an actress, and he cast her as the star in a movie he was making.”
Newton would eventually fly Kirk to Bulgaria, where he would direct her in her first starring role, playing Nicole Brown Simpson in Nicole & O.J., based on the premise that O.J. Simpson had been framed. The unfinished film has yet to be released, but parts of it were screened. “Joshua rented a screening room and Charlotte was there as the star of the movie, but she was there with a new boyfriend,” says Silberstein. It was yet another British filmmaker for whom she had auditioned: Neil Marshall, the director of the 2019 movie Hellboy and two episodes of Game of Thrones, including the famous Battle of the Blackwater set piece from season two.
The text read: “If you are going to be fucking someone for a part it should be a director or producer.” It was September 2015 and director-producer Brett Ratner was texting Charlotte Kirk, spelling out the rules of sex and power in Hollywood, to which an industry source says Ratner added a caveat: If a director or producer is offering a part in exchange for sex, he or she is not legitimate. “KT cannot get you jobs or auditions,” Ratner fumed. “I told u this many times. Stop asking.”
But Charlotte and “KT” had already had sex. Kevin Tsujihara had only been CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment for seven months when he and Kirk met, in September 2013. The aftermath of their relationship would later spill out in an extraordinary Hollywood Reporter story by Kim Masters and Tatiana Siegel, which revealed an eye-popping collection of texts that somebody—it was never revealed who—sent to the magazine.
The son of egg distributors from Petaluma, California, Tsujihara had been chosen to run the studio—at the young age of 48—after a long, fiercely contested battle for the throne. His fall would be abrupt and bitter.
Kirk, then 21, had entered Tsujihara’s world via an affair with James Packer.
She’d come to know the 45-year-old Australian billionaire at a precarious moment in his life: He was in the process of blowing $100 million in Hollywood, according to his biographer Damon Kitney’s book The Price of Fortune. Packer arrived there in 2013, booking the $18,000-a-night Presidential Suite at the storied Hotel Bel-Air for an indefinite stay, and proceeded to embark on an epic meltdown, fueled by booze (a bottle of vodka a day, usually swigged straight from the bottle), women (including a short engagement to singer Mariah Carey), prescription meds, and ill-fated business deals. The rugged six-foot-six Aussie was worth some $6 billion, thanks to his inheritance from his late father, the media baron Kerry Packer. He had come to L.A. to work with Ratner, who would later be accused of sexual harassment and misconduct by six women. (Ratner has denied all charges.)
Packer and Ratner formed a production company called RatPac Entertainment. In October 2013, RatPac and Dune Entertainment (owned by future treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin) signed a four-year financing deal with Warner Bros. and New Line, in which RatPac and Dune put up $450 million to fund Warner’s “entire slate” of up to 75 films.
On September 27, 2013, three days before the deal with Warner Bros. closed, Packer and Tsujihara were celebrating over dinner in Packer’s Bel-Air suite when, as the Hollywood Reporter recounted, Packer reached for his phone. “I have the opportunity of a lifetime for u,” he texted Kirk that night. “Come to Bel air now. U will never be able to re pay me.” He was going to introduce her to “the most important man u can meet,” he added.
Kirk soon arrived at the verdant grounds of the Bel-Air, the fabled L.A. retreat where Marilyn Monroe posed for her final photo shoot.
“His [sic] not very nice!” Kirk texted Packer about her encounter with Tsujihara. “Very pushy!! He just wants to fuck noting [sic] else dose [sic] not even want To say anything!”
“U OK ?” Packer responded. “Be cool.”
Kirk hadn’t come to Hollywood to play it cool. She began pushing the Warner Bros. chief, and by the following October she texted Packer that Tsujihara was “very kindly looking at what he can do to help me now that my career is starting to take off.”
“I’m really happy for you,” Packer replied. “Just don’t want to overpromise. Sending you good energy.”
Four days later, she turned back to Packer: “Putting me in one of your many movies shouldn’t be a big deal. I did help u out with Kevin which was hard for me but I did it for you.”
“Hey that’s not being cool,” Packer replied, flinching at the mention of Tsujihara’s name.
“I didn’t expect to be part of a business deal so all I’m asking is u just help me with a couple of roles it’s not big deal and then we’ll just put this all behind us,” Kirk wrote.
Now, Packer felt “like ur trying to blackmail me over a lie.” He wrote, “Don’t push me. U’ll regret it.”
“James if you’re trying to make me worry about my safety you’ll be forcing me to give this to my attorneys.”
“Can’t wait tough girl…. Get back in your box or let’s fight. Lying and blackmail are a bad start.”
As for Tsujihara, he and Kirk met for a second time on February 24, 2014, five months after their first night together. Kirk was waiting for him at a West Hollywood boutique hotel called Palihouse when Tsujihara reportedly texted from the car asking her to order him a Grey Goose martini with olives. No sex on that occasion, but they had a tryst the next time, at a motel.
Their texts seemed to reveal a twisted relationship. One night, Kirk asked Tsujihara about a screening he’d attended. “It was good, but I would rather have watched ur video on loop for a night,” he answered, referring to a smoldering, sex-pantomiming music video she’d made for a song called “I Get the Feeling Again.” “U make me blush,” she replied before getting back to business: Had Tsujihara spoken to his “guys” about her audition for a Warner-affiliated TV show? “Yes, I spoke to our guys—i caused a bit of a stir,” he wrote. “I don’t usually call about casting about these types of roles. It’s fine, I just need to be careful.”
“Wish I was doing something else,” he texted. “Mmmm such as?...I remember how good you were at Mmmm. You’re a giver :),” she replied.
But he hadn’t given her what she wanted most. “Kevin? A two liner? U have got to be kidding me!!” she texted about her miniscule role in the forthcoming romantic comedy How to Be Single.
She was turning up the heat: “Please make sure that [New Line president Richard] Brener accepts or returns my agent’s calls—as he requested—so that I can get the help you promised me before luring me to that motel to have sex with you.”
She tried a more direct approach in a text she sent on March 3, 2015: “You’re very busy I know but when we were in that motel having sex u said u would help me and when u just ignore me like you’re doing now it makes me feel used.”
“Sorry you feel that way,” he replied. “Richard will be reaching out to u tonight.”
Alarmed by the escalating pressure, Tsujihara turned for help to Ratner, who soon got similar treatment. “You know what u need to do,” Kirk texted Ratner. “U haven’t even come close to doing it. If you thought I would be so easily manipulated you’re wrong.”
“What are u talking about?” Ratner replied. “I don’t work for u. Why are u so unappreciative?”
She demanded auditions and readings and respect. “You just keep lying to me about getting me jobs and you’re not doing what Kevin told you to,” she wrote Ratner, later adding that she felt used “as the icing on the cake for your finance deal with Warner Bros…. It’s gross what you all did to me!”
“Ratner responded angrily that the deal had nothing to do with her,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, which quoted a statement from Kirk, in which she denied having “any connection to the Warner Bros/Rat-Pac slate-financing deal…directly or indirectly.”
At one point, according to the Holly-wood Reporter, Ratner texted: “I only promised u auditions not jobs.” He tried to get Kirk to back off. “Stop writing Kevin and saying what he told me to do?? I don’t work for him…I am helping you but your attitude sucks…. As I said, I don’t owe you anything. If anything u owe me for all the money James paid you. A thank you would be nice.”
As for Tsujihara, Ratner added, “He is a married man what are u thinking?”
Kirk said Packer hadn’t given her anything except gifts. If Ratner didn’t apologize, she added, “the shit if [sic] going to hit the fan!!!!!”
“Regardless what you are doing is extortion [and] is very illegal in this country,” Ratner wrote. “You can’t take back the extortion u have committed because you have sent text and emails asking for these auditions and jobs.”
“Brett you’re an idiot I’m not extorting anyone,” she replied.
Then the shit did indeed hit the fan. In late summer 2016, Kirk had her attorney at the time draft a settlement agreement, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Under its terms, Kirk would supposedly get six auditions within the year and Ratner would help her land a role in his next movie. (The agreement was never signed.)
The secrets still seemed safe—until November 2017, when someone contacted the Hollywood Reporter: Had they heard about Kevin Tsujihara’s liaison with a young actress? (Asked for a response, Tsujihara issued a denial and threatened to sue.) A year later, in September 2018, an anonymous letter arrived in the office of WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey: Had a senior executive promised roles to an actress, identified as “CK”? Outside counsel investigated but found no evidence—and none would arise until early 2019, when someone leaked the lurid texts between the pair, which were published in the blistering Hollywood Reporter piece.
Less than two weeks after the scandal broke, Warner Bros. announced that Tsujihara’s career with the studio was over. But there were still fireworks to come. Kirk had much more to tell.
On September 3, 2020, seven years after her fateful first encounter with Tsujihara, Kirk filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court to vacate a gag order that had prevented her from telling her side. In the petition, which was officially sealed but seen by the Holly-wood Reporter, she asserted that she, in fact, had been a victim of sexual abuse.
The petition read like a sad script, with the famous filmland figures identified by pseudonyms: Bruce Hamilton, Clark Grandin, and Gregory Kemp for Kevin Tsujihara, Brett Ratner, and James Packer, and Melissa Parker for Charlotte Kirk…all starring in a movie that mutated from Fatal Attraction, with its scheming femme fatale, into Chinatown, a murky tangle of secret pacts that would require a detective like Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes to unravel. “Whether or not consensual, what followed the night at the Hotel Bel-Air appears to have been a wide-ranging cover-up that involved some of Hollywood’s most powerful men, including NBCUniversal vice chair Ron Meyer,” the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel wrote on September 23, after three years of tracking what she called the “labyrinthine” case.
The drama had begun the evening of September 27, 2013, in the Presidential Suite of the Hotel Bel-Air, which was detailed in the petition quoted by Siegel:
“When [Kirk] arrived she was introduced to a cocaine snorting [Tsujihara], CEO of [Warner Bros.] who shortly thereafter left and went into another room,” the petition states. “Mr. [Packer] told Ms. [Kirk] that Mr. [Tsujihara] wanted to discuss her career further in the other room. Ms. [Kirk] entered the other room to find Mr. [Tsujihara] naked on the bed and demanding sex. When Ms. [Kirk] hurried to the adjoining bathroom and strongly objected by text message to Mr. [Packer] he ordered her to comply by replying ‘Be Cool.’ ”
“When attempting to leave the room, the significantly taller and larger Mr. [Packer] blocked her from leaving and menacingly told her she had to have sex with Mr. [Tsujihara]. Desperate to have Petitioner comply, Mr. [Packer] offered her $30,000 to do as he demanded, which she did not accept. Fearing for her personal safety, being blacklisted and the destruction of her career before it even began, she complied with Mr. [Packer’s] demands and engaged in nonconsensual intercourse with Mr. [Tsujihara] under duress. [Kirk] later learned that she was Mr. [Packer’s] offering to Mr. [Tsujihara] to further induce him to agree to a $450,000,000 deal between Mr. [Packer] and Mr. [Ratner], and Mr. [Tsujihara] and [Warner Bros.]” (Sources insist, however, that the financing deal had already been fully negotiated at the time of the meeting.)
Separately, a draft complaint reportedly noted, “Due to her autism and difficulty interpreting people’s self-interested conduct, Ms. Kirk was unaware she was becoming a victim of sexual abuse.”
“U made me sleep with Kevin,” she texted Packer in 2014.
“I didn’t promise u anything or make u do anything. This is a very uncool conversation.”
“We all know the truth,” Kirk texted.
Tsujihara’s attorney, Bert H. Deixler, would vehemently deny that there was nonconsensual sex between Tsujihara and Kirk, or that his client was using cocaine, labeling such claims “legally and factually baseless, manufactured many years after their brief consensual relationship to unjustly seek the payment of money. The relationship was pursued by Ms. Kirk and at all times understood by Kevin to be entirely consensual.” Moreover, an industry source says that Packer had never tried to block or coerce Kirk, noting, “A billionaire forcing someone to have sex? That claim is worth multiple eight figures!”
“We had a brief relationship and I tried to help her career, I genuinely only ever had good intentions for Charlotte,” Packer said in a March 2019 statement to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Attorney Marty Singer, who would eventually defend the accused executives, blasted Kirk’s version of events as “ludicrous, offensive, and entirely false. James Packer never behaved in the manner alleged, and, as Kirk herself repeatedly said in multiple television and print interviews that she voluntarily gave, all of her interactions with my clients were fully consensual at all times.”
And her texts kept on telling, as revealed in a court filing. “U got me excited when we met last time thought it would be a regular thing,” she wrote Tsujihara on August 12, 2014. And on February 13, 2015: “Happy Valentine’s Day :)”
In the summer of 2017, Kirk turned her focus to Hellboy, the third installment of the supernatural superhero franchise created by director Guillermo del Toro. The film was produced by Millennium Films, whose founder and CEO, the now 72-year-old Israeli American Avi Lerner, supposedly told the director, Neil Marshall, that giving Charlotte Kirk the role of Alice Monaghan (“a woman of Irish blood that Hellboy rescued as an infant”) would “save my life, it would save a lot of people’s life.” (A knowledgeable source contends this exchange never happened.) In an email to Marshall on May 12, 2017, Lerner added: “I think she would be good for the role. Also, I have another reason which I would like to talk to you about.”
Marshall had met Kirk during the audition process for Hellboy. A year later, after she and Joshua Newton broke up, Kirk and Marshall began a relationship. “The British helmer seemed instantly and genuinely besotted with the aspiring actress, then in her mid-20s,” observed the Hollywood Reporter. “He reacted with anger when Hellboy producer Larry Gordon—apparently unimpressed with Kirk’s acting—refused to cast her in the film. At that point, sources say, Marshall…proclaimed that he would devote himself entirely to making movies with Kirk.”
The role went to another actor. By then, Kirk had sought legal advice over her issues with Tsujihara.
It was an unholy mess that only one man would even attempt to fix: Ron Meyer, reportedly identified in court documents as “Paul Stevenson.” For Meyer, it was something he had done endless times before, with labor unions, actors guilds, talent agencies, movie studios, and other individuals and entities. Meyer stepped in to defuse any potential lawsuit and “help them discuss a resolution, suggesting that she mediate instead to see if they could figure out a solution,” says a source close to Meyer.
To avoid going to court, the four Hollywood executives—Tsujihara, Packer, Ratner, and Lerner—entered private mediation with Kirk, who was accompanied by Newton. On August 8, 2017, negotiations commenced with Kirk and Newton’s attorney on one side and Marty Singer, representing the four men, on the other. Although Meyer wasn’t part of the mediation, he “periodically facilitated conversations between the parties and Kirk and Newton until they reached a deal,” says the source.
They emerged with a settlement: Kirk would receive a total of $3 million over two years, plus above-the-line billing in three Avi Lerner/Millennium films. For any roles that didn’t materialize, she would be paid an additional $500,000 bonus. Newton would receive the first funds toward Nicole & O.J. “out of a misplaced desire to put this issue behind them,” Singer would later write in a statement.
There was supposedly another person who would stand to benefit from the agreement, though his real name would appear nowhere in its pages: Meyer himself. Kirk’s then attorney alleged that Meyer’s name was added “secretly…into the settlement agreement without having to pay any consideration.” Others insist, however, that it is standard practice for attorneys drafting agreements to anonymously add parties who have helped facilitate a settlement, to protect them from liability for their role. In this case, Meyer wasn’t the only “nonparty” added. “Ron didn’t even know it had been added and never saw it,” says the source close to Meyer.
Kirk and Newton both signed confidentiality agreements as part of the settlement. While such pacts, if they involve compromising sexual relationships, are now being challenged in the age of #MeToo, at the time those were the agreed-upon terms. From there it was supposed to be lights, camera, action. Kirk and Newton soon flew off to Bulgaria, where sets re-creating the homes of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson would be built. Most important, Kirk had top billing. “The whole purpose of the Charlotte Kirk saga is for her to be a movie star at any cost,” says a knowledgeable source, adding that now that she had a leading role in a film, the executives believed the matter was “done.”
But Nicole & O.J. soon stalled. “After those monies were paid…Newton shot only 20–30 minutes of the movie—while he and his producing partners pocketed seven figures and also bought themselves a Ferrari,” attorney Marty Singer wrote in his statement on September 24. And yet, according to another knowledgeable source, the terms of the investment agreement for the film stated that Singer himself had to sign off on the purchase of the Ferrari that was used in the movie. An industry source says that the claim that Singer knew about the Ferrari purchase—or approved it—is “an absolute lie.” In turn, Newton’s attorney Larry Caldwell would assert in a September statement, “Newton categorically denies all of Martin Singer’s provably false accusations against him.”
It seems that Nicole & O.J. was in large part a vehicle for Kirk. “The financing of my film to enable Ms KIRK to have a high profile role as a leading actress was the raison d’etre of the Settlement Agreement,” Joshua Newton wrote in a December 2019 affidavit filed in the U.K. “I am witness to Mr [Meyer] telling Ms KIRK during a phone call, in an intense bid to persuade Ms KIRK not to file a lawsuit against the…parties, ‘Don’t do it Charlotte, you’ve got O.J.’.... Mr [Meyer], who presented himself to me as acting in my best interests and persuaded me to become involved…and enter into an agreement with [the parties] to finance my film, was acting instead in his own best interest and in the interest of the...parties.” (Meyer’s attorney Howard Weitzman responds: “Newton’s allegations are completely frivolous and baseless, as exemplified by the extraordinary sums he claims he is owed.” Adds a source close to Meyer: “Ron [Meyer] stepped in to help discuss a resolution and suggested [Kirk] mediate instead to see if they could figure out a solution. This is a deliberately misleading effort to harm his reputation.”
It was a complete shitshow, but Meyer might have succeeded in bringing peace to the parties if not for the undeniable evidence that blew the lid off everything: Charlotte Kirk’s texts. The messages involving Kirk, Tsujihara, and Packer had begun circulating among the media. And to get ahead of things, a statement was prepared, which Kirk approved. She claimed she wasn’t a victim of casting-couch sex or nonconsensual sex: “I emphatically deny any inappropriate behaviour on the part of Brett Ratner, James Packer, and Kevin Tsujihara, and I have no claims against any of them.” (In the #MeToo era, an accuser’s repeated public denials after an alleged incident may well be meaningless if they were later proved to be coerced.)
Kirk’s declaration was quoted in the original Hollywood Reporter story, exposing the text messages, which effectively ended Tsujihara’s career at Warner Bros.
The situation began to escalate in the summer of 2019, when focus turned to Meyer.
Kirk changed lawyers and various accusations flew, but her network appeared to still be trying to find her film roles. In late 2019, Meyer agreed to mediate with Kirk, this time over various claims, including whether or not Meyer, according to someone familiar with the case, had somehow “conspired with the four other people to help himself and not help her.” A settlement was reached in December: Kirk was to receive $2 million, paid in installments of $500,000.
“The purpose of the settlement was to stop the threats since there were no legal claims, put the matter to rest, and be done with Charlotte,” says a knowledgeable source. “She got her movie role, she got money from Ron Meyer, and they came back for more.”
“It seems I’m being targeted for disintegration by powerful men who are utilizing the full extent of their personal P.R. machines to discredit me and ruin my reputation and credibility,” writer-director Neil Marshall wrote in a statement in September. By then, as news of his involvement with Kirk became more public, he said he had been dropped by his agency and removed from a television project he’d been hired to helm. He, too, is said to have made a claim against Meyer and NBCUniversal, which has yet to come to light. Wrote Kim Masters in an October 1 Hollywood Reporter story: “Marshall doesn’t spell out the nature of that claim in his statement, but it appears that he believed Meyer had agreed to make a film with Kirk that Marshall would direct.”
Said Meyer’s attorney Howard Weitzman: “The claim that any studio executive—let alone the vice chairman of NBCUniversal—would promise to hire someone they had never met, nor spoken with, to direct a film, to commit to financing the project, and to make the stranger’s girlfriend the lead is a ludicrous proposition, and in this case, is false.”
Both Marshall and Newton would contend they had separately begun the process of mediation with Meyer—over their own individual claims. “We had reached a point of mutually appointing a retired Judge to mediate a possible settlement,” wrote Marshall, “when Mr. Meyer chose to break off discussions to make his entirely untrue and highly slanderous and malicious statement [of extortion].” (“There was never any mediation,” says a source close to Meyer.)
Joshua Newton, for his part, accused Meyer of “reneging” on a commitment to help him make his Holocaust passion project The Will to Resist. “The scandal involving Ms KIRK has not only prevented the completion of my film [Nicole & O.J.], it has also substantially damaged my career,” Newton stated in an affidavit last December.
“All of this,” says Newton’s attorney Caldwell, “is designed to prevent Charlotte Kirk from telling her story.” And while she cannot yet speak about the matter, this statement reportedly appeared in the petition to release her from her gag order: “Ms. [Kirk] was victimized by a cabal of entertainment industry elites each who believed they could use and abuse her with impunity and then hand her off. Second, Claimants demanded that their shameful conduct remain secret.”
Kirk may someday emerge from this thicket to recount the full tale of her adventures in Hollywood, which would make one hell of a movie—or a very scary theme park ride. But all of the executives, through their attorneys, brand the menu of accusations as merely “an increasingly outlandish hunt for money,” as Marty Singer would write in his statement. “My clients are done with these scheming opportunists and their malicious, defamatory smears—and look forward to putting an end to this menacing plot once and for all.”
To that end, Singer filed suit last June on behalf of his clients against Kirk, Newton, Marshall, and one of Kirk’s previous lawyers for civil extortion—defined in California as obtaining money or property through force or fear. A preliminary injunction was granted by an arbitrator in July, and Singer soon came out swinging in the media: “My clients are the victims of a multimillion-dollar civil extortion plot perpetrated by Charlotte Kirk, her former boyfriend Joshua Newton and her latest paramour Neil Marshall. This so-called legal filing is simply the latest…scheme to extort my clients with ever-evolving, outlandish false allegations of misconduct unless they are paid millions of dollars.”
The accusations of extortion have been declared “provably false” by the opposing attorney, Larry Caldwell. Instead, he maintains it is a “meritless civil extortion claim [that] now appears to have been intended” to accuse his clients of “extortion, while avoiding legal liability for slander.” To certain Hollywood insiders, however, the entire ordeal may seem like a shakedown, plain and simple. And the price tag seems startling, even to them: “a mind-boggling $335 million,” Singer wrote in a September statement. On top of that amount, sources say, is a demand for multiple millions from Meyer. A spokesman for Marshall, however, is adamant that the number is absurd: “Singer’s contention that the $335 million was demanded from his clients was false. We have no idea what that number is purportedly based upon, if anything.” And Newton, according to his attorney, never demanded $270 million, as has been alleged. Newton was apparently arguing, instead, that had the case been filed in court, that sum was the amount he would have asked a jury to award him for damages to his career.
And what was the blowback for Ron Meyer? This past summer, even with movie theaters closed, this was not a picture that Universal wanted the public to see. One look at this sloppy script, with the company’s legendary vice chairman in a supporting role, surely caused NBCUniversal chairman Jeff Shell to part ways with Meyer after the two met for lunch at Universal Studios’ CityWalk on August 13. Meyer announced his resignation five days later.
On August 24, the alleged extortion aspect of the case was brought to the attention of the FBI by the crusading activist R.J. Cipriani, who tweets under the handle @Robinhood702. Says Cipriani, “I reached out to my FBI connections…[and they are] taking this very seriously.” (The FBI neither confirms nor denies that it is investigating.)
In the wake of scarred reputations and aborted careers, will any of the figures involved be able to thrive in this town again?
The fates of Meyer, Tsujihara, and Ratner seem uncertain, although many expect Meyer to rise again into a new position of power. Avi Lerner is developing another feature film in the Expendables franchise. And last month, James Packer reportedly testified remotely from his $200 million superyacht as part of an Australian court hearing that is looking into dealings involving casinos in which he is heavily invested.
As for Charlotte Kirk and Joshua Newton, as this article was going to press, an arbitrator’s ruling from last summer was released. It stated that once the various confidentiality agreements went into effect, Newton and Kirk threatened to breach them unless they were paid additional monies and that Newton “threatened to file a lawsuit that would include Confidential Information.”
“If proved, such conduct would also support a claim of civil extortion,” the arbitrator wrote. Kirk and Newton had claimed they had “rescinded” the agreements, but neither had returned the payments they had received.
In the meantime, Kirk’s professional career goes on. She has by her side Neil Marshall, who publicly responded to the wave of press over the alleged extortion plot as “a load of old bollocks.”
“What we have here is a witch hunt, plain and simple, perpetrated by overprivileged men in positions of power, aided by friends of equal standing and lack of ethics,” he said, “carried out against the woman I love, my fiancée, Charlotte Kirk.”
But she is at long last a star. On October 6, the U.S. premiere of Marshall’s film The Reckoning, cowritten by and starring Charlotte Kirk, was held, with coronavirus precautions in place, at the Mission Tiki Drive-in Theater in Los Angeles.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the football team with which Steve Tisch is affiliated. It is the New York Giants, not the New York Jets.
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