A top legal eagle, Jose Baez, is suing Rose McGowan for suggesting that he was “bought off” by Harvey Weinstein. Baez was retained by McGowan in a 2017 case in Virginia, and later served on the legal defense team of Weinstein, whom McGowan has accused of sexual abuse.
Baez claims McGowan — who was charged in 2017, and last year pleaded no contest to misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance — defamed him in comments on Twitter and in the Daily Beast, the New York Times and on CNN. Last year, McGowan told the Daily Beast of Baez being on her legal team and then Weinstein’s: “This is a major conflict of interest, but I knew there was shadiness going on behind the scenes … This is why my case didn’t go to trial — my instinct was my lawyers had been bought off.” She told the Times, “Baez did nothing for my case and now I know why. A truly terrible human and a disgrace of a lawyer.”
In court papers, Baez claims his firm never handled McGowan’s plea negotiations and was just on hand if the case went to trial. He says his firm repped Weinstein “after McGowan’s criminal case ended,” and he “obtained an opinion from an ethics attorney” before repping Weinstein.
The suit, filed in Illinois, alleges: “McGowan knew that her criminal conviction harmed her reputation and her ability to sell her new book, ‘Brave.’ As a result, McGowan and her attorneys … concocted a malicious scheme to salvage McGowan’s reputation at the expense of the reputation of Baez.” The suit claims, “Defendants … have gone so far as to astonishingly contend that Weinstein somehow planted the … cocaine in McGowan’s wallet … and that McGowan should thus never have [pleaded] guilty.”
Baez is being repped by fellow power lawyer Joe Tacopina. Julie B. Porter of Salvatore Prescott & Porter, which was named in the case, told us on Tuesday, “Not having seen the entire complaint, we decline to comment at this time.”
A rep for McGowan could not be immediately reached.