Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey provided the FBI with two accounts about his ties to indicted Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano, his attorneys said.
Pellicano is accused of illegally wiretapping people, including Hollywood stars such as Sylvester Stallone, that he was hired to investigate. He allegedly used the information for threats, blackmail and to help clients gain advantages in legal disputes. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Grey attorney Carl Moor said his client is only a witness in the case against Pellicano.
“He has been repeatedly told he is not even a subject, much less a target, of this investigation,” Moor said in response to a Friday report about the accounts in The New York Times.
Grey called Pellicano a “colorful character” during the first interview and more fully described his relationship with him in the second, Moor said. The second interview was broader in scope because Grey waived his attorney-client privilege and spoke freely about hiring Pellicano to work on litigation he was involved in, his attorneys said.
The Times, quoting summaries of FBI interviews, also reported that Michael Ovitz, the former head of the Creative Artists Agency and one-time Walt Disney Company president, paid Pellicano for information on 15 to 20 people.
Among them were Bernard Weinraub, then a New York Times reporter who was writing about the demise of an Ovitz company, and Anita Busch, a freelance reporter who wrote with Weinraub.
Bart Williams, an Ovitz attorney, disputed the report, saying his client used Pellicano through his attorneys in three lawsuits and stressed that Ovitz is only a witness in the case.
“If information was gathered on people other than people in litigation, that information was collected without (Ovitz’s) knowledge,” Williams said.