Ex-NYPD detective John Connolly and longtime partner Dorothy Carvello in New York City in 2005. Patrick McMullan via Getty Images We told you yesterday that famed Hollywood reporter John Connolly’s archive is being shopped, sending shivers through a town all too familiar with the late journo’s exposés. Connolly’s longtime partner, music industry veteran and author Dorothy Carvello, told Page Six Hollywood exclusively that she is shopping his reporting and intellectual property that covered all manner of Tinseltown maleficence and had engaged an unnamed lawyer.
We’ve learned that the lawyer who is representing Carvello is none other than Bryan Freedman. The legal eagle seems to be involved with every high-profile matter of the moment, including the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni settlement that went from civil to frosty, as well as a rift involving “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyl Alfonsi, who is being shown the door by CBS News topper Bari Weiss at the end of the month when her contract expires. (Freedman reps Baldoni and Alfonsi in those respective cases.)
The Hollywood power lawyer says there’s plenty to dig into with Connolly’s cache.
“We will investigate the vast IP and make sure that if there were attempts to silence people that we will do everything in our power to make sure that those survivors, whether under NDAs or not, will no longer live in fear and be given their voices back,” Freedman says.
Until the time of his death in 2022, Connolly was known for taking on the rich and powerful, both in the industry and far beyond, including Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Michael Jackson, Bryan Singer and Steven Seagal.
The one-time NYPD cop also broke major ground in the pages of Spy, Vanity Fair, Premiere and New York magazine in shining a light on the fixers and massagers like Anthony Pellicano and Heidi Fleiss who kept the town’s miscreants out of the headlines. He also wrote a takedown of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 2001 Premiere story piece, “Arnold the Barbarian,” which claimed the “Terminator” star, at the height of his A-list prowess, groped women, engaged in extramarital affairs and used steroids. The story prompted multiple actresses to write to Connolly and Premiere and voice their disgust in his targeting their friend. (Years later, Schwarzenegger admitted to groping, affairs and steroid use.)
For her part, Carvello has nicknamed Freedman “The Sheriff” and insists that others refer to him thusly. “The Hollywood Reporter called him The Dark Knight. That’s a vigilante,” she says of the magazine’s cover story on Freedman. “The Sheriff rides in and restores law and order.”
