A few days before we are due to meet, Dorothy Carvello emails from New York to say she’ll be bringing the silver silk shirt Michael Hutchence gave her and will be accompanied by one of her attorneys, Camille Vasquez.
“She’s from the Johnny Depp trial,” Carvello adds.
A little frantic googling and double-checking follows.
That Camille Vasquez?
Yes, the Camille Vasquez. The white-suited lawyer whose methodical, ruthless cross-examination of Amber Heard decimated the actress’s case and secured courtroom victory for Depp in the most talked about trial of 2022. The woman who was propelled overnight to celebrity status, TikTok stardom and Depphead adulation. And who inevitably became the focus of multiple (wholly inaccurate) stories of romantic links to her actor client.
Having successfully represented Depp (whose victory is widely seen as a setback for the #MeToo cause), Vasquez is now acting for Carvello (a woman intent on igniting the music industry’s #MeToo moment). The case centres on Carvello’s three years at Atlantic Records in the late Eighties, a workplace she describes as “a circus mixed with an orgy — if personnel had actually enforced the rules, everyone in the building would have been fired by lunch”.
● Johnny Depp’s lawyer, Camille Vasquez, takes starring role
“The music business has had this attitude that they are excused from proper behaviour because the culture is sex, drugs and rock’n’roll,” says Carvello. “The expression was coined by a bunch of executives so they could give themselves a pass.”
I meet Carvello and Vasquez at the Langham hotel in the West End where they are sipping from oversized cups of cappuccino. Carvello, 60, is Italian-American, blonde and direct — “like a battering ram”. She’s old-school Brooklyn and jokes her broad accent no longer exists since the hipster invasion. Vasquez, 38, is from a Hispanic background — Cuban mother, Colombian father — in southern California, and despite her reputation as a legal rottweiler is altogether more measured, reserved and controlled than her new client.
“Camille’s very low-key — nothing like I thought she would be,” laughs Carvello.
As Carvello and I talk Vasquez is quietly doing that multitasking thing that annoyingly capable people really can do — tapping her phone, dealing with important emails while simultaneously monitoring her client’s every word. There is the occasional raised eyebrow as she ponders whether Carvello has spoken out of turn, like when she describes Kentucky as “serial killer country”.
Vasquez knows that since the Depp case everything she does becomes instantly high profile. “People are watching the cases I take on, the causes that are important to me, and I take that really seriously, especially being a woman in this industry. I’m an advocate for people I believe in whose stories need to be told in a court of law. Johnny Depp’s story needed to be told. Dorothy’s story needs to be told.”
CARVELLO FIRST TOLD THAT STORY in her 2018 book, Anything for a Hit, which took her a decade to write and get published as she recovered from her 20-year ordeal working in the music industry.
Her career began in 1987 when, aged 24, she was hired as secretary to Ahmet Ertegun, the co-founder and president of Atlantic Records and, according to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (which he helped establish), “one of the most significant figures in the modern recording industry”. He developed talents such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. He signed Led Zeppelin, snapped up Crosby Stills & Nash (then added Neil Young) and negotiated personally with Mick Jagger to arrange distribution of the Rolling Stones output.
When Carvello arrived in the executive wing of Atlantic’s offices in Rockefeller Plaza, Ertegun, then 63, was less and less interested in his business (now owned by Warner Music Group) and more and more interested in having a wild time.
Her first encounter with him came later that first week when she was ordered to get his signature on some papers. “I found Ahmet in the control room, trousers and underwear down to the floor, getting a blow job… He signed them, mid-blow job, without a word.”
It was her introduction to the “freak show” workplace where there seemed to be no rules and no boundaries, with debauchery dictated from the very top.
“He’d been the greatest talent finder in the business but he had burnt out. Now he just wanted to play,” Carvello wrote. “He needed an entire entourage to help him function — enablers, drug dealers, hookers, groupies, hangers-on and, yes, his secretary.” He rarely graced the office before 3pm, staying until around 9pm, when he went out “partying”.
Ertegun’s constitution was something of a marvel. “His nightly routine was 14 vodka tonics, 4 lines of coke and 2 joints. This usually came after smoking several joints in the Atlantic bathroom and having a few drinks in his office during the day.” At Atlantic, Carvello says, “Blackmail was as normal as breakfast,” and there was a “safe full of cash” in Ertegun’s office for paying off women who would be made to sign secrecy agreements.
Other senior figures followed the president’s lead. “Some executives watched pornography behind closed doors. They also walked around with pornographic magazines hidden in manila envelopes and they’d read them in meetings.” Carvello remembers walking into one “meeting” where two executives and a major artist were watching a Japanese porn movie and eating a Chinese takeaway.
“Another promotion executive decorated his office with dildos, S&M harnesses and ball gags, masks, lube and a cat-o’-nine-tails whip.”
As an ambitious twentysomething in her first real job, Carvello admits she did not really know how to react. Were all offices like this? Did she simply have to grit her teeth and bear it to get on?
In 1988 she was made an A&R (artists and repertoire) executive — the first woman in Atlantic’s history entrusted with developing new talent. But if anything, promotion made her more vulnerable to the abusive behaviour of the senior men on whom her career depended.
Carvello had scouted the band Skid Row and flew with Ertegun and another senior executive, Jason Flom, to Pennsylvania to see the band perform.
In her legal complaint, filed in the New York Supreme Court, she claims both at the concert and in the company helicopter, Ertegun groped and pawed her and violently tried to remove her underwear while, she alleges, Flom and other male executives “looked on and laughed”. The legal documents also accuse Doug Morris, who went on to become a senior executive in the three biggest record companies, of sexual assault, forcible kissing and unwanted touching, which he has denied.
At another Skid Row concert, where the band played badly, Ertegun — “Cocaine and booze fuelling his rage” — allegedly grabbed her arm, lifted it and, she says, smashed it down hard on a table.
“This is what you made me spend my f***ing money on?” she says he growled at her.
In acute pain, the next day Carvello went to see her doctor, who x-rayed her arm and found a hairline fracture. Instead of complaining, she covered up the bruising with long sleeves.
She says she eventually snapped in 1990 when Flom, then her boss as head of A&R, allegedly called to her in a crowded meeting room, “Honey, come and sit on my lap.” She says he was smoking a cigar and the other men in the room were laughing as he called out again for her to sit on his lap. “It’s a horrible thing when somebody is doing something to you and they’re laughing at you. It is so dehumanising and it diminished all the work I did. It was the last straw after years of shit from these characters who have everything but that isn’t enough for them – they just have to f***ing cut you down to nothing. And I didn’t want to feel like nothing. I wanted to be taken seriously.”
Carvello stormed from the meeting, burst into tears, then went to HR to make a formal complaint. In a memo to Morris, who was Flom’s superior, she wrote, “I’m tired of this juvenile behaviour by all the men at Atlantic Records. It’s a free-for-all in this place. Please let me know what you intend to do about it.”
She found out what they intended to do the following day, when Ertegun fired her for questioning Morris and Flom’s authority. “You leave me no choice,” Ertegun told her.
“I WAS SO NAIVE,” Carvello tells me. “I thought everything was going to be straightened out and I’d get respect — instead, I was out. I was stunned.” Her career never recovered. Although she would work in the business for another 16 years, she only had one other staff position – and that for just six months. “My reputation became, ‘Oh, she can’t keep a job. She’s crazy. She complained. She’s a troublemaker.’ People said, ‘You complained about sexual harassment,’ as if I’d done the wrong thing.”
The legal filings specifically accuse Morris of using “his uniquely powerful position in the music industry to crush Ms Carvello”.
She stubbornly stayed in the industry because she wanted to prove Ertegun and his cronies wrong. Her attitude was, “Why should I leave?” She wanted to succeed and she loved the business.
Coming from a tough working-class background with a father who was a gambling addict, the world of rock’n’roll was impossibly glamorous and she could scarcely believe she was part of it. “I felt conflicted. I saw many women get used like Kleenex – artists, employees, groupies — and I didn’t like it. But that was the price of entry.
“I was living my dream, answering phone calls all day from the likes of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and Mick Jagger and sometimes partying with them all night.”
There was also Michael Hutchence, whose silver shirt — given to her by the INXS singer in 1991 — is one of her cherished possessions. Carvello and Hutchence had “an on-off thing” that sparked in a Wisconsin hotel room in the summer of 1988 and burnt for years. “We banged all over the room. We went through the first eight positions of the Kama Sutra like it was nothing,” she writes. “It was like I’d been driving around in a run-down Ford Pinto my whole life and all of a sudden I jumped in a Ferrari and went from 0 to 150. I understood why the man got applause on stage and off.”
Carvello and Hutchence remained close until his death in 1997 with a relationship based on “friendship and mutual respect”.
“Not only did he defend me and stick up for me, he warned me about Atlantic Records, that it was an unfit place for a woman to work,” Carvello remembers. “One of his managers was a woman and he used to warn her to stay away from some of the guys at Atlantic. For a rock star of that stature to make comments like that was funny. Everyone thinks the bands do all the bad behaviour, but he thought it was a crazy place.”
LIKE MANY ABUSE SURVIVORS, it took Carvello a long time — and thousands of dollars’ worth of therapy — to process and admit to herself what had happened. She now understands the complexity of her personal relationship with Ertegun, whom she last saw in 2006, not long before he died after falling over and banging his head at a Rolling Stones concert.
“My own f***ed-upness needed his approval — everything was about his approval,” she says. “You don’t realise it at the time, but it really took a toll on my self-esteem — my life was totally handed over, like in a cult, to these men. He’d give you a whole day of brutalisation and abuse, then he would look up and say, ‘Would you like to come to see the Who tonight? They’re performing for me privately.’ And then it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I did good.’ ”
Carvello had kept a journal of her time at Atlantic, in part because friends didn’t believe her when she told them stories of what happened in the office. Yet her book didn’t flow easily. First she had to deal with her complicity in what happened to her and other women. She likens the Atlantic years to Stockholm syndrome, where hostages form a bond with their captors.
“I had to tell the truth about myself — how I wanted and needed that approval, and I understand that now about myself. For my own emotional stability — I needed that family. Even though it’s an abusive family, it’s still a family. It’s still somebody to validate you.”
It proved hard to find a publisher until David Vigliano came on board as her agent with the words, “I know these assholes.”
Published in 2018 — the year before the Harvey Weinstein scandal — the book caused ripples in the industry but no major explosion. Carvello says lots of women got in touch, artists and employees, whose experiences chimed with her own.
“There was no #MeToo moment in the music industry; there’s been no internal clean-up. I’ve heard from many women, but none of them want to come forward. Many of them are under nondisclosure agreements [NDAs].
“It’s not just about me. It’s about all the women that are under NDAs, who are silenced and cannot tell their stories, the ones that want to come forward but are too scared.”
The book named names and made serious allegations, but no one sued. Indeed, its lurid tales might have disappeared without trace by now had it not been for a groundbreaking piece of legislation passed in New York state.
On May 24 last year, Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Adult Survivors Act, creating a one-year “look-back window” to allow adult survivors to sue their abusers regardless of when the abuse occurred.
The window opened in November and to date 57 cases, covering 85 plaintiffs, have been filed with courts. Significantly, at least one other case features allegations of sexual abuse at Atlantic Records: Jan Roeg, a former music manager at the label, claims she was sexually assaulted multiple times by Ertegun and that the company covered up his offending.
Carvello filed her case — naming the defendants as Atlantic, Warner Music Group, Ertegun’s estate, Morris and Flom — in December, but only after she had assembled a hefty legal team. That process began through a lawyer acquaintance, Anne Andrews, based in California. The renowned civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who represented the family of George Floyd, also came on board. And the global firm Brown Rudnick signed up. This is where Vasquez, a partner there, comes in. In 2021 and 2022 she featured on the Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch list. Following her cross-examination of Heard, she is now one of the most sought after trial attorneys in America.
Vasquez tells me she and her team prepared intensively for that courtroom moment, knowing that was their “one shot” at winning the case for Depp. “My mom, who probably knows me better than anyone — better than I know myself — was watching and she said to me, many months later, ‘You know when you started it, I could tell you were really nervous. But when you got through the first section and you lasered in, I knew you had it.’ And she’s right. I could hear my voice quivering a bit at the very beginning. I think it was the pressure – we knew we had one shot at this.”
Vasquez has been a practising attorney for 13 years and sees no contradiction in moving from representing Depp to representing Carvello. “I believed in Mr Depp; I believed in his innocence. We proved that. We also proved that he was actually the victim of domestic abuse. Domestic violence doesn’t have a gender; abuse victims don’t have genders. In this case, I believe Dorothy Carvello.”
It is not enough, she says, for people to cry #MeToo. Cases cannot be decided, and lives fundamentally changed, on the basis of allegations alone. “There needs to be an investigation, I think that’s what #MeToo calls for. You can’t be guilty by accusation. There needs to be a process by which victims and the accused have a right to have the evidence evaluated by a jury of their peers and their stories told. That’s what it was calling for — accountability, investigations, justice… Mr Depp vehemently denied that he abused Miss Heard or any woman for that matter, anyone except himself as he has so poignantly described. The jury agreed.”
Vasquez tells me the celebrity status bestowed on her since the Depp case makes her uneasy. “When you lose anonymity you realise how precious it actually is,” she says. “To some extent the loss of my anonymity is nothing compared with the artists that Dorothy worked with or the celebrity clients that I represent. Johnny said to me one time, ‘I live my life behind windows — car windows, train windows, plane windows.’ And that can be really traumatic for a human being to go through, especially if you didn’t seek it out.”
The romance rumours surrounding her and Depp were “not true”, but it was “still traumatic that people feel they have carte blanche to comment on who you’re dating or not dating. Paparazzi outside hotels? I find it just strange, really bizarre. I’ve found it overwhelming what has happened to my life, but I also realise that with great privilege comes great responsibility and I do believe that.
“The values of our clients are imposed on us — we are representatives of them. So I take that seriously when I’m evaluating whom I represent and whether I believe in them, believe their story and believe it should be told in a court of law.”
CARVELLO’S AIM, WITH THE HELP OF VASQUEZ, is to secure “a trial by jury and an undetermined amount of monetary damages”. They believe Carvello’s case could be a breakthrough moment for the music industry. In addition to her litigation in New York, Carvello is engaging in “shareholder activism” to demand access to Warner Music’s accounts and financial records to determine whether the company is “doing enough to investigate and act upon allegations of sexual misconduct”. Her request includes demands for copies of sexual misconduct complaints, settlement agreements and NDAs, investigation reports and board minutes related to sexual misconduct.
Carvello has also made a specific request for “all documents and communications related to allegations of sexual misconduct” made by Lily Allen. The British singer alleged in her autobiography in 2018 she was sexually assaulted by a senior figure who is still working in the industry.
Speaking to The Times two weeks ago, Allen said she was concentrating on acting and was no longer working in the music business. “I try not to think about it too much because I just get so irate and angry. It’s a patriarchal industry. It’s misogynistic and awful.”
A defence statement from Warner and Atlantic calls for Carvello’s case to be dismissed by the New York courts. A company spokesperson said, “We are absolutely committed to providing a safe, equitable and inclusive working environment. We take any allegations of misconduct seriously and are consistently working toward eliminating all forms of discrimination and harassment.”
Lawyers for Ertegun’s widow Mica, now 96, say she cannot be held responsible for the alleged actions of her husband so long after his death. They also call for the action to be dismissed, as has John Carman, Morris’s lawyer. He said, “Mr Morris denies the plaintiff’s claims and trusts the courts to reject them.”
Flom currently heads Lava Records and its website calls him “a leading philanthropist and expert on criminal justice issues” who “serves on the boards of numerous criminal justice reform organisations”. In response to requests for comment, his spokesperson said she had not been able to reach anyone.
Carvello, meanwhile, firmly believes her day in court will come. “Since the publication of my book, I have heard from women who have told me stories about men who are currently involved in the business,” she says. “There may not be dildos in the office like at Atlantic but we have men still abusing power over women at work in their companies.
“What’s going to change things is a trial, and a trial in New York — the city that put Harvey Weinstein in prison, the city that indicted Donald Trump.” She is confident a jury of regular New Yorkers – “People who know and call bullshit when they see it” — will believe her story. “I’m in this for the long haul – when someone takes away your passion and the thing that you love, when you know of all the people who have been hurt and cast out and you see these misdeeds… I wanna take this all the way. I’ll take my chances.”
Carvello’s chances have surely improved by having the softly spoken legal assassin Vasquez on her team.
“The great thing about having Camille is, she’s younger than me, she’s a different generation,” she says. “The way these old, white male cultures are going to relate to her under cross-examination… Well, it’s gonna be extremely interesting.”
Shoot credits
Styling Hannah Rogers. Hair Tori Hutchinson using Moroccanoil. Make-up Aga Dobosz at Carol Hayes Management using YSL Beauty. Camille wears alexandermcqueen.com. Dorothy Carvello wears aliceandolivia.com
