Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

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Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 11, 2017 8:37 am

From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories

Multiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.

Ronan Farrow
Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The English Patient,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God.
For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would “crush” her. “I know he has crushed a lot of people before,” Argento said. “That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old; some of them are older—has never come out.”
Last week, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, a story that led to the resignation of four members of his company’s all-male board, and to Weinstein’s firing from the company.
The story, however, is more complex, and there is more to know and to understand. In the course of a ten-month investigation, I was told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Times’ revelations, and also include far more serious claims.
Three women—among them Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans—told me that Weinstein raped them, allegations that include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex. Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015 and made public here for the first time, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.” Four of the women I interviewed cited encounters in which Weinstein exposed himself or masturbated in front of them.
Weinstein admits to groping a woman, in a recording secretly captured during an N.Y.P.D. sting operation.

Sixteen former and current executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies told me that they witnessed or had knowledge of unwanted sexual advances and touching at events associated with Weinstein’s films and in the workplace. They and others describe a pattern of professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances on young actresses and models. All sixteen said that the behavior was widely known within both Miramax and the Weinstein Company. Messages sent by Irwin Reiter, a senior company executive, to Emily Nestor, one of the women who alleged that she was harassed at the company, described the “mistreatment of women” as a serial problem that the Weinstein Company was struggling with in recent years. Other employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout the companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way. Some employees said that they were enlisted in subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. A female executive with the company described how Weinstein assistants and others served as a “honeypot”—they would initially join a meeting, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman.
Virtually all of the people I spoke with told me that they were frightened of retaliation. “If Harvey were to discover my identity, I’m worried that he could ruin my life,” one former employee told me. Many said that they had seen Weinstein’s associates confront and intimidate those who crossed him, and feared that they would be similarly targeted. Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them. Multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted. Several pointed to Gutierrez’s case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages. (In the taped conversation with Gutierrez, Weinstein asks her to join him for “five minutes,” and warns, “Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.”)
Several former employees told me that they were speaking about Weinstein’s alleged behavior now because they hoped to protect women in the future. “This wasn’t a one-off. This wasn’t a period of time,” an executive who worked for Weinstein for many years told me. “This was ongoing predatory behavior towards women—whether they consented or not.”
It’s likely that women have recently felt increasingly emboldened to talk about their experiences because of the way the world has changed regarding issues of sex and power. These disclosures follow in the wake of stories alleging sexual misconduct by public figures, including Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, a Bill Cosby, and Donald Trump. In October, 2016, a month before the election, a tape emerged of Trump telling a celebrity-news reporter, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” This past April, O’Reilly, a host at Fox News, was forced to resign after Fox was discovered to have paid five women millions of dollars in exchange for silence about their accusations of sexual harassment. Ailes, the former head of Fox News, resigned last July, after he was accused of sexual harassment. Cosby went on trial this summer, charged with drugging and sexually assaulting a woman. The trial ended with a hung jury.
On October 5th, in an initial effort at damage control, Weinstein responded to the Times piece by issuing a statement partly acknowledging what he had done, saying, “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it.” In an interview with the New York Post, he said, “I’ve got to deal with my personality, I’ve got to work on my temper, I have got to dig deep. I know a lot of people would like me to go into a facility, and I may well just do that—I will go anywhere I can learn more about myself.” Weinstein went on, “In the past I used to compliment people, and some took it as me being sexual, I won’t do that again.” In his statement to the Times, Weinstein claimed that he would “channel that anger” into a fight against the leadership of the National Rifle Association. He also said that it was not “coincidental” that he was organizing a foundation for women directors at the University of Southern California. “It will be named after my mom and I won’t disappoint her.”
Sallie Hofmeister, a spokesperson for Weinstein, issued a statement in response to the allegations in this article. It reads in full: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances. Mr. Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr. Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual. Mr. Weinstein has begun counseling, has listened to the community and is pursuing a better path. Mr. Weinstein is hoping that, if he makes enough progress, he will be given a second chance.”
While Weinstein and his representatives have said that the incidents were consensual, and were not widespread or severe, the women I spoke to tell a very different story.
2.

Lucia Stoller, now Lucia Evans, was approached by Weinstein at Cipriani Upstairs, a club in New York, in 2004, the summer before her senior year at Middlebury College. Evans wanted to be an actress, and although she had heard rumors about Weinstein she let him have her number. Weinstein began calling her late at night, or having an assistant call her, asking to meet. She declined, but said that she would do readings during the day for a casting executive. Before long, an assistant called to set up a daytime meeting at the Miramax office, in Tribeca, first with Weinstein and then with a casting executive, who was a woman. “I was, like, ‘Oh, a woman, great, I feel safe,’ ” Evans said.
When Evans arrived for the meeting, the building was full of people. She was led to an office with exercise equipment and takeout boxes on the floor, where she met with Weinstein alone. Evans said that she found him frightening. “The type of control he exerted, it was very real,” she told me. “Even just his presence was intimidating.”
In the meeting, Evans recalled, “he immediately was simultaneously flattering me and demeaning me and making me feel bad about myself.” Weinstein told her that she’d “be great in ‘Project Runway’ ”—the show, which Weinstein helped produce, premièred later that year—but only if she lost weight. He also told her about two scripts, a horror movie and a teen love story, and said one of his associates would discuss them with her.
“At that point, after that, is when he assaulted me,” Evans said. “He forced me to perform oral sex on him.” As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. “I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t,’ ” she said. “I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “He’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” At a certain point, she said, “I just sort of gave up. That’s the most horrible part of it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it’s their fault.”
Weinstein appeared to find the encounter unremarkable. “It was like it was just another day for him,” Evans said. “It was no emotion.” Afterward, she said, he acted as if nothing had happened. She wondered how Weinstein’s staff could not know what was going on.
After the encounter, she met with the female casting executive, who sent her the scripts, and also came to one of her acting-class readings a few weeks later. (Evans does not believe that the executive was aware of Weinstein’s behavior.) Weinstein, Evans said, began calling her again late at night. Evans told me that the entire sequence of events had a routine quality. “It feels like a very streamlined process,” she said. “Female casting director, Harvey wants to meet. Everything was designed to make me feel comfortable before it happened. And then the shame in what happened was also designed to keep me quiet.”
Evans said that, after the incident, “I just put it in a part of my brain and closed the door.” She continued to blame herself for not fighting harder. “It was always my fault for not stopping him,” she said. “I had an eating problem for years. I was disgusted with myself. It’s funny, all these unrelated things I did to hurt myself because of this one thing.” Evans told friends some of what had happened, but felt largely unable to talk about it. “I ruined several really good relationships because of this. My schoolwork definitely suffered, and my roommates told me to go to a therapist because they thought I was going to kill myself.”
In the years that followed, Evans encountered Weinstein occasionally. Once, while she was walking her dog in Greenwich Village, she saw him getting into a car. “I very clearly saw him. I made eye contact,” she said. “I remember getting chills down my spine just looking at him. I was so horrified. I have nightmares about him to this day.”
3.

Asia Argento, an actress born in Rome, played the role of a glamorous thief named Beatrice in the crime drama “B. Monkey,” which was released in the U.S. in 1999. The distributor was Miramax. In a series of long and often emotional interviews, Argento told me that Weinstein assaulted her while they worked together.
At the time, Argento was twenty-one and a rising actress who had twice won the Italian equivalent of the Oscar. Argento said that, in 1997, one of Weinstein’s producers invited her to what she understood to be a party thrown by Miramax at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riviera. Argento felt professionally obliged to attend. When the producer led her upstairs that evening, she said, there was no party—only a hotel room, empty but for Weinstein: “I’m, like, ‘Where is the fucking party?’ ” She recalled the producer telling her, “Oh, we got here too early,” before he left her alone with Weinstein. (The producer denies bringing Argento to the room that night.) At first, Weinstein was solicitous, praising her work. Then he left the room. When he returned, he was wearing a bathrobe and holding a bottle of lotion. “He asks me to give a massage. I was, like, ‘Look, man, I am no fucking fool,’ ” Argento said. “But, looking back, I am a fucking fool. And I am still trying to come to grips with what happened.”
Argento said that, after she reluctantly agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. Weinstein “terrified me, and he was so big,” she said. “It wouldn’t stop. It was a nightmare.”
At some point, Argento said, she stopped saying no and feigned enjoyment, because she thought it was the only way the assault would end. “I was not willing,” she told me. “I said, ‘No, no, no.’ . . . It’s twisted. A big fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale.” Argento, who insisted that she wanted to tell her story in all its complexity, said that she didn’t physically fight him off, something that has prompted years of guilt.
“The thing with being a victim is I felt responsible,” she said. “Because, if I were a strong woman, I would have kicked him in the balls and run away. But I didn’t. And so I felt responsible.” She described the incident as a “horrible trauma.” Decades later, she said, oral sex is still ruined for her. “I’ve been damaged,” she told me. “Just talking to you about it, my whole body is shaking.”
Argento recalled sitting on the bed after the incident, her clothes “in shambles,” her makeup smeared. She said that she told Weinstein, “I am not a whore,” and that he began laughing. He said he’d put the phrase on a T-shirt. Afterward, Argento said, “He kept contacting me.” For a few months, Weinstein seemed obsessed, offering her expensive gifts.
What complicates the story, Argento readily allowed, is that she eventually yielded to Weinstein’s further advances and even grew close to him. Weinstein dined with her, and introduced her to his mother. Argento told me, “He made it sound like he was my friend and he really appreciated me.” She said that she had consensual sexual relations with him multiple times over the course of the next five years, though she described the encounters as one-sided and “onanistic.” The first occasion, several months after the alleged assault, came before the release of “B. Monkey.” “I felt I had to,” she said. “Because I had the movie coming out and I didn’t want to anger him.” She believed that Weinstein would ruin her career if she didn’t comply. Years later, when she was a single mother dealing with childcare, Weinstein offered to pay for a nanny. She said that she felt “obliged” to submit to his sexual advances.
Argento said that she knew this contact would be used to attack the credibility of her allegation. In part, she said, the initial assault made her feel overpowered each time she encountered Weinstein, even years later. “Just his body, his presence, his face, bring me back to the little girl that I was when I was twenty-one,” she told me. “When I see him, it makes me feel little and stupid and weak.” She broke down as she struggled to explain. “After the rape, he won,” she said.
In 2000, Argento released “Scarlet Diva,” a movie that she wrote and directed. In the film, a heavyset producer corners the character of Anna, who is played by Argento, in a hotel room, asks her for a massage, and tries to assault her. After the movie came out, women began approaching Argento, saying that they recognized Weinstein’s behavior in the portrayal. “People would ask me about him because of the scene in the movie,” she said. Some recounted similar details to her: meetings and professional events moved to hotel rooms, bathrobes and massage requests, and, in one other case, forced oral sex.
Weinstein, according to Argento, saw the film after it was released in the U.S., and apparently recognized himself. “Ha, ha, very funny,” Argento remembered him saying to her. But he also said that he was “sorry for whatever happened.” The movie’s most significant departure from the real-life incident, Argento told me, was how the hotel-room scene ended. “In the movie I wrote,” she said, “I ran away.”
Other women were too afraid to allow me to use their names, but their stories are uncannily similar to these allegations. One, a woman who worked with Weinstein, explained her reluctance to be identified. “He drags your name through the mud, and he’ll come after you hard with his legal team.”
Like other women in this article, she said that Weinstein brought her to a hotel room under a professional pretext, changed into a bathrobe, and “forced himself on me sexually.” She said no, repeatedly and clearly. Afterward, she experienced “horror, disbelief, and shame,” and considered going to the police. “I thought it would be a ‘He said, she said,’ and I thought about how impressive his legal team is, and I thought about how much I would lose, and I decided to just move forward,” she said. The woman continued to have professional contact with Weinstein after the alleged rape, and acknowledged that subsequent communications between them might suggest a normal working relationship. “I was in a vulnerable position and I needed my job,” she told me. “It just increases the shame and the guilt.”
4.

Mira Sorvino, who starred in several of Weinstein’s films, told me that he sexually harassed her and tried to pressure her into a physical relationship while they worked together. She said that, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 1995, she found herself in a hotel room with Weinstein, who produced the movie she was there to promote, “Mighty Aphrodite,” for which she later won an Academy Award. “He started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable, and then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around,” she recalled. She scrambled for ways to ward him off, telling him it was against her religion to date married men. (At the time, Weinstein was married to Eve Chilton, a former assistant.) Then she left the room.
A few weeks later, in New York City, her phone rang after midnight. It was Weinstein, saying that he had new marketing ideas for the film and asking to meet. Sorvino offered to meet him at an all-night diner, but he told her he was coming over to her apartment and hung up. “I freaked out,” she told me. She called a friend and asked him to come over and pose as her boyfriend. The friend hadn’t arrived by the time Weinstein rang her doorbell. “Harvey had managed to bypass my doorman,” she said. “I opened the door terrified, brandishing my twenty-pound Chihuahua mix in front of me, as though that would do any good.” When she told Weinstein that her new boyfriend was on his way, Weinstein became dejected and left.
Sorvino said that she struggled for years with whether to come forward with her story, partly because she was aware that it was mild compared to the experiences of other women, including another actress she spoke to at the time. (That actress told me that she locked herself in a hotel bathroom to escape Weinstein, and that he masturbated in front of her. She said it was “a classic case” of “someone not understanding the word ‘no’. . . I must have said no a thousand times.”) The fact that Weinstein was so instrumental to Sorvino’s success also made her hesitate: “I have great respect for Harvey as an artist, and owe him and his brother a debt of gratitude for the early success in my career, including the Oscar.” She had professional contact with Weinstein for years after the incident, and remains close friends with his brother and business partner, Bob Weinstein. (She said that she never told Bob about his brother’s behavior.)
Sorvino said that she felt afraid and intimidated, and that the incidents had a significant impact on her. When she told a female employee at Miramax about the harassment, the woman’s reaction “was shock and horror that I had mentioned it.” Sorvino appeared in a few more of Weinstein’s films afterward, but felt that saying no to Weinstein and reporting the harassment had ultimately hurt her career. She said, “There may have been other factors, but I definitely felt iced out and that my rejection of Harvey had something to do with it.”
5.

In March, 2015, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who was once a finalist in the Miss Italy contest, met Harvey Weinstein at a reception for “New York Spring Spectacular,” a show that he was producing at Radio City Music Hall. Weinstein introduced himself to Gutierrez, who was twenty-two, remarking repeatedly that she looked like the actress Mila Kunis.
Following the event, Gutierrez’s agency e-mailed to say that Weinstein wanted to set up a business meeting as soon as possible. Gutierrez arrived at Weinstein’s office in Tribeca early the next evening with her modelling portfolio. In the office, she sat with Weinstein on a couch to review the portfolio, and he began staring at her breasts, asking if they were real. Gutierrez later told officers of the New York Police Department Special Victims Division that Weinstein then lunged at her, groping her breasts and attempting to put a hand up her skirt while she protested. He finally backed off and told her that his assistant would give her tickets to “Finding Neverland,” a Broadway musical that he was producing. He said that he would meet her at the show that evening.
Instead of going to the show that night, Gutierrez went to the nearest N.Y.P.D. precinct station and reported the assault. Weinstein telephoned her later that evening, annoyed that she had failed to appear at the show. She picked up the call while sitting with investigators from the Special Victims Division, who listened in on the call and devised a plan: Gutierrez would agree to see the show the following day and then meet with Weinstein. She would wear a wire and attempt to extract a confession or incriminating statement.
The next day, Gutierrez met Weinstein at the bar of the Tribeca Grand Hotel. A team of undercover officers helped guide her through the interaction. On the recording, which I have heard in full, Weinstein lists actresses whose careers he has helped and offers Gutierrez the services of a dialect coach. Then he presses her to join him in his hotel room while he showers. Gutierrez says no repeatedly; Weinstein persists, and after a while she accedes to his demand to go upstairs. But, standing in the hallway outside his room, she refuses to go farther. In an increasingly tense exchange, he presses her to enter. Gutierrez says, “I don’t want to,” “I want to leave,” and “I want to go downstairs.” She asks him directly why he groped her breasts the day before.
“Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in,” Weinstein says. “I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”
“You’re used to that?” Gutierrez asks, sounding incredulous.
“Yes,” Weinstein says. He later adds, “I won’t do it again.”
After almost two minutes of back-and-forth in the hallway, Weinstein finally agrees to let her leave.
According to a law-enforcement source, Weinstein, if charged, would have most likely faced a count of sexual abuse in the third degree, a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of three months in jail. But, as the police investigation proceeded and the allegation was widely reported, details about Gutierrez’s past began to appear in the tabloids. In 2010, as a young contestant in a beauty pageant associated with the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Gutierrez had attended one of his infamous Bunga Bunga parties. She claimed that she had been unaware of the nature of the party before arriving, and eventually became a witness in a bribery case against Berlusconi, which is still ongoing. Gossip outlets also reported that Gutierrez, as a teen-ager, had made an allegation of sexual assault against an older Italian businessman but later declined to coöperate with prosecutors.
Two sources close to the police investigation said that they had no reason to doubt Gutierrez’s account of the incident. One of them, a police source, said that the department had collected more than enough evidence to prosecute Weinstein. But the other source said that Gutierrez’s statements about her past complicated the case for the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr. After two weeks of investigation, the District Attorney’s office decided not to file charges. The D.A.’s office declined to comment on this story but pointed me to its statement at the time: “This case was taken seriously from the outset, with a thorough investigation conducted by our Sex Crimes Unit. After analyzing the available evidence, including multiple interviews with both parties, a criminal charge is not supported.”
“We had the evidence,” the police source involved in the operation told me. “It’s a case that made me angrier than I thought possible, and I have been on the force a long time.”
Gutierrez, when contacted for this story, said that she was unable to discuss the incident. According to a source close to the matter, after the D.A.’s office decided not to press charges, Gutierrez, facing Weinstein’s legal team, and in return for a payment, signed a highly restrictive nondisclosure agreement with Weinstein, including an affidavit stating that the acts Weinstein admits to in the recording never happened.
Weinstein’s use of such settlements was reported by the Times and confirmed to me by numerous sources. A former employee with firsthand knowledge of two settlement negotiations that took place in London in the nineteen-nineties recalled, “It felt like David versus Goliath . . . the guy with all the money and the power flexing his muscle and quashing the allegations and getting rid of them.”
6.

Last week’s Times story disclosed a complaint to the Weinstein Company’s office of human resources, filed on behalf of a temporary front-desk assistant named Emily Nestor in December, 2014. Her own account of Weinstein’s conduct is being made public here for the first time. Nestor was twenty-five when she started the job, and, after finishing law school and starting business school, was considering a career in the movie industry. On her first day in the position, Nestor said, two employees told her that she was Weinstein’s “type” physically. When Weinstein arrived at the office, he made comments about her appearance, referring to her as “the pretty girl.” He asked how old she was, and then sent all of his assistants out of the room and made her write down her telephone number.
Weinstein told her to meet him for drinks that night. Nestor invented an excuse. When he insisted, she suggested an early-morning coffee the next day, assuming that he wouldn’t accept. He did, and told her to meet him at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills, where he was staying. Nestor said that she had talked with friends in the entertainment industry and employees in the company who had warned her about Weinstein’s reputation. “I dressed very frumpy,” she said.
Nestor told me that the meeting was the “most excruciating and uncomfortable hour of my life.” After Weinstein offered her career help, she said, he began to boast about his sexual liaisons with other women, including famous actresses. “He said, ‘You know, we could have a lot of fun,’ ” Nestor recalled. “I could put you in my London office, and you could work there and you could be my girlfriend.” She declined. He asked to hold her hand; she said no. In Nestor’s account of the exchange, Weinstein said, “Oh, the girls always say no. You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman. “It’s just a bizarre thing to be so proud of,” she said. “That you’ve never had to resort to doing that. It was just so far removed from reality and normal rules of consent.”
“Textbook sexual harassment” was how Nestor described Weinstein’s behavior to me. “It’s a pretty clear case of sexual harassment when your superior, the C.E.O., asks one of their inferiors, a temp, to have sex with them, essentially in exchange for mentorship.” She recalled refusing his advances at least a dozen times. “ ‘No’ did not mean ‘no’ to him,” she said. “I was very aware of how inappropriate it was. But I felt trapped.”
Throughout the breakfast, she said, Weinstein interrupted their conversation to yell into his cell phone, enraged over a spat that Amy Adams, a star in the Weinstein movie “Big Eyes,” was having in the press. Afterward, Weinstein told Nestor to keep an eye on the news cycle, which he promised would be spun in his favor. Later in the day, there were indeed negative news items about his opponents, and Weinstein stopped by Nestor’s desk to be sure that she’d seen them.
By that point, Nestor recalled, “I was very afraid of him. And I knew how well connected he was. And how if I pissed him off then I could never have a career in that industry.” Still, she told the friend who referred her to the job about the incident, and he alerted the company’s office of human resources, which contacted her. (The friend did not respond to a request for comment.) Nestor had a conversation with company officials about the matter but didn’t pursue it further: the officials said that Weinstein would be informed of anything she told them, a practice not uncommon in smaller businesses. Several former Weinstein employees told me that the company’s human-resources department was utterly ineffective; one female executive described it as “a place where you went to when you didn’t want anything to get done. That was common knowledge across the board. Because everything funnelled back to Harvey.” She described the department’s typical response to allegations of misconduct as “This is his company. If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
Nestor told me that some people at the company did seem concerned. Irwin Reiter, a senior executive who had worked for Weinstein for almost three decades, sent her a series of messages via LinkedIn. “We view this very seriously and I personally am very sorry your first day was like this,” Reiter wrote. “Also if there are further unwanted advances, please let us know.” Last year, just before the Presidential election, he reached out again, writing, “All this Trump stuff made me think of you.” He described Nestor’s experience as part of Weinstein’s serial misconduct. “I’ve fought him about mistreatment of women 3 weeks before the incident with you. I even wrote him an email that got me labelled by him as sex police,” he wrote. “The fight I had with him about you was epic. I told him if you were my daughter he would have not made out so well.” (Reiter declined to comment, but his lawyer, Debra Katz, confirmed the authenticity of the messages and said that Reiter had made diligent efforts to raise these issues, to no avail. Katz also said that Reiter “is eager to coöperate fully with any outside investigation.”)
Though no assault occurred, and Nestor completed her temporary placement, she was profoundly affected by the incident. “I was definitely traumatized for a while, in terms of feeling so harassed and frightened,” she said. “It made me feel incredibly discouraged that this could be something that happens on a regular basis. I actually decided not to go into entertainment because of this incident.”
7.

Emma de Caunes, a French actress, met Weinstein in 2010, at a party at the Cannes Film Festival. A few months later, he asked her to a lunch meeting at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. In the meeting, Weinstein told de Caunes that he was going to be producing a movie with a prominent director, that he planned to shoot it in France, and that it had a strong female role. It was an adaptation of a book, he said, but he claimed he couldn’t remember the title. “But I’ll give it to you,” Weinstein said, according to de Caunes. “I have it in my room.”
De Caunes replied that she had to leave, since she was already running late for a TV show she was hosting—Eminem was appearing on the show that afternoon, and she hadn’t written her questions yet. Weinstein pleaded with her to retrieve the book with him, and finally she agreed. As they got to his room, she received a telephone call from one of her colleagues, and Weinstein disappeared into a bathroom, leaving the door open. She assumed that he was washing his hands.
“When I hung up the phone, I heard the shower go on in the bathroom,” she said. “I was, like, What the fuck, is he taking a shower?” Weinstein came out, naked and with an erection. “What are you doing?” she asked. Weinstein demanded that she lie on the bed and told her that many other women had done so before her.
“I was very petrified,” de Caunes said. “But I didn’t want to show him that I was petrified, because I could feel that the more I was freaking out, the more he was excited.” She added, “It was like a hunter with a wild animal. The fear turns him on.” De Caunes told Weinstein that she was leaving, and he panicked. “We haven’t done anything!” she remembered him saying. “It’s like being in a Walt Disney movie!”
De Caunes told me, “I looked at him and I said—it took all my courage—but I said, ‘I’ve always hated Walt Disney movies.’ And then I left. I slammed the door.” She was shaking on the stairs down to the lobby. A director she was working with on the TV show confirmed that she arrived at the studio distraught and that she recounted what had happened. Weinstein called relentlessly over the next few hours, offering de Caunes gifts and repeating that nothing had happened.
De Caunes, who was in her early thirties at the time, was already an established actress, but she wondered what would happen to younger and more vulnerable women in the same situation. Over the years, she said, she’s heard similar accounts from friends. “I know that everybody—I mean everybody—in Hollywood knows that it’s happening,” de Caunes said. “He’s not even really hiding. I mean, the way he does it, so many people are involved and see what’s happening. But everyone’s too scared to say anything.”
8.

One evening in the early nineties, the actress Rosanna Arquette was supposed to meet Weinstein for dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel to pick up the script for a new film. At the hotel, Arquette was told to meet Weinstein upstairs, in his room.
Arquette recalled that, when she arrived at the room, Weinstein opened the door wearing a white bathrobe. Weinstein said that his neck was sore and that he needed a massage. She told him that she could recommend a good masseuse. “Then he grabbed my hand,” she said. He put it on his neck. When she yanked her hand away, she told me, Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it toward his penis, which was visible and erect. “My heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,” she said. She told Weinstein, “I will never do that.”
Weinstein told her that she was making a huge mistake by rejecting him, and named an actress and a model who he claimed had given in to his sexual overtures and whose careers he said he had advanced as a result. Arquette said she told him, “I’ll never be that girl,” and left.
Arquette said that after she rejected Weinstein her career suffered. In one case, she believes, she lost a role because of it. “He made things very difficult for me for years,” she told me. She did appear in one subsequent Weinstein film, “Pulp Fiction,” which she attributes to the small size of the role and Weinstein’s deference to the filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino. (Disputes later arose over her entitlement to payment out of the film’s proceeds.) Arquette said that her silence was the result of Weinstein’s power and reputation for vindictiveness. “He’s going to be working very hard to track people down and silence people,” she explained. “To hurt people. That’s what he does.”
There are other examples of Weinstein’s modus operandi. Jessica Barth, an actress who met Weinstein at a Golden Globes party in January, 2011, told me that Weinstein invited her to a business meeting at the Peninsula. When she arrived, he asked her over the phone to come up to his room. Weinstein assured her it was “no big deal”—because of his high profile, he simply wanted privacy to “talk career stuff.” In the room, Barth found that Weinstein had ordered champagne and sushi.
Barth said that, in the conversation that followed, he alternated between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed. “So, what would happen if, say, we’re having some champagne and I take my clothes off and you give me a massage?” she recalled him asking. “And I’m, like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ ”
When she moved toward the door to leave, Weinstein lashed out, saying that she needed to lose weight “to compete with Mila Kunis,” and then, apparently in an effort to mollify her, promising a meeting with one of his female executives. “He gave me her number, and I walked out and I started bawling,” Barth told me. (Immediately after the incident, she spoke with two individuals who confirmed to me that she related her account to them at the time.) Barth said that the promised meeting at Weinstein’s office seemed to be purely a formality. “I just knew it was bullshit,” she said. (The executive she met with did not respond to requests for comment.)
9.

Weinstein’s behavior deeply affected the day-to-day operations of his company. Current and former Weinstein employees described a pattern of meetings and strained complicity that closely matches the accounts of the many women I interviewed. The employees spoke on condition of anonymity, they said, because of fears about their careers in Hollywood and because of provisos in their work contracts.
“There was a large volume of these types of meetings that Harvey would have with aspiring actresses and models,” one female executive told me. “He would have them late at night, usually at hotel bars or in hotel rooms. And, in order to make these women feel more comfortable, he would ask a female executive or assistant to start those meetings with him.” She said that she was repeatedly asked to join the meetings but refused.
The female executive said that she was especially disturbed by the involvement of other employees. “It almost felt like the executive or assistant was made to be a honeypot to lure these women in, to make them feel safe,” she said. “Then he would dismiss the executive or the assistant, and then these women were alone with him. And that did not feel like it was appropriate behavior or safe behavior.”
One former employee said that she was frequently asked to join for the beginning of meetings that, she said, had in many cases already been moved from day to night and from hotel lobbies to hotel rooms. She said that Weinstein’s conduct in the meetings was brazen. During a meeting with a model, the former employee said, he turned to her and demanded, “Tell her how good of a boyfriend I am.” She said that when she refused to join one such meeting, Weinstein became enraged. Often, she was asked to keep track of the women, who, in keeping with a practice established by Weinstein’s assistants, were all filed under the same label in her phone: F.O.H., which stood for “Friend of Harvey.” She said that the pattern of meetings was nearly uninterrupted in her years working for Weinstein. “I have to say, the behavior did stop for a little bit after the groping thing,” she said, referring to Ambra Battilana Gutierrez’s allegation to the police, “but he couldn’t help himself. A few months later, he was back at it.”
Two staffers who facilitated these meetings said that they felt morally compromised by them. One male former staffer said that many of the women seemed “not aware of the nature of those meetings” and “were definitely scared.” He said most of the encounters that he saw seemed consensual, but others gave him pause. He was especially troubled by his memory of one young woman: “You just feel terrible because you could tell this girl, very young, not from our country, was now in a room waiting for him to come up there in the middle of the day, and we were not to bother them.” He said that he was never asked to facilitate these meetings for men.
None of the former executives or assistants I spoke to quit because of the misconduct, but many expressed guilt and regret about not having said or done more. They spoke about what they believed to be a culture of silence about sexual assault inside Miramax and the Weinstein Company and across the entertainment industry more broadly.
10.

Weinstein and his legal and public-relations teams have conducted a decades-long campaign to suppress these stories. In recent months, that campaign escalated. Weinstein and his associates began calling many of the women in this story. Weinstein asked Argento to meet with a private investigator and give testimony on his behalf. One actress who initially spoke to me on the record later asked that her allegation be removed. “I’m so sorry,” she wrote. “The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse.” Weinstein and his legal team have threatened to sue multiple media outlets, including the New York Times.
Several of the former executives and assistants in this story said that they had received calls from Weinstein in which he attempted to determine if they had talked to me or warned them not to. These employees continued to participate in the article partly because they felt there was a growing culture of accountability, embodied in the relatively recent disclosures about high-profile men like Cosby and Ailes. “I think a lot of us had thought—and hoped—over the years that it would come out sooner,” the former executive who was aware of the two legal settlements in London told me. “But I think now is the right time, in this current climate, for the truth.”
The female executive who declined inappropriate meetings told me that her lawyer advised her that she could be exposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits for violating the nondisclosure agreement attached to her employment contract. “I believe this is more important than keeping a confidentiality agreement,” she said. “The more of us that can confirm or validate for these women if this did happen, I think it’s really important for their justice to do that.” She continued, “I wish I could have done more. I wish I could have stopped it. And this is my way of doing that now.”
“He’s been systematically doing this for a very long time,” the former employee who had been made to act as a “honeypot” told me. She said that she often thinks of something Weinstein whispered—to himself, as far as she could tell—after one of his many shouting sprees at the office. It so unnerved her that she pulled out her iPhone and tapped it into a memo, word for word: “There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.”
Ronan Farrow is a television and print reporter and the author of the forthcoming “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence,” from W. W. Nortonhttps://www.newyorker.com/news/ne ... ir-stories.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Cordelia » Wed Oct 11, 2017 12:35 pm

^^^ Point? (I won't read Alex Jones.)

Bob Weinstein calls his brother Harvey 'a very sick man' and a 'world class liar'

Following the surfaced allegations of sexual harassment and assault by movie producer Harvey Weinstein in stories from The New York Times and The New Yorker, Harvey's brother, Bob, finally made a public statement on Tuesday night.

TMZ reports that Harvey firmly believes Bob is the one that fed the New York Times information for its story.

"My brother Harvey is obviously a very sick man," Bob told TMZ. "I've urged him to seek immediate professional help because he is in dire need of it. His remorse and apologies to the victims of his abuse are hollow. He said he would go away for help and has yet to do so."

On Tuesday, People reported that Harvey's wife, Georgina Chapman, is leaving him and that the disgraced movie mogul is flying to Europe to seek treatment for sex addiction.

"He has proven himself to be a world class liar and now rather than seeking help he is looking to blame others," Bob went on to tell TMZ. "His assertion [that Bob set him up] is categorically untrue from A to Z. I pray he gets the help that he needs and I believe that it is him behind all of these stories to distract from his own failure to get help."

Bob and Harvey Weinstein became the kings of the independent film world in the 1990s when they founded the company Miramax, which launched the careers of Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith. The brothers went on to release a string of Oscar nominated and winning movies. The success led to the company being bought by Disney. In 2005, the brothers left the company and began The Weinstein Company.


Continued.....
http://www.businessinsider.com/bob-wein ... an-2017-10


(As w/all 'sins of the fathers', it's a shame for their children as well as for their victims.)
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 11, 2017 2:52 pm

Point: Alt Right/Trumpite types sare not particularly friends to women and other people targeted by patriarchal good-ole-boy violence. Reactionaries are generally, well, reactionary...


ALEX JONES (HOST): So now The New Yorker magazine: “From Aggressive Overtures To Sexual Assault: Harry (sic) Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories.” And here’s the deal, whether it’s true or not, and I tend to believe it, with the Hollywood slime types, it’s all part of the same slime bucket and it’s what everybody wallowed into. So it’s a bunch of vampires eating each other. I mean, there’s some truth to, hey you know what you’re getting into when you go to Hollywood. It’s like walking down the alley in the worst part of town at midnight and then getting freaked out when you get mugged. But still the muggers are more to blame, they actually carried out the criminal act. Now some of the young 16-year-old girls that watch TV all day, think they are going to be movie stars, they go, “Oh yeah, come to California, you’re going to be movie stars.” You know what you’re going to be is a crack whore and when they’re done using you up they’re going to put you in a snuff film for European consumption and they’re going to torture you to death.



https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017 ... ry/218184/
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Sounder » Thu Oct 12, 2017 6:08 am

I would love for nothing better than to see the Hollywood self preservation racket start to break down. It may be a side effect of too much virtue signaling.

Ben Flack and and that famous actress that called Harvey 'God' at the Oscars can lead the way.

There are any number of potential accusers because the 'casting couch' and other forms of abuse and coercion are pervasive in that (CIA infested fantasy entitlement) world.

Purge yourselves people; Purge.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby kelley » Thu Oct 12, 2017 8:41 am

Bed Bath and Beyond: The Fall of Harvey Weinstein

Produced by Bob Weinstein and distributed by Miramax

Coming to Tribeca and Sundance and et al etc in 2018
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Sounder » Thu Oct 12, 2017 10:19 am

Bed Bath and Beyond: The Fall of Harvey Weinstein

Produced by Bob Weinstein and distributed by Miramax

Coming to Tribeca and Sundance and et al etc in 2018


Hey, it could happen, I'm telling ya Kelly, if we had Bob's permission, scripting rights and a go-fund-me page, we would make millions.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:11 pm

Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, and Others Say Weinstein Harassed Them

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/us/gwyneth-paltrow-angelina-jolie-harvey-weinstein.html?_r=0
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Oct 16, 2017 7:21 pm

.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/ ... weinstein/



The Greeks and Romans had one up on us: their gods and goddesses were not so easy to impersonate. Their gods and goddesses acted at a remove from everyday life, out of reach, except in the popular imagination. Two thousand years later, along comes Hollywood with an industry designed to manufacture gods and goddesses, and churns them out in its “dream factories” like so many floor lamps.

Movies, it turned out, with their close-up shots on the giant silver screen, were a much better vehicle for depicting human mythology than the creaky old stagecraft of the Christian church, with its limp and tedious liturgical hocus-pocus. America went cuckoo for movies in our insatiable drive to comprehend the human condition — or at least to see it represented artistically.

The stereotype of the Hollywood Producer has been vividly established for nearly a hundred years now: a vulgarian alpha male in an expensive suit working the casting couch in his office on the lot. The studios made not a few movies about this entitled, predatory stock character, even back in the day when their rule was absolute. He was as well known as Porky Pig. Harvey Weinstein was the apotheosis of this type.

Harvey Weinstein was in the goddess business, the way his ancestors were in the pants business or the pickle business. Women of a certain goddessy type came to him out of the cornfields, the cities, the slums, the backwaters of distant lands, and he transformed them into goddesses for the movie audiences. He was good at it.

For decades, it was as well-known in the movie business, as night follows day, that Harvey often behaved badly among the goddesses he created and trafficked in. His reputation among the ladies must have been something like a walking-talking roach motel, Hell-in-a-bathrobe, with rat poison on top. Had he the good looks of Errol Flynn, the decorum of James Mason, and the melancholy charm of Humphrey Bogart, he might have gotten away with it forever.

But he had the look of some wild Teutonic forest swine, a monster out of the Maurice Sendak Wild Things gallery, with his oversized head and that unfortunate six-day scruff of beard bristling over his hoggish jowels. He was a physical specimen of a villain that only his pet director, Quentin Tarantino, might have dreamed up. In body, he was the very essence of a slob. With all that money, you’d think he could have engaged the services of a personal trainer, a cosmetician, perhaps even a plastic surgeon to buff off the rough edges. But, perhaps, unlike everybody else in show business, he was comfortable being himself.

His antics were legend well before the recent official documentation of his evil deeds in The New York Times. It’s something of a wonder and a mystery that, over the years, more manufactured goddesses didn’t run shrieking from his clutches, or lodge a complaint with the proper authorities — but such were the blandishments of stardom, I guess, that they didn’t dare. You’d think a certain code would have been shared generously among the ladies around their pantheon: don’t ever let yourself be alone in a room, or even an elevator, with Harvey. If there was such a meme, it didn’t stick
.

Paradoxically, this repulsive character, with his outrageously brutish temper to go along with his boorish approach to seduction, produced many of the truly excellent movies of the last quarter century: The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Pulp Fiction, Il Postino, Flirting With Disaster, Emma, Good Will Hunting, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Chicago, Cold Mountain, Bad Santa, The King’s Speech, The Artist, The Human Stain, Silver Linings Playbook, Finding Neverland, Fruitvale Station, August: Osage County, The Fighter, Lion, and some not yet released. Many of these won awards, including Best Picture, from the film academy that tossed him under the bus last week.

Harvey’s story is an old one: hubris. He was too intoxicated with his own role as goddess-maker to recognize the dangers of fooling around in his own workshop. Especially in these times of all-out gender warfare. The other gnomes, elves, manufactured gods and goddesses in the Hollywood workshop only piled onto him when they thought it was safe (for their careers) to do so, so shame on them and boo-hoo. They’re as gutless as the grifters in congress.

But remember, there’s nothing that Hollywood, and perhaps America itself (if that entity still exists as a stock character), loves better than a redemption tale and a comeback. Harvey might do some jail time. When he comes out, I doubt it will be as a born-again evangelical pastor. But, heck, these days you can make movies on your phone. Don’t be surprised if the old reprobate turns up again in show biz, like the demonic “Michael Myers” in that sturdy old chestnut Halloween.


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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Oct 17, 2017 2:05 am

Why just Harvey?

I mean, are he and Bill Cosby the only guys in Hollywood who ever did this?
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Sounder » Tue Oct 17, 2017 6:04 am

Why just Harvey?


Could it be retaliation for producing the Vaxxed movie?
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Oct 17, 2017 8:40 am

.

Yes, it's not just Harvey. It's systemic.
And there are others that will continue to do what they do despite the recent Harvey 'outing'.

http://deadline.com/2017/10/scott-rosen ... 202189525/


So, uh, yeah.
We need to talk about Harvey.

I was there, for a big part of it.
From, what, 1994 to the early 2000s?
Something like that.
Certainly The Golden Age.
The “PULP FICTION”, “SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE”, “CLERKS”, “SWINGERS”, “SCREAM”, “GOOD WILL HUNTING”, “ENGLISH PATIENT”, “LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL” years…

Harvey and Bob made my first two movies.
Then they signed me to an overall deal.
Then they bought that horror script of mine about the Ten Plagues.
For a lot of money.
Also bought that werewolf-biker script.
That no one else liked but was my personal favorite.
They were going to publish my novel.
They anointed me.
Made it so other studios thought I was the real deal.
They gave me my career.


I was barely 30.
I was sure I had struck gold.
They loved me, these two brothers, who had reinvented cinema.
And who were fun and tough and didn’t give an East Coast fuck about all the slick pricks out in L.A.

And those glory days in Tribeca?
The old cramped offices?
That wonderful gang of executives and assistants?
All the filmmakers who were doing repeat business?
The brothers wanted to create a “family of film”.
And they did just that…
We looked forward to having meetings there.
Meetings that would turn into plans that would turn into raucous nights out on the town.
Simply put: OG Miramax was a blast.

So, yeah, I was there.
And let me tell you one thing.
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing:

Everybody-fucking-knew.

Not that he was raping.
No, that we never heard.
But we were aware of a certain pattern of overly-aggressive behavior that was rather dreadful.
We knew about the man’s hunger; his fervor; his appetite.
There was nothing secret about this voracious rapacity; like a gluttonous ogre out of the Brothers Grimm.
All couched in vague promises of potential movie roles.
(and, it should be noted: there were many who actually succumbed to his bulky charms. Willingly. Which surely must have only impelled him to cast his fetid net even wider).

But like I said: everybody-fucking-knew.

And to me, if Harvey’s behavior is the most reprehensible thing one can imagine, a not-so-distant second is the current flood of sanctimonious denial and condemnation that now crashes upon these shores of rectitude in gloppy tides of bullshit righteousness.

Because everybody-fucking-knew.

And do you know how I am sure this is true?
Because I was there.
And I saw you.
And I talked about it with you.
You, the big producers; you, the big directors; you, the big agents; you, the big financiers.
And you, the big rival studio chiefs; you, the big actors; you, the big actresses; you, the big models.
You, the big journalists; you, the big screenwriters; you, the big rock stars; you, the big restaurateurs; you, the big politicians.

I saw you.
All of you.
God help me, I was there with you.

Again, maybe we didn’t know the degree.
The magnitude of the awfulness.
Not the rapes.
Not the shoving against the wall.
Not the potted-plant fucking.
But we knew something.
We knew something was bubbling under.
Something odious.
Something rotten.

But…
And this is as pathetic as it is true:
What would you have had us do?
Who were we to tell?
The authorities?
What authorities?
The press?
Harvey owned the press.
The Internet?
There was no Internet or reasonable facsimile thereof.
Should we have called the police?
And said what?
Should we have reached out to some fantasy Attorney General Of Movieland?
That didn’t exist.

Not to mention, most of the victims chose not to speak out.
Aside from sharing the grimy details with a close girlfriend or confidante.
And if they discussed it with their representatives?
Agents and managers, who themselves feared The Wrath Of The Big Man?
The agents and managers would tell them to keep it to themselves.
Because who knew the repercussions?
That old saw “You’ll Never Work In This Town Again” came crawling back to putrid life like a re-animated cadaver in a late-night zombie flick.
But, yes, everyone knew someone who had been on the receiving end of lewd advances by him.
Or knew someone who knew someone.

A few actress friends of mine told me stories: of a ghastly hotel meeting; of a repugnant bathrobe-shucking; of a loathsome massage request.
And although they were rattled, they sort of laughed at his arrogance; how he had the temerity to think that simply the sight of his naked, doughy, carbuncled flesh was going to get them in the mood.
So I just believed it to be a grotesque display of power; a dude misreading the room and making a lame-if-vile pass.

It was much easier to believe that.
It was much easier for ALL of us to believe that.

Because…

And here’s where the slither meets the slime:
Harvey was showing us the best of times.
He was making our movies.
Throwing the biggest parties.
Taking us to The Golden Globes!
Introducing us to the most amazing people (Meetings with Vice President Gore! Clubbing with Quentin and Uma! Drinks with Salman Rushdie and Ralph Fiennes! Dinners with Mick Jagger and Warren-freaking-Beatty!).

The most epic Oscar weekends.
That seemed to last for weeks!
Sundance! Cannes! Toronto!
Telluride! Berlin! Venice!
Private jets! Stretch limousines! Springsteen shows!
Hell, Harvey once took me to St. Barth’s for Christmas.
For 12 days!
I was a broke-ass kid from Boston who had never even HEARD of St. Barth’s before he booked my travel.
He once got me tickets to the seven hottest Broadway shows in one week. So I could take a new girlfriend on a dazzling tour of theater.
He got me seats on the 40-yard-line to the Super Bowl, when the Patriots were playing the Packers in New Orleans.
Even got me a hotel room, which was impossible to get that weekend.
He gave and gave and gave and gave.
He had a monarch’s volcanic generosity when it came to those within his circle.
And a Mafia don’s fervent need for abject loyalty from his capos and soldiers.

But never mind us!
What about what he was doing for the culture?
Making stunningly splendid films at a time when everyone else was cranking-out simpering “INDEPENDENCE DAY” rip-offs.

It was glorious.
All of it.

So what if he was coming on a little strong to some young models who had moved mountains to get into one of his parties?
So what if he was exposing himself, in five-star hotel rooms, like a cartoon flasher out of “MAD MAGAZINE” (just swap robe for raincoat!)
Who were we to call foul?
Golden Geese don’t come along too often in one’s life.

Which goes back to my original point:
Everybody-fucking-knew.
But everybody was just having too good a time.
And doing remarkable work; making remarkable movies.

As the old joke goes:
We needed the eggs.

Okay, maybe we didn’t NEED them.
But we really, really, really, really LIKED them eggs.
So we were willing to overlook what the Golden Goose was up to, in the murky shadows behind the barn…

And for that, I am eternally sorry.
To all of the women that had to suffer this…
I am eternally sorry.
I’ve worked with Mira and Rosanna and Lysette.
I’ve known Rose and Ashley and Claire for years…
Their courage only hangs a lantern on my shame.
And I am eternally sorry to all those who suffered in silence all this time.
And have chosen to remain silent today.

I mostly lost touch with the brothers by the early 2000s.
For no specific reason.
Just that there were other jobs, other studios.
But a few months ago, Harvey called me, out of the blue.
To talk about the bygone days.
To talk about how great it would be to get some of the gang back together.
Make a movie.
He must have known then the noose was tightening.
There was a wistfulness to him that I had never heard before.
A melancholy.
It most assuredly had a walking-to-the-gallows feel.
When we hung up I wondered: “what was that all about?”
In a few short weeks I would know.
It was the condemned man simply wanting to comb some of the ruins of his old stomping grounds.
One last time.

So, yeah, I am sorry.
Sorry and ashamed.
Because, in the end, I was complicit.
I didn’t say shit.
I didn’t do shit.
Harvey was nothing but wonderful to me.
So I reaped the rewards and I kept my mouth shut.
And for that, once again, I am sorry.

But you should be sorry, too.
With all these victims speaking up…
To tell their tales.
Shouldn’t those who witnessed it from the sidelines do the same?
Instead of retreating to the cowardly, canopied confines of faux-outrage?
Doesn’t being a bystander bring with it the responsibility of telling the truth, however personally disgraceful it may be?

You know who are.
You know that you knew.
And do you know how I know that you knew?

Because I was there with you.

And because everybody-fucking-knew.

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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 17, 2017 9:21 am

https://thebaffler.com/blessed-and-brig ... ying-game/

Chris Lehmann, October 16

The Lying Game

The culture-wars scripting of the Weinstein scandal


THE MENTAL EQUIPAGE OF OUR MERITOCRACY is designed to harbor one idea at a time—at most. Thus, when there’s a multifront assault on our inherited body of social mythology (like, oh, I don’t know, the Trump administration), the consensus of responsible thought will typically focus on each malady as it arises, in painstaking sequence—the Russia menace, the press-baiting, the tantrum-fed descent into organizational chaos, the white-nationalist coddling. The operating manual for elite rule holds that social ills must always appear in obligingly manageable sequence, all in a row, to be sorted out by lab-coated and credentialed guardians of the common good.

So naturally, when Harvey Weinstein—a liberal titan of Hollywood commerce—was exposed, after decades of privileged license, as a serial sexual predator, the business of responsible opinion-making was largely short-circuited. Thought leadership is, first, a notoriously male-dominated racket, so Weinstein’s misdeeds—allegedly up to and including rape—required careful handling. What’s more, a scenario that seemed at first glance to be irresistible fodder for the cannons of the right flank of the culture wars—bigfoot Hollywood liberal donor exposed as tumescent nightmare being—actually drew unwanted attention to the GOP’s role in elevating a serial sexual assaulter-cum-showbiz lowlife into the Oval Office.

Some culprit beyond the obvious corporate overlord exercising what he took to be his droit du seigneur, had to be dug up and flogged.

Differences needed trimming, and outrage needed modulating, much as when, as so often happens in our ugly epoch, naked white supremacy needs some good old official euphemizing from on high. Some culprit beyond the obvious, familiar specter of a corporate overlord exercising what he took to be his droit du seigneur, had to be dug up and flogged.

In other words, enter New York Timesconservative contrarian hack Bret Stephens. In a rather dumbfounding display of alibi-conjuring, Stephens was dead set on pinning Weinstein’s transgressions on an enabling film industry—and a still more amoral and “libertine” American culture rooted in the Boomer excesses of the sixties and seventies. In Stephens’s telling, these reassuringly impersonal causes rendered the rampaging moneyed accused rapist misunderstood, trapped like some Boomer-rebel film antihero in a world he never made. “One can mount a defense of sorts for Mr. Weinstein,” Stephens explains, on the grounds that he “inhabited a moral universe that did nothing but cheer his golden touch and wink at (or look away from) his transgressions—right until the moment that it became politically inconvenient to do so.” Cut, wrap, print:

The important truth about [Weinstein] is that he was just another libidinous cad in a libertine culture that long ago dispensed with most notions of personal restraint and gentlemanly behavior. . . . Like those other libidinous cads—Bill Clinton and Donald Trump—Weinstein benefitted from a culture that often celebrated, constantly depicted, sometimes enabled, seldom confronted, and all-too frequently forgave the behavior they so often indulged in.

It’s generally a good rule of thumb that when a conservative commentator downshifts out of personal responsibility preachments and starts soberly explaining how the great fungible abstraction of “culture” dictates behavior, you should reach for your bullshit detector. And when the talk turns to “cads” and “gentlemen” as opposed to plutocrats and sexual predators, you can be sure that the fulmination-to-viable-remedy ratio is fast approaching the infinity point. There is, indeed, a discomfiting parallel logic between Stephens’s culture-first exoneration of Weinstein’s predatory conduct (“Hyenas cannot help their own nature,” he writes, ludicrously) and the conservative resistance to any and all curbs on untrammeled gun ownership as “legislating evil”: people are just going to mow each other down with hot lead, in pretty much the same way that hyenas are going to attack starlets in luxe hotel suites, and force their quarry to watch them masturbate and shower. What, you want to change something more than the culture, you poor hapless naïf?

Of course, there is an enabling culture that permits sociopathic predators like Weinstein to flourish, but far from a rudderless culture of indiscriminate libertinism, it’s a culture of moneyed privilege and money-driven political clout. It’s striking that of the three prime examples of libidinal caddishness that Stephens dotes on, Weinstein is the only one not to serve as president of the United States. And the ethos of impunity for the wandering presidential staff well antedates the hated sixties; just ask Sally Hemings or Nan Britton.

There’s also a strong countervailing current within our culture that calls out the sexual predation of powerful men. It’s called feminism, and Stephens neglects, bizarrely, to make even passing mention of it in his Weinstein jeremiad. Right from the start, in fact, he maintains that the trouble with the Weinstein scandal is that “it has so few heroes”—thus blithely overlooking the scores of women victimized by Weinstein who came forward with the whole ugly saga, facing down potentially devastating consequences for their livelihoods and good names. (They do briefly get lip service, it’s true, in Stephens’s morality-play staging of the Weinstein scandal—but tellingly as “victims,” apparently disqualified for hero status on self-evident grounds.)

Like specialized auto parts, the ideas under review can only perform one limited function in a hermetically confined context.
Of course, Stephens isn’t shy about talking about feminism in other contexts. Indeed, it occupies a quite prominent place in his own preferred brand of cultural demonology. On one day, it’s among the principal free-thought-choking forces on America’s “Orwellian” college campuses. On another, it’s touting the bogus epidemic of campus rape. (That Stephens can only envision feminism operating in and around the leafy confines of the American university is another telltale tic of privileged thought leadership, but that cultural blind spot will have to await closer attention on another day.)

But that’s the beauty of monocausal, pasteboard culture explication: like specialized auto parts, the ideas under review can only perform one limited function in a hermetically confined context. Feminism can only enforce campus conduct codes and other sinister forms of elite liberal orthodoxy—just as the half-century old culture wars of the sixties only work to mint out libidinous cads and puritanical P.C. authoritarians. Lost in all the myopic cultural functionalism is the both/and character of American experience in our hellish new millennium, which has baptized a bankruptcy-prone real-estate huckster as a tribune of populist justice, created a neoliberal governing caste of leased mouthpieces on the make, and gleefully wired itself into self-perpetuating feedback loops of toxic civic ignorance. In this actually existing American scene, it’s anything but shocking that a Harvey Weinstein or a Donald Trump pursues a professional sideline as a roving penis on the make. But in this actually existing American scene, Bret Stephens and his cronies will always be charged with policing the respectable boundaries of opinion, so prim one-dimensional parables of culture moralizing will be always dolloped out one at a time, right on schedule.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 17, 2017 11:05 am

If there's one important lesson that can be gleaned from all this, it's that the Good Ole Boy culture is alive and well on an institutional level.
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Re: Harvey "The Pig" Weinstein's Accusers

Postby Cordelia » Thu Oct 19, 2017 2:09 pm

Next up..........

Bob Weinstein Accused of Sexual Harassment by TV Showrunner

October 17, 2017

A female showrunner who worked on the Weinstein Co. drama “The Mist” has accused Bob Weinstein of sexual harassment during the production of the Spike TV series.

Amanda Segel, an executive producer of “Mist,” said Weinstein repeatedly made romantic overtures to her and asked her to join him for private dinners. The harassment began in the summer of 2016 and continued on and off for about three months until Segel’s lawyer, David Fox of Myman Greenspan, informed TWC executives — including COO David Glasser — that she would leave the show if Bob Weinstein did not stop contacting her on personal matters.

“ ‘No’ should be enough,” Segel told Variety. “After ‘no,’ anybody who has asked you out should just move on. Bob kept referring to me that he wanted to have a friendship. He didn’t want a friendship. He wanted more than that. My hope is that ‘no’ is enough from now on.”

A representative for Bob Weinstein denied that he engaged in any inappropriate behavior in a statement to Variety.

“Bob Weinstein had dinner with Ms. Segel in LA in June 2016. He denies any claims that he behaved inappropriately at or after the dinner. It is most unfortunate that any such claim has been made,” the statement said.

Bert Fields, a lawyer for Bob Weinstein, also issued a strong denial on Weinstein’s behalf.

“Variety’s story about Bob Weinstein is riddled with false and misleading assertions by Ms. Segel and we have the emails to prove it, but even if you believe what she says it contains not a hint of any inappropriate touching or even any request for such touching,” Fields said. “There is no way in the world that Bob Weinstein is guilty of sexual harassment, and even if you believed what this person asserts there is no way it would amount to that.”

A rep for the Weinstein Co. denied that Glasser was contacted by Segel’s lawyer, a source close to Glasser said in fact the COO had communicated with Segel but his involvement in addressing the situation was minimal.

Spike TV in a statement said: “We take all allegations of this nature very seriously, and are investigating.”

Continued........
http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/bob-wei ... 202592165/


I never finished reading Ronan Farrow’s ‘New Yorker’ article. Too many (unnecessary imo) lurid details on Hollywood’s culture of open dirty secrets. But given, over the past 3 decades, the steep escalation of ‘soft’porn and ultra-violence in mega money-making films, it would be more surprising to me if there wasn’t a corresponding spike in sexual assault, violence and other forms of unethical acting out at the industry's workplaces--as portrayed in their products.

The Weinstein Brothers are being painted by some media as the Cain & Abel of Hollywood. I don’t buy the analogy, but think their relationship would be a fascinating study, as sibling relationships are; in their case, rivalries amongst multi-millionaire/billionaire sibling/partners (especially influential/domineering/bullying elder over the younger and younger's subsequent reported revenge). Bob Weinstein wrote a lite Frank Capra-ish accounting of their relationship in 2015.

Bob Weinstein's Love Letter to Brother Harvey: "Some Would Say I Deserve a Lifetime Achievement Award"

My brother, Harvey, and I have run Miramax Films and The Weinstein Co. for more than 35 years. I'm 60 years old, Harvey is 62, and I could describe our relationship as one long, unending conversation between two brothers. Some people would say I deserve a lifetime achievement award just for talking to Harvey for that amount of time. Knowing Harvey, of course, he would probably find some way to accept the award on my behalf. Oh, brother …

Our father was instrumental in bonding the two of us not just as brothers but as partners, confidantes, allies and eventually co-chairmen. Over the years, we've seriously spoken for thousands of hours. In these conversations, many of them have been about our families, wives, ex-wives, the kids, grandkids and, yes, the state of the Mets, Yankees, Knicks, Jets and Giants. But an overwhelmingly large amount of these conversations were about — yes, you guessed it — business. We'd spend countless hours on the phone and in person plotting, planning, imagining and conceiving deals and movies. Everything that goes into the story of Miramax. While the finished products were always the movies or the deals, and that is what ultimately matters, I can say that the overwhelming majority of them started with a conversation between two brothers.

I have to say that over the last five years the conversations at times have waned and, sadder to report, at times they've even come to a complete halt. Perhaps with age and success, the feeling that we both need them is not as strong as it once was. That said, a few months ago I did notice the change and reached out to my 87-year-old mother and said that while nothing was really wrong, Harvey and I had stopped talking as much as we'd been doing and that I was missing the connection. To my utter amazement, she swore to me that Harvey had called her and expressed the same feelings. I don't want anyone to think we've gone into couples' therapy, but my mom did send an article I wrote years ago about our dad forging an alliance between his two sons for both of us to read. I am happy to report that the conversations have once again become a daily occurrence. What follows is just a selection of several of those dialogs that depict a few of the more memorable moments in our earlier years, both in our youth and our careers.”

“Some of our talks have changed. We talk more about family than we do about business. We talk about new adventures and even though we're not prone to it, sometimes we do reminisce. And of course we occasionally speak about business, as we still have some wrinkles up our sleeves in the hopes of shaking up the movie business one more time. But the most important thing to me is that we talk about the big and the small, knowing that the small things are what connected us and made us happy most of all.”

Image

More..........
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/b ... her-773532


King of ultra-violence Quentin Tarantino (and partner to the Weinsteins, whose company is, or was, rumored to be producing his upcoming Manson/Tate massacre film) weighed in:

"For the last week I've been stunned and heartbroken about the revelations that have come to light about my friend for 25 years Harvey Weinstein,"

"I need a few more days to process my pain, emotions, anger and memory and then I will speak publicly about it."

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/o ... llegations
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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