TAKING DOWN A PREDATOR
THE HARVEY WEINSTEIN SCANDAL
Why women are speaking out about Harvey Weinstein.
Two weeks ago, if you’d asked most Hollywood insiders to describe Harvey Weinstein, you’d probably get the words “bully” or “blowhard” shot back at you with a laugh. His cartoonish reputation as a big, blustering, high-powered Hollywood studio executive had long been the stuff of legend. “He was romanticised as an old-style movie mogul,” says former New York Observer reporter Rebecca Traister. “That was seen as a good thing.” But the reality of Harvey Weinstein was far, far more disturbing. At a 2000 book party, when Traister asked Weinstein a probing question about the marketing of a movie, Weinstein exploded, calling her a “c--t,” dragging her then-boyfriend Andrew Goldman onto the street in a headlock and yelling, “I’m the f--king mayor of this f--king lawless piece of shit town!” Weinstein “has never done anything in his life that was consensual,” says a source who worked for him for years. “He makes people do things. He assaults people in every way.”
Weinstein was a bully in public—and a predator in private, according to more than 40 women. Beginning with stunning exposés in The New York Times and The New Yorker last week, women including Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie came forward to accuse the Miramax and Weinstein Company mogul of sexual abuse ranging from harassment to rape. “We’re at a point in time when women need to send a clear message that this is over,” Paltrow told the Times while revealing Weinstein had propositioned her in his Beverly Hills
hotel room, touching her and asking her to partake in massages during what she thought was a business meeting to discuss her role in 1996’s Emma.
Actresses Rose Mcgowan and Lysette Anthony have alleged that Weinstein raped them; Asia Argento said he forced oral sex on her. Still others, from assistants to models to stars, said Weinstein groped them, exposed himself or threatened to destroy their careers if they didn’t provide sexual favours, in incidents dating from the early 1980s to 2015. The New York Police Department and London police confirmed they are now each investigating multiple cases against Weinstein. “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein,” said his spokeswoman.
According to the Times, whose reporters reportedly saw legal documents, several women privately settled with Weinstein. Others stayed silent until now amid a climate of fear and intimidation. “I always knew there were loads more women. The way he so casually lured me into a dark empty kitchen and cornered me—it all seemed choreographed,” says Lauren Sivan, a Los Angeles TV reporter who alleges Weinstein forced her to watch him masturbate a decade ago. “For years I’d hear stories of actresses who found themselves in similar situations but no-one would dare go public for fear of being blacklisted in Hollywood.” She calls Judd and Mcgowan, among the first to go public, “heroes to all women. They spoke out when an entire industry stayed silent.”
Judgement has been swift for the 65-year-old Weinstein, a twice-married father of five—though he has lost little of his bluster. After an initial statement saying he came of age in the ’60s and ’70s “when all the rules about behaviour and workplaces were different” sparked outrage, Weinstein released a more measured response, saying, “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologise for it.” His glamorous wife, Marchesa designer Georgina Chapman, 41, told WHO’S US sister magazine People on Oct. 10 that she was leaving him. Hillary Clinton, for whom he threw fundraisers, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey decried his alleged actions, and both his studio and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences gave him the boot. After saying he was headed for a treatment centre, Weinstein instead checked into an Arizona luxury resort on Oct. 11 —“a secure place to get him the help he needs,” said a source. Another source said Weinstein refused to give up his phone in Arizona. “He believes everything that happened was consensual and that people are just being dramatic,” says the source who worked with him for years. “He doesn’t think he’s a monster.”
Still, the signs of trouble were there since well before Weinstein was an Oscar-winning powerhouse. From beginnings in Queens, New York, he got his start in the industry he adored in the early 1980s. The youngest son of
housewife Miriam and diamond cutter Max went from a post-office worker and rock-concert promoter to a fledgling film producer alongside his big brother Bob. He had the gift of gab (“he could talk a hungry dog off a meat bone,” an early business associate told New York magazine) and a knack for finding good movies that made money.
But the sexual abuse allegations go back to one of the first films he produced, 1984’s Playing for
Keeps. According to The Washington Post, a young female crew member told another producer, Alan Brewer, that Weinstein had attacked her in his hotel room, attempting to perform oral sex on her. But cameras kept rolling and Weinstein went on to his next project. As one of his longtime colleagues says, “It’s easy to write off someone who’s ignorant, but when they’re well-read, charming and intellectual like Harvey, you make excuses somehow, because you’re in denial.”
And so it went for 30 years, while Weinstein scaled the Hollywood ladder with Oscarwinning hits such as Pulp Fiction and
Shakespeare in Love. “Everyone in the industry knew” he pursued young women, says a female producer who worked with him, “just as everyone who came in contact with him knew about his temper.” Still, stars lined up to work with him: “He launched campaigns for you, not just for Oscar nominations, but he went out there and banged the drum for you on other films.”
Meanwhile, to those who worked for him, he was a tyrant, claims the longtime colleague: “It was human harassment at every level. Mass intimidation, constant threats—to men and women—about losing your job. It was mocking people about their physicality, about their age.” As he took “meetings” at hotels such as the Peninsula in Los Angeles and the Savoy in London, a Hollywood producer source contends most around him knew he was cheating on his first wife, former model Eve Chilton (they split in 2004 and have three daughters), and Chapman, with whom he has a daughter, 7, and son, 4. But sources at his company say few realised what was truly going on. “I don’t know why no-one saw it, why we didn’t know,” says a different former employee. “We were naive. We thought his abuse stopped in the office.”
The exact match that ignited the Weinstein firestorm remains unclear. Rumours swirled that Harvey’s brother, Weinstein Company co-chair and bitter rival Bob, 63, played a hand in his downfall. Bob denied that, though he told The
Hollywood Reporter his brother is a “depraved” person who physically abused him. (Says an industry insider, “They hardly spoke to each other.”) Changing attitudes towards sexual harassment, with high-profile cases involving companies such as Fox News and Uber, and women accusing US President Donald Trump of past abuse, helped inspire some of the women to come forward. Traister and other journalists have
said the story has long been an elusive scoop. “I’ve known lots of other reporters who have tried to write this story for 17 years,” she says, “really tried hard, gone to the ends of the earth to find women only to discover that they’d signed non-disclosure agreements and they couldn’t speak.”
Now the world knows, and waits to see what if anything will change in an industry that has long been a boys’ club. Before heading to Arizona, Weinstein said he’ll fight for a future at his company—which could be sold off at any moment. “He should not be at a spa for sex addiction,” says Sivan. “If all this is true he should be in jail.” As more women share their own stories of sexual harassment, Sivan hopes their courage will have a lasting impact. “I hope that women will be more willing to speak up, and that men will no longer turn a blind eye,” she says. “This can’t be a gender issue. This needs to be a societal issue that we all want abolished.”
By Janine Rubenstein. Reporting by Pernilla ■ Cedenheim, Mary Green, Elizabeth Leonard, Linda Marx, Liz Mcneil, Peter Mikelbank, Mike Miller, Ale Russian and Kara Warner