Tina Brown turns against her former bossWeinstein
Publishing queen bee Tina brown has finally joined the public condemnation of film producer harvey Weinstein following alleged sexual offences against aspiring actresses dating back decades.
‘growing lobby to kick harvey out of [the Oscars] Academy,’ brown said on social media yesterday. ‘honor the brave women who spoke and do it!’
Movie mogul harvey and his brother bob poached brown from The new Yorker to edit their magazine Talk in the nineties. The publication was bankrolled by their new multimedia company, a partnership with hearst Magazines.
in return for her salary of around £ 700,000, brown had an understanding to promote actresses starring in the brothers’ Miramax films.
gwyneth Paltrow, Oscarwinning star of Weinstein’s 1998 film shakespeare in love, was a prime beneficiary and posed for an early issue in an s& M outfit that didn’t fit her cleancut image.
in later interviews, Paltrow said that Weinstein ‘looks out for me’, but that there were ‘ certain favours that he asked me to do that i felt were not exploitive but not necessarily as great for me as they were for him’.
When Talk was launched with a lavish party under the statue of liberty in the summer of 1999, Rupert Everett, who turned up with Madonna, called the event the ‘peak’ of his Manhattan social ambitions. but when the publication collapsed two and a half years later, colleagues of brown let it be known that she found Weinstein ‘abrasive’ and ‘overbearing’ during her time at Talk. This week, lee smith, a former colleague at Talk, said at least 20 people in the office knew of Weinstein’s ‘mistreatment’ of women.
‘Every time Tina went downtown to meet with him he screamed at her the whole time. he humiliated her.’
Another colleague, Rebecca Traister, recalls ‘tales of hotel rooms, nudity, suggestion and coercion, and then whispered pay- offs’ that went unreported ‘because there were so many journalists on [Weinstein’s] payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters’. next month brown, the wife of former sunday Times editor sir harold Evans, is to publish her memoirs, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 19831992. They have been optioned by a major hollywood player. luckily for her, it’s not the Weinstein Company.