I did warn Bob about Harvey’s abuse – but he wouldn’t listen
Guinness heiress who worked for Weinstein and dated his brother recounts own sex harassment and makes bombshell claim
By IVANA LOWELL
Harvey asked me what I would like to do at the company and we agreed that I should be in charge of everything literary. I was getting paid to do something I loved.
After lunch, we went back up to his office, where he shut the office door, made some comment about being tired and said he really needed a massage.
It suddenly felt very claustrophobic. He moved round his desk towards me and I quickly moved to the other side. He asked if I liked to give oral sex. It was such an outrageous question, I thought he was joking. I started giggling, trying to make light of it, but I wondered what he would do if he caught me. What could he do? The walls were paper-thin and his secretary was right outside.
Fortunately, his intercom buzzed, he had to take a call and I slipped out of the office to reflect on an interesting first day.
The next evening, my phone rang and it was Harvey calling from his car. He wasn’t far away and he wanted to come up and talk. Within minutes, he was banging at my door. My apartment was small, I hadn’t much furniture and there really wasn’t anywhere for him to sit, so he wandered down the corridor towards my bedroom.
Harvey lay on my bed and asked me to give him a back rub, which I politely refused. Harvey didn’t seem to mind the rejection or seem embarrassed to have made such an intimate request. Instead he spent the next half an hour swearing about work.
I asked him if his wife wasn’t going to wonder where he was but he said she didn’t care. He asked me to lie next to him but again I firmly declined and perched on my bedroom chair, praying he would get bored, which mercifully he finally did and he disappeared into the night.
I knew what happened was wrong on every level and I thought about telling Harvey that I didn’t think this was going to work out.
But the next day I found I had been assigned an office on the third floor of Miramax and was given a box of embossed cards with the vague title Vice President of Creative, Miramax Films. Harvey’s behaviour was reprehensible and demeaning, yet I was dazzled by the job. So what if the price was to be on the receiving end of strange sexual requests? As long as I didn’t have to actually do anything – and after all, no one was really getting hurt, were they?
It didn’t take me long to work out the truth. Pretty young actresses were a common sight entering and exiting Harvey’s office. Speculation on how badly they wanted a role was a common office game.
Somehow, I managed to keep inappropriate dealings with Harvey at arm’s length. I actually considered him to be a friend and in many ways I respected and admired him. He could be generous and even compassionate but then his volatile mood and voracious appetite would take over.
It was not uncommon to be called to a meeting with Harvey at 2am. The lobby of whichever hotel he had made his base would have a constant stream of young actresses going to or from his suite at all hours of the night. Some were already quite famous, and back at the office we would speculate as to who had actually slept with him and who got away with just giving in to his demand for oral sex.
Looking back now, it all seems so tawdry and sordid, but working in such a toxic atmosphere seemed to have hardened everyone. We had all become cynical.
Neither I nor my girlfriend and colleague – a very pretty former actress – found it unusual when we were called into Harvey’s room in middle of the night to discuss the book division. We thought little of the fact that he greeted us wearing nothing but his hotel bathrobe. I did, however, try very hard to avert my eyes from the grotesque flashes of penis he gave me every time he moved.
The last encounter of this nature I had with Harvey was in New York – my same girlfriend was staying with me on my sofa bed. It was late at night when we heard a loud banging. I ran to the door only to see through the peephole the distorted but recognisable face of Harvey. ‘S***, it’s Harvey,’ I whispered to my friend.
‘Quick, let’s hide,’ she said, so we locked ourselves in the bathroom. Of course, he persisted and we eventually let him in. He barged past us straight into the bedroom and immediately starting undressing. He plopped down and lay naked on my bed. ‘Which one of you ladies is going to be nice and give Uncle Harvey a massage?’
We both started giggling nervously. He seemed agitated and in a state of excitement. We cowered nervously in the adjoining living room as he raged. Finally, he sat up and, looking sort of dazed, slowly got dressed. To our relief, he left.
A few weeks later, he rang and asked me to join him with his brother Bob at Elaine’s. The moment I sat down, Harvey got up and left us alone. Bob had a reputation of being the stricter, more businesslike of the two. I expected a grilling. Instead, Bob was charming and self-deprecating, thinner than his brother but with the same intense energy and quick mind. Eventually, we started dating – and Harvey stopped calling.
When I next bumped into Harvey and asked him if there was anything he needed work-wise, he just growled back at me: ‘No, you’re Bob’s property now.’
Bob asked me if I had ever slept with his brother. I said of course I hadn’t but I did add that Harvey had made aggressive attempts.
I started to tell him about all the girls and about all of Harvey’s exploits but he became angry and said he didn’t want to know.
Whenever I plucked up the courage to try to talk to Bob about his brother’s despicable behaviour, he would become furious and immediately shut me down.
It was much easier for him to bury his head in the sand rather than face the ugly truth. It was as if by not acknowledging the severity of the situation, he could just go make it go away.
Everyone else in the company seemed to be aware of Harvey’s exploitive treatment of women so I just assumed the brother he was so close to must have known as well. After years of a hot-and-cold relationship, Bob and I split up, but we remained friends.
It wasn’t until I published my memoir in 2010 that things turned nasty. The moment Harvey read it, he went ballistic.
He called me and started to threaten me. He said he was going to ‘f ****** sue’ me, that I was a liar, that I made him sound like a pervert and that I was ruining his reputation. His publicist ordered me to take out everything in the book about Harvey. I refused.
Bob shouted at me too and the next day there was a piece in the New York Post calling me a liar.
I told everyone I could what had happened but no one seemed to care or wanted to get involved. Harvey had become untouchable – until now.
Many people have asked why those in the industry didn’t raise the alarm. Well I did, or at least I tried to. Harvey called me a liar, just as he called countless other women before and after me liars.
Now the whole world knows who the real liar is.
We cowered nervously in the living room as he raged