Weinstein ex-assistant: I tried to stop him in ’98
LONDON — Harvey Weinstein’s former assistant says she tried to stop him from abusing women two decades ago, making him sign a legal agreement that required him to seek therapy and mend his ways.
Zelda Perkins quit Weinstein’s film company in 1998, along with a colleague who accused the movie mogul of trying to rape her.
As part of a settlement, Perkins signed a nondisclosure agreement. It kept her silent, but also committed Weinstein to attend therapy for three years. And it required the company to spill the beans to its then-owner, the Walt Disney Co., or to fire Weinstein if he made any more payouts over alleged wrongdoing.
Perkins said her hope was to “create protection for people in the future.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Perkins chose the therapist Weinstein was to consult. She doesn’t know whether he ever went to the sessions.
“I have no idea if any of the obligations were upheld,” Perkins told The Associated Press yesterday.
She said that a year after she left the company she ran into Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival, and “he told me that everything I had done was pointless.”
Perkins is due to testify today before the British Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee, which is investigating sexual harassment and the use of nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs. Conservative lawmaker Maria Miller, who chairs the committee, says there are concerns the gag orders might be used to “mask the scale of this problem.”
NDAs are common in the corporate world, but Perkins says her experience shows they can be used to let perpetrators get away with wrongdoing while silencing their victims.
The agreement Perkins signed kept her quiet about Weinstein’s behavior for almost 20 years. Perkins was in her early 20s and says she had barely heard of Weinstein when she began working for his then-company, Miramax, in London.
Perkins says she wasn’t aware of any allegations of sexual assault until a younger colleague came to her in distress during the 1998 Venice Film Festival and said Weinstein had tried to rape her. The pair flew back to England and went to lawyers, “with the presumption that we were going to prosecute him in court.”
Told they could not prosecute in England because the alleged crime took place in Italy, the two women ended up negotiating an agreement that saw each receive 125,000 pounds (now $177,000).
While Perkins managed to get the agreement to impose conditions on Weinstein, she said the negotiating process “was humiliating and degrading. I was made to feel like I was in the wrong for trying to expose his behavior.”