TO LASH A PREDATOR
l Jolie, Paltrow say Harvey preyed on them l 3 others accuse pervert exec of rape l Wife: He’s a fiend & I’m leaving him
AND THE AWARD for most sickening performance in a hotel suite goes to . . . Harvey Weinstein, again and again and again.
A trio of Oscar-winning actresses — Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Mira Sorvino — accused the portly Hollywood predator Tuesday of creepy hotel room come-ons early in their careers.
Once rejected, a vindictive Weinstein demanded their silence and tried to submarine their careers.
“I was a kid . . . I was petrified,” Paltrow, 45, told The New York Times about the hands-on harassment by Weinstein when she was just 22.
Weinstein, after inviting Paltrow to his Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel suite, suggested the pair head to the bedroom for massages. The actress recalled reeling on the car ride home after rejecting Weinstein’s unwanted attention.
“I thought you were my Uncle Harvey,” she remembered thinking.
The tale was eerily similar to the one told by Sorvino to The New Yorker for its bombshell report about the movie mogul’s alleged serial sexual assaults on young
S women in show biz. orvino, 50, described an unpleasant scene where she fled a Toronto hotel room in 1995 after the married Weinstein suddenly put his hands on her. His wife said Tuesday she was leaving him, People magazine reported.
“He started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable,” Sorvino recalled. “And then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around.”
A unnerved Sorvino, looking for the right words to keep Weinstein at bay, announced it was against her religion to date married men and fled the room.
Sorvino, like many of the other women coming forward with terrifying tales of 65-year-old Weinstein’s behavior, said she was afraid and intimidated to go public with the story.
Sorvino and “Pulp Fiction” actress Rosanna Arquette told The New Yorker their rejection of Weinstein hurt their careers: Roles lost to other actresses, projects that went on without them.
Both suspect Weinstein, a fellow Oscar-winner, was behind their problems. Weinstein — fired Sunday from his perch atop the Weinstein Co. — issued a statement Tuesday declaring his innocence against the new allegations, which include raping three women and assaulting 13 more.
“Any allegations of nonconsensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein,” read the statement from spokeswoman Sallie Hofmeister. “Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.” The Weinstein Co. board of directors issued a statement denying that anyone, including Weinstein’s brother
Bob, knew anything about the allegations.
The members “are shocked and dismayed by the recently emerged allegations of extreme sexual misconduct and sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein,” they said. “These alleged actions are antithetical to human decency. These allegations come as an utter surprise to the board.”
Jolie, without going into detail, said she was targeted by Weinstein in a hotel room in the late 1990s after shooting the film “Playing By Heart.”
“I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,” Jolie, 42, told the newspaper. “This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.”
The allegations from the A-list stars continued unabated, with Arquette and actress Heather Graham joining the growing number of Tinseltown stars going public with their tales.
Graham, 47, recalled a summons to meet Weinstein in his office, where she found a pile of scripts sitting on his desk. Weinstein said two things: He wanted Graham in one of his movies. And he could sleep with any woman he wanted when outside New York.
“I walked out of the meeting feeling uneasy,” she said in a column for Variety. “There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.”
And Arquette, in the New Yorker story, recalled how Weinstein surprised her at a supposed meeting to pick up a script by answering his hotel room door in a white bathrobe.
Weinstein complained of a stiff neck and asked the actress for a massage.
“Then he grabbed my hand,” she recalled, moving it first to his neck and then toward his crotch.
“My heart was really racing,” Arquette continued. “I was in a fight-or-flight moment.”
After the actress declared, “I will never do that,” she recalled, the moviemaker named two other women whose careers took off after they acquiesced to his overtures.
Arquette, 58, believes Weinstein cost her at least one part and “made things very difficult for me for years.”
Paltrow recalled going home to her then-boyfriend, Brad Pitt, and detailing the allegations. Pitt confronted Weinstein at a movie premiere, warning the producer to keep his hands off Paltrow.
“He got right in his face and made it absolutely clear this was unacceptable and something that was never going to happen again,” a source close to Pitt told the Daily News.
“He did not back down and was very, very strong. Nothing ever did happen again,” the source said.
The actress told The Times that Weinstein subsequently called to blast her for letting anyone know what happened. “I was expected to keep the secret,” she said.
Actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, both frequent Weinstein collaborators, issued statements condemning the honcho on Tuesday.
But their words rang hollow with actress Rose McGowan, one of the women The Times named as being paid by the studio head to remain silent. The 44-year-old accused the pair of being fully aware of Weinstein’s behavior.
“@benaffleck ‘GODDAMNIT! I TOLD HIM TO STOP DOING THAT’ you said that to my face. The press conf I was made to go to after assault. You lie,” she tweeted.
I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did. ANGELINA JOLIE