Harvey Weinstein allegations now include rape
‘New Yorker’ report details a pattern of abusive conduct
Five days after The New York Times published a blistering report detailing nearly 30 years of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, the magazine The New Yorker has published its own explosive investigative report that includes accusations of rape and sexual assault.
The report includes new accounts from three women who say Weinstein forced them to perform or receive oral sex and forced vaginal sex, as well as four women who told the magazine they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. It also includes an audio clip from a 2015 New York Police Department sting operation in which Weinstein can be heard pres- suring a woman to come into his hotel room and seemingly admitting groping her.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which declined to prosecute after the 2015 investigation, issued a statement Tuesday saying Weinstein’s pattern of “mistreating women, as recounted in recent reports, is disgraceful and shocks the conscience.”
“If we could have prosecuted Harvey Weinstein for the conduct that occurred in 2015, we would have,” Chief Assistant DA Karen Friedman-Agnifilo said in a statement provided to USA TODAY. The statement said that what emerged from the audio was not enough to prove a crime under New York law.
In the audio clip, Weinstein can be heard pressuring model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who told The New Yorker she met Weinstein at a show he was producing at Radio City Music Hall before he asked her to visit his TriBeCa office, where he lunged at her. She reported the incident to the Special Victims Division, which planned an operation in which Gutierrez wore a wire to extract a confession.
“Don’t embarrass me,” Weinstein tells her before admitting to groping her. “I’m used to that,” he says. “I won’t do it again.”
Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow added their voices to Guterriez’s on Tuesday. In another report in The Times, the actresses detail similar stories from earlier in their careers that further illuminate Weinstein’s alleged pattern of abuse: The movie mogul would lure up-and-coming talent to his offices or hotel rooms under the pretext of professional meetings, then pressure them into sexual contact and threaten their careers if they spoke out.
When Paltrow was 22, she tells The Times, Weinstein hired her as the lead in the Jane Austen adaptation Emma. Before shooting began, he called her to his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a meeting that ended with Weinstein placing his hands on her and suggesting they head to the bedroom for massages.
Jolie had a similar story from the publicity tour for Playing by Heart in the late 1990s, she told The Times, saying Weinstein made advances on her in a hotel room, which she rejected.
“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 told the newspaper in an email.
Through a spokesman Tuesday, Weinstein responded to the New Yorker allegations and “unequivocally” denied any allegations of “non-consensual sex.”