Decades of sexual harassment allegations
Harvey Weinstein, movie producer behind Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, takes leave,
Two decades ago, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.
“How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?” Judd said she remembers thinking.
In 2014, Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Co. executives.
The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.
“There is a toxic environment for women at this company,” O’Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Weinstein.
An investigation by the Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Co.
During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements.
Among the eight women was actress Rose McGowan, who allegedly had an incident with him in 1997 when she was 23.
In a statement Thursday, Weinstein said: “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I’m trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.” He added that he was working with therapists and planning to take a leave of absence to “deal with this issue head on.”
Lisa Bloom, a lawyer advising Weinstein, said in a statement that “he denies many of the accusations as patently false.” In comments to the Times earlier this week, Weinstein said that many claims in O’Connor’s memo were “off base” and that they parted on good terms.
He and his representatives declined to comment on any of the settlements.
Though O’Connor had been writing only about a two-year period, her memo echoed other women’s complaints. Weinstein required her to have casting discussions with aspiring actresses after they had private appointments in his hotel room, she said, her description matching those of other former employees. She suspected that she and other female Weinstein employees, she wrote, were being used to facilitate liaisons with “vulnerable women who hope he will get them work.”
The allegations piled up even as Weinstein helped define popular culture. He has collected six best-picture Oscars and turned out a number of touchstones, from the films Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting to the television show Project Runway.
In 2015, the year O’Connor wrote her memo, his company distributed The Hunting Ground, a documentary about campus sexual assault. He recently helped endow a faculty chair at Rutgers University in Gloria Steinem’s name. During the Sundance Film Festival in January, when Park City, Utah, held its version of the nationwide women’s marches, Weinstein joined the parade.
“From the outside, it seemed gold- en — the Oscars, the success, the remarkable cultural impact,” said Mark Gill, former president of Miramax Los Angeles, which was then owned by Disney. “But behind the scenes, it was a mess, and this was the biggest mess of all,” he added, referring to Weinstein’s treatment of women.
Dozens of Weinstein’s former and current employees, from assistants to top executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while they worked for him. Only a handful said they ever confronted him. Most of the women involved in the Weinstein agreements collected between roughly $80,000 and $150,000, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
In the wake of O’Connor’s 2015 memo, some Weinstein Co. board members and executives, including Weinstein’s brother and longtime partner, Bob, 62, were alarmed about the allegations, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the end, though, board members were assured there was no need to investigate. After reaching a settlement with Harvey Weinstein, O’Connor withdrew her complaint and thanked him for the career opportunity he had given her.
Through her lawyer, Nicole Page, O’Connor declined to be interviewed. In the memo, she explained how unnerved she was by what she witnessed or encountered while a literary scout and production executive at the company.
“I am just starting out in my career, and have been and remain fearful about speaking up,” O’Connor wrote. “But remaining silent is causing me great distress.”
In speaking out about her hotel episode, Judd said in a recent interview, “Women have been talking about Harvey amongst ourselves for a long time, and it’s simply beyond time to have the conversation publicly.”