Yard probes FIVE British ‘assaults by Weinstein’
Rape claim: Actress Lysette Anthony
HARVEY Weinstein is being investigated by British police over five alleged sex assaults in London, it was revealed last night.
As the Hollywood sleaze scandal continued to grow, actress Lysette Anthony claimed she was raped by the movie mogul and two other women have told Scotland Yard they were attacked by him. A total of five alleged assaults on the three span almost 30 years.
One attack is said to have taken place as recently as 2015. The three women each came forward within the last week, joining dozens of actresses who have told of sexual harassment, assault and rape by Weinstein.
Police in New York are also investigating claims of rape and sexual assault against the Hollywood producer, although he has not been arrested or charged with any offence. Weinstein, 65, has apologised for some of his behaviour but has denied any allegation of rape or any non-consensual sex.
His career in Hollywood appears to have been effectively ended by the growing scandal, though, and the organisation behind the Oscars has voted to expel him.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he would revoke Weinstein’s prestigious Legion d’Honneur and MPs in Britain have called for him to be stripped of his CBE.
Stars including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ange- lina Jolie and Cara Delevingne have told how Weinstein abused his position of power in the movie industry to attempt to pressure them into sexual encounters.
In the US, actresses Rose McGowan, Asia Argento and Lucia Evans, along with a fourth unnamed woman, have alleged they were raped by Weinstein and dozens more have told of harassment or assault.
Weinstein’s British wife Georgina Chapman has left him over the allegations and he has said he has voluntarily checked himself into a rehabilitation centre.
The Metropolitan Police said a team of officers has been set up to investigate claims of sexual assault by three women, but no arrests have been made.
Miss Anthony, who gave the Sunday Times a graphic description of how she was raped at her home in London in the late 1980s, said she met police last week.
A second woman told officers she was assaulted by Weinstein in West London in 1992. In an anonymous account of her ordeal to the Mail on Sunday, she said she was raped by Weinstein in the basement of his office in Fulham, West London, in 1992.
She said she had worked at Weinstein’s company Miramax and that female staff dreaded his visits, with one woman even wearing tatty clothes and chewing raw garlic in an attempt to repel him. During one visit he called her down to the office basement. When she went downstairs he was standing naked. The woman, now in her 50s, said: ‘He grabbed me and he was so big and powerful. He just ripped my clothes away and pushed me, threw me down.
‘I kept shouting, “No! Stop!” and tried to push him off. But he forced himself on me.
‘And I remember, this is the one thing I remember most clearly, I thought, I have to keep saying “No!” I was very aware that if a woman says no, it means no. And that was the one thing going through my mind throughout, “No, no, no, no!” It was over very quickly and then he just said, “Get out!” I remember walking home that night and it was cold and sodden. I was mortified and ashamed. I didn’t tell anyone. Back then I thought no one would believe me.’
Now a married mother-of-two, the woman said she left the film industry soon afterwards but still suffers nightmares.
The third woman has said she was attacked in 2010, 2011 and 2015, in Westminster and in Camden, North London.
A spokesman for Weinstein said: ‘Mr Wein- stein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but he unequivocally denies allegations of non-consensual sex.’
However, he has already been expelled from the the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the Oscars, amid predictions that it will now face demands for other Hollywood predators to be named and shamed. The 8,400-member academy voted overwhelmingly to kick Weinstein out, reflecting the industry’s revulsion – and its panic as it emerged that his behaviour has been covered up for decades.
In the past, the academy has refused to expel other scandal-hit members. They included director Roman Polanski, who admitted raping a 13-year- old girl, Bill Cosby, who faced dozens of sexual assault claims, and Mel Gibson, who admitted beating up an ex-girlfriend and delivering anti-Semitic tirade.
‘I was mortified and ashamed’
BRITISH actress Lysette Anthony claimed yesterday that she was raped by Harvey Weinstein after enduring a campaign of ‘predatory stalking’.
The Hollywood mogul forced his way into her home and raped her against a coat rack, leaving her ‘disgusted and embarrassed’, she alleged.
He then continued to harass her for almost two decades while she was ‘powerless’ to fight off his advances, she claimed.
Miss Anthony, 54, who starred in the BBC comedy Three Up, Two Down and is now in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks, went to police last week to report the sex attack, which Weinstein has denied.
She told The Sunday Times: ‘Harvey Weinstein raped me – not in a hotel suite with champagne and caviar on tap, but up against a coat rack on a grey morning in my own home. I was in my dressing gown and I answered the door to find Harvey standing there.
‘ He pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack in my tiny hall and started fumbling at my gown. It was disgusting.’
Describing the alleged sex attack, Miss Anthony said she tried to fight him off but he was too heavily built. ‘ Finally I just gave up – at least I was able to stop him kissing me,’ she added. ‘I kept my eyes shut tight, held my breath, just let him get on with it… It was pathetic, revolting. I remember lying in the bath later and crying.’
Miss Anthony said she first met Weinsteinthe sciencein New fiction York film after Krull filming in 1982, and later socially in London on a few occasions.
She had come to consider him as a friend, she said, even after he ‘grabbed’ her while they were hav- ing drinks at his rented house in Chelsea, West London. She said she ran away after he suddenly stripped off and lunged at her, but she viewed it as a drunken ‘ clumsy fumble’ until he then began stalking her. ‘It was the last thing I expected,’ she added. ‘That was when the predatory stalking began.’ He turned up once at her home and was sent away by a friend, but returned one morning when the alleged rape occurred in the late 1980s. Miss Anthony said she did not consider going to the police at the time, adding: ‘There hadn’t been a knife. He wasn’t a stranger. I was disgusted and embarrassed, but I was at home.
‘I thought I should just forget the whole disgusting incident. I blamed myself. I’d been an idiot to think he and I were just friends.’
She did not see him again until a year later when he contacted her and took her out for dinner before buying her a coat, she said. But after she starred in the Woody Allen comedy Husbands and Wives in 1992, he began calling her again and asked her agent to set up meetings between them.
Miss Anthony said: ‘ No one turned down an opportunity to meet Harvey Weinstein – no one. I’d never told my agent about the rape, so it was impossible to explain why I didn’t want to see him.
‘The meetings would start with a chat in a hotel suite. The assistants would disappear and then he’d disappear and return in a robe demanding a massage. By then I’d just given up. I knew I was powerless and at least I wouldn’t have to do much. I was just a body, young flesh. It wouldn’t take long and no one knew.’
She said Weinstein was ‘ the career- changing kingmaker’ in Hollywood, adding: ‘ He had the power to end my career. And I had to work to survive.’
Miss Anthony, who now lives in Liverpool, said the encounters continued until he ‘finally let go of me’ in 2002.
She added: ‘ Can you imagine what it was like, never knowing when he was going to show up and putting up with that big lumbering brute all those years?’
The mother-of-one was married twice in the 1990s but both marriages ended in divorce.
She spoke to police last week and her allegation of sexual assault has been passed to Scotland Yard to investigate.
After contacting Merseyside Police with her claims, she posted a photo on Twitter of a crime number handwritten on a piece of pink heart-shaped notepaper, saying she felt ‘sick’ and ‘sad’.
Weinstein’s spokesman said: ‘Any allegations of non- consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein.’
‘I knew I was powerless’