Ex-assistant breaks silence on sex abuse

A former assistant to Harvey Weinstein who took a monetary settlement from the disgraced filmmaker that included a nondisclosure agreement broke her silence Monday, saying she endured his sexual harassment for years.

“I want to publicly break my nondisclosure agreement,” Zelda Perkins told the Financial Times. “Unless somebody does this, there won’t be a debate about how egregious these agreements are and the amount of duress that victims are put under.”

Perkins, one of at least eight alleged victims to receive settlements from Weinstein in ex- change for signing an agreement barring them from publicly discussing their accusations, said her ex-boss’ creepy behavior started the very first time she was alone with him.

“He went out of the room and came back in his underwear,” Perkins, who worked out of Miramax’s London office, told the Financial Times. “He asked me if I would give him a massage. Then he asked if he could massage me.”

“This was his behavior on every occasion I was alone with him,” Perkins said. “I often had to wake him up in the hotel in the mornings and he would try to pull me into bed.”

Perkins, who now works for the Robert Fox theater production company, said her breaking point finally came after her colleague came to her “white as a sheet and shaking” with a similar story.

It was September 1998 at the Venice Film Festival.

“She told me something terrible had happened. She was in shock and crying and finding it very hard to talk,” said Perkins. “I was furious, deeply upset and very shocked. I said, ‘ We need to go to the police,’ but she was too distressed. Neither of us knew what to do in a foreign environment.”

A month later, Perkins, who was 24 at the time, and the unnamed woman agreed to split a roughly $330,000 settlement contingent on signing the NDAs.

The deals included a handful of stipulations, including that Weinstein undergo therapy “for as long as his therapist deems necessary” and that Miramax create a procedure to log complaints. The company was also supposed to make a substantial donation to a women’s charity — which she said never happened.

If a complaint was filed against Weinstein within two years of Perkins’ contract and it resulted in either a settlement of either roughly $46,000 or six months’ salary, Miramax would report it to Disney, its then-owner, or fire Weinstein.

It’s unclear whether Miramax fully abided by the deal.