![]() A female executive with the company described how Weinstein’s assistants and others served as a “honeypot”-they would initially join a meeting along with a woman Weinstein was interested in, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman. Some employees said that they were enlisted in a subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. Other employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout his companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way. Messages sent by Irwin Reiter, a senior company executive, to Emily Nestor, one of the women who alleged that she was harassed, described the “mistreatment of women” as a serial problem that the Weinstein Company had been struggling with in recent years. ![]() All sixteen said that the behavior was widely known within both Miramax and the Weinstein Company. They and others described a pattern of professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances on young actresses and models. Sixteen former and current executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies told me that they witnessed or had knowledge of unwanted sexual advances and touching at events associated with Weinstein’s films and in the workplace. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.” Four of the women I interviewed cited encounters in which Weinstein exposed himself or masturbated in front of them. Four women said that they had experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. Three of the women-among them Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans-told me that Weinstein had raped them, forcibly performing or receiving oral sex or forcing vaginal sex. Their allegations corroborate and overlap with the Times’s revelations, and also include far more serious claims. In the course of a ten-month investigation, I was told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them. The story, however, is complex, and there is more to know and to understand. On October 5th, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, an article that led to the resignation of four members of the Weinstein Company’s all-male board, and to Weinstein’s firing. “That’s why this story-in my case, it’s twenty years old, some of them are older-has never come out.” “I know he has crushed a lot of people before,” Argento said. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, said that she did not speak out until now-Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her-because she feared that Weinstein would “crush” her. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, payoffs, and legal threats to suppress their accounts. His behavior has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. ![]() His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, ranking just after Steven Spielberg and right before God.įor more than twenty years, Weinstein, who is now sixty-five, has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. He co-founded the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, helping to reinvent the model for independent films with movies including “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The Crying Game,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The English Patient,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. ![]() Since the establishment of the first studios, a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. The version below appears in the October 23, 2017, issue. ![]() This story was first published on on October 10, 2017, at 10:47 A. ![]()
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