Update: The Weinstein Company’s board has fired Harvey Weinstein after reports of sexual harassment complaints against him. Find more coverage here.
Two decades ago, the 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?” Ms. Judd said she remembers thinking.
In
2014, Mr. 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
Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a
female assistant said Mr. 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,” Ms. O’Connor said in
the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr.
Weinstein.
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An
investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed
allegations against Mr. 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
Company.
During
that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual
harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at
least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials
speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times
found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997,
an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms.
O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the
agreements.
In
a statement to The Times on Thursday afternoon, Mr. 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.”
I am a 28 year old woman trying to make a living and a career. Harvey Weinstein is a 64 year old, world famous man and this is his company. The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10.
— From Lauren O’Connor‘s memo
Lisa
Bloom, a lawyer advising Mr. Weinstein, said in a statement that “he
denies many of the accusations as patently false.” In comments to The
Times earlier this week, Mr. Weinstein said that many claims in Ms.
O’Connor’s memo were “off base” and that they had parted on good terms.
He
and his representatives declined to comment on any of the settlements,
including providing information about who paid them. But Mr. Weinstein
said that in addressing employee concerns about workplace issues, “my
motto is to keep the peace.”
Ms.
Bloom, who has been advising Mr. Weinstein over the last year on gender
and power dynamics, called him “an old dinosaur learning new ways.” She
said she had “explained to him that due to the power difference between
a major studio head like him and most others in the industry, whatever
his motives, some of his words and behaviors can be perceived as
inappropriate, even intimidating.”
Though Ms. O’Connor had been writing only about a two-year period, her memo echoed other women’s complaints. Mr. 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 Mr. 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 public, he presents himself as a liberal lion, a champion of women
and a winner of not just artistic but humanitarian awards.
In 2015, the year Ms. O’Connor wrote her memo, his company distributed “The Hunting Ground,”
a documentary about campus sexual assault. A longtime Democratic donor,
he hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last
year. He employed Malia Obama, the oldest daughter of former President
Barack Obama, as an intern this year, and 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 nationwide women’s marches, Mr. Weinstein joined the parade.
“From
the outside, it seemed golden — the Oscars, the success, the remarkable
cultural impact,” said Mark Gill, former president of Miramax Los
Angeles when the company was owned by Disney. “But behind the scenes, it
was a mess, and this was the biggest mess of all,” he added, referring
to Mr. Weinstein’s treatment of women.
Dozens
of Mr. 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.
Mr.
Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employees of the Weinstein
Company have contracts saying they will not criticize it or its leaders
in a way that could harm its “business reputation” or “any employee’s
personal reputation,” a recent document shows. And most of the women
accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them
from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them.
Charles
Harder, a lawyer representing Mr. Weinstein, said it was not unusual to
enter into settlements to avoid lengthy and costly litigation. He
added, “It’s not evidence of anything.”
I am a professional and have tried to be professional. I am not treated that way however. I am sexualized and diminished.
— From Lauren O’Connor‘s memo
At Fox News, where the conservative icons Roger E. Ailes and Bill O’Reilly
were accused of harassment, women have received payouts well into the
millions of dollars. But 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 Ms. O’Connor’s 2015 memo, some Weinstein Company board
members and executives, including Mr. 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 Mr. Weinstein, Ms. O’Connor withdrew her complaint and
thanked him for the career opportunity he had given her.
“The parties made peace very quickly,” Ms. Bloom said.
Through
her lawyer, Nicole Page, Ms. 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,” Ms. O’Connor wrote. “But remaining silent is
causing me great distress.”
In
speaking out about her hotel episode, Ms. 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.”
A Common Narrative
Ms.
Nestor, a law and business school student, accepted Mr. Weinstein’s
breakfast invitation at the Peninsula because she did not want to miss
an opportunity, she later told colleagues. After she arrived, he offered
to help her career while boasting about a series of famous actresses he
claimed to have slept with, according to accounts that colleagues
compiled after hearing her story and then sent on to company executives.
“She
said he was very persistent and focused though she kept saying no for
over an hour,” one internal document said. Ms. Nestor, who declined to
comment for this article, refused his bargain, the records noted. “She
was disappointed that he met with her and did not seem to be interested
in her résumé or skill set.” The young woman chose not to report the
episode to human resources personnel, but the allegations came to
management’s attention through other employees.
Across
the years and continents, accounts of Mr. Weinstein’s conduct share a
common narrative: Women reported to a hotel for what they thought were
work reasons, only to discover that Mr. Weinstein, who has been married
for most of three decades, sometimes seemed to have different interests.
His home base was New York, but his rolling headquarters were luxury
hotels: the Peninsula Beverly Hills and the Savoy in London, the Hôtel
du Cap-Eden-Roc near the Cannes Film Festival in France and the Stein Eriksen Lodge near the Sundance Film Festival.
Working
for Mr. Weinstein could mean getting him out of bed in the morning and
doing “turndown duty” late at night, preparing him for sleep. Like the
colleague cited in Ms. O’Connor’s memo, some junior employees required
to perform those tasks said they were disturbing.
In
interviews, eight women described varying behavior by Mr. Weinstein:
appearing nearly or fully naked in front of them, requiring them to be
present while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or initiating
one himself. The women, typically in their early or middle 20s and
hoping to get a toehold in the film industry, said he could switch
course quickly — meetings and clipboards one moment, intimate comments
the next. One woman advised a peer to wear a parka when summoned for
duty as a layer of protection against unwelcome advances.
Laura
Madden, a former employee who said Mr. Weinstein prodded her for
massages at hotels in Dublin and London beginning in 1991, said he had a
way of making anyone who objected feel like an outlier. “It was so
manipulative,” she said in an interview. “You constantly question
yourself — am I the one who is the problem?”
Document
Statement From Harvey Weinstein
The New York Times received the following statement from
Harvey Weinstein responding to allegations about his treatment of women
in Hollywood.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Mr. Weinstein said.
Most
women who told The Times that they experienced misconduct by Mr.
Weinstein had never met one another. They range in age from early 20s to
late 40s and live in different cities. Some said they did not report
the behavior because there were no witnesses and they feared retaliation
by Mr. Weinstein. Others said they felt embarrassed. But most confided
in co-workers.
Ms.
Madden later told Karen Katz, a friend and colleague in the
acquisitions department, about Mr. Weinstein’s overtures, including a
time she locked herself in the bathroom of his hotel room, sobbing. “We
were so young at the time,” said Ms. Katz, now a documentary filmmaker.
“We did not understand how wrong it was or how Laura should deal with
it.”
Others
in the London office said the same. “I was pretty disturbed and angry,”
said Sallie Hodges, another former employee, recalling the accounts she
heard from colleagues. “That’s kind of the way things were.”
The
human resources operation was considered weak in New York and worse in
London, so some employees banded together in solidarity. “If a female
executive was asked to go to a meeting solo, she and a colleague would
generally double up” so as not to be alone with Mr. Weinstein, recalled
Mr. Gill, the former president of Miramax Los Angeles.
Many
women who worked with Mr. Weinstein said they never experienced sexual
harassment or knew of anyone who did, and recalled him as a boss who
gave them valuable opportunities at young ages. Some described long and
satisfying careers with him, praising him as a mentor and advocate.
But
in interviews, some of the former employees who said they had troubling
experiences with Mr. Weinstein asked a common question: How could
allegations repeating the same pattern — young women, a powerful male
producer, even some of the same hotels — have accumulated for almost
three decades?
“It
wasn’t a secret to the inner circle,” said Kathy DeClesis, Bob
Weinstein’s assistant in the early 1990s. She supervised a young woman
who left the company abruptly after an encounter with Harvey Weinstein
and who later received a settlement, according to several former
employees.
Speaking
up could have been costly. A job with Mr. Weinstein was a privileged
perch at the nexus of money, fame and art, and plenty of his former
assistants have risen high in Hollywood. He could be charming and
generous: gift baskets, flowers, personal or career help and cash. At
the Cannes Film Festival, according to several former colleagues, he
sometimes handed out thousands of dollars as impromptu bonuses.
Mr.
Weinstein was a volcanic personality, though, given to fits of rage and
personal lashings of male and female employees alike. When a female
guest of his had to wait for a hotel room upgrade, he yelled that Ms.
O’Connor would be better off marrying a “fat, rich Jewish” man because
she was probably just good for “being a wife” and “making babies,” she
wrote in her memo. (He added some expletives, she said.) His treatment
of women was sometimes written off as just another form of toxicity,
according to multiple former employees.
In
the fall of 1998, a 25-year-old London assistant named Zelda Perkins
confronted Mr. Weinstein. According to former colleagues, she and
several co-workers had been regularly subjected to inappropriate
requests or comments in hotel rooms, and she was particularly concerned
about the treatment of another woman in the office. She told Mr.
Weinstein that he had to stop, according to the former colleagues, and
that she would go public or initiate legal action unless he changed his
behavior.
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We talk to the Times reporters who found three decades of allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Steve
Hutensky, one of Miramax’s entertainment lawyers, was dispatched to
London to negotiate a settlement with Ms. Perkins and her lawyer. He
declined to comment for this article.
Ms.
Perkins, now a theater producer in London, also declined to comment for
this article, saying that she could not discuss her work at Miramax or
whether she had entered into any agreements.
Months after the settlement, Mr. Weinstein triumphed at the Oscars, with “Life Is Beautiful” and “Shakespeare in Love”
winning 10 awards. A few years later, Mr. Weinstein, who had produced a
series of British-themed movies, was made a Commander of the British
Empire, an honorary title just short of knighthood.
‘Coercive Bargaining’
For
actors, a meeting with Mr. Weinstein could yield dazzling rewards:
scripts, parts, award campaigns, magazine coverage, influence on
lucrative endorsement deals. He knew how to blast small films to box
office success, and deliver polished dramas like “The King’s Speech” and
popular attractions like the “Scary Movie” franchise. Mr. Weinstein’s
films helped define femininity, sex and romance, from Catherine
Zeta-Jones in “Chicago” to Jennifer Lawrence in “Silver Linings
Playbook.”
But
movies were also his private leverage. When Mr. Weinstein invited Ms.
Judd to breakfast in Beverly Hills, she had been shooting the thriller “Kiss the Girls”
all night, but the meeting seemed too important to miss. After arriving
at the hotel lobby, she was surprised to learn that they would be
talking in his suite; she decided to order cereal, she said, so the food
would come quickly and she could leave.
Mr.
Weinstein soon issued invitation after invitation, she said. Could he
give her a massage? When she refused, he suggested a shoulder rub. She
rejected that too, she recalled. He steered her toward a closet, asking
her to help pick out his clothing for the day, and then toward the
bathroom. Would she watch him take a shower? she remembered him saying.
“I
said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me
with some new ask,” Ms. Judd said. “It was all this bargaining, this
coercive bargaining.”
To
get out of the room, she said, she quipped that if Mr. Weinstein wanted
to touch her, she would first have to win an Oscar in one of his
movies. She recalled feeling “panicky, trapped,” she said in the
interview. “There’s a lot on the line, the cachet that came with
Miramax.”
Not
long afterward, she related what had happened to her mother, the singer
Naomi Judd, who confirmed their conversation to a Times reporter. Years
later, Ashley Judd appeared in two Weinstein films without incident,
she said. In 2015, she shared an account of the episode in the hotel
room with “Variety” without naming the man involved.
In
1997, Mr. Weinstein reached a previously undisclosed settlement with
Rose McGowan, then a 23-year-old-actress, after an episode in a hotel
room during the Sundance Film Festival. The $100,000 settlement was “not
to be construed as an admission” by Mr. Weinstein, but intended to
“avoid litigation and buy peace,” according to the legal document, which
was reviewed by The Times. Ms. McGowan had just appeared in the slasher film “Scream” and would later star in the television show “Charmed.” She declined to comment.
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Increased Scrutiny
Just
months before Ms. O’Connor wrote her memo, a young female employee quit
after complaining of being forced to arrange what she believed to be
assignations for Mr. Weinstein, according to two people familiar with
her departure. The woman, who asked not to be identified to protect her
privacy, said a nondisclosure agreement prevented her from commenting.
Soon, complaints about Mr. Weinstein’s behavior prompted the board of his company to take notice.
In
March 2015, Mr. Weinstein had invited Ambra Battilana, an Italian model
and aspiring actress, to his TriBeCa office on a Friday evening to
discuss her career. Within hours, she called the police. Ms. Battilana
told them that Mr. Weinstein had grabbed her breasts after asking if
they were real and put his hands up her skirt, the police report says.
The
claims were taken up by the New York Police Department’s Special
Victims Squad and splashed across the pages of tabloids, along with
reports that the woman had worked with investigators to secretly record a
confession from Mr. Weinstein. The Manhattan district attorney’s office
later declined to bring charges.
But
Mr. Weinstein made a payment to Ms. Battilana, according to people
familiar with the settlement, speaking on the condition of anonymity
about the confidential agreement.
The
public nature of the episode concerned some executives and board
members of the Weinstein Company. (Harvey and Bob Weinstein together own
42 percent of the privately held business.) When several board members
pressed Mr. Weinstein about it, he insisted that the woman had set him
up, colleagues recalled.
Ms.
Battilana had testified in court proceedings against associates of
former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy who are accused of
procuring women for alleged sex parties, and the Italian news media also
reported that, years ago, Ms. Battilana accused a septuagenarian
boyfriend of sexual harassment, a complaint that was apparently
dismissed. Ms. Battilana did not respond to requests for comment. Her
lawyer, Mauro Rufini, could not be reached for comment.
After
the episode, Lance Maerov, a board member, said he successfully pushed
for a code of behavior for the company that included detailed language
about sexual harassment.
Then
Ms. O’Connor’s memo hit, with page after page of detailed accusations.
In describing the experiences of women at the company, including her
own, she wrote, “The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10.”
She
was a valued employee — Mr. Weinstein described her as “fantastic,” “a
great person,” “a brilliant executive” — so the complaint rattled top
executives, including Bob Weinstein. When the board was notified of it
by email, Mr. Maerov insisted that an outside lawyer determine whether
the allegations were true, he said in an interview.
But
the inquiry never happened. Mr. Weinstein had reached a settlement with
Ms. O’Connor, and there was no longer anything to investigate.
“Because
this matter has been resolved and no further action is required, I
withdraw my complaint,” Ms. O’Connor wrote in an email to the head of
human resources six days after sending her memo. She also wrote a letter
to Mr. Weinstein thanking him for the opportunity to learn about the
entertainment industry.
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