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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFrom Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein's Accusers Tell Their Stories
Multiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.
By Ronan Farrow
10:47 A.M.
Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, The Crying Game, Shakespeare in Love, and The Kings Speech. Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. 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. 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, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God.
For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This 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. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until nowWeinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on herbecause she feared that Weinstein would crush her. I know he has crushed a lot of people before, Argento said. Thats why this storyin my case, its twenty years old, some of them are olderhas never come out.
Last week, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, a story that led to the resignation of four members of his companys all-male board, and to Weinsteins firing from the company.
The story, however, is more complex, and there is more to know and to understand. 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, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Timess revelations, and also include far more serious claims.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories?mbid=social_twitter
Orrex
(63,213 posts)Divide his property and holdings among his victims.
Throck
(2,520 posts)WhiskeyGrinder
(22,355 posts)The stakes are different, is all.
IronLionZion
(45,447 posts)and how the people with the power and money can control some aspiring actress/actor's career it is probably very common for them to abuse that power. There's a good chance it happens more than other industries because reporting it could ruin someone's career more in the entertainment industry than other professions. I bet quite a few folks get benefits from keeping quiet or punished for speaking out.
This is all guesses. I doubt there would be accurate data on the issue.
50 Shades Of Blue
(10,004 posts)Among everyone who was anyone in Hollywood. I find it hard to believe the denials by big names who claim they had no idea. This is not good for Democrats who took money from him, either. It's hard to believe none of them had heard the rumors.
chowder66
(9,070 posts)If any other settlements based on sexual allegations are made or if more than one other complaint comes to light the confidentiality in the agreement becomes null and void. All monies paid remain with the plaintiff.
I'm disappointed that those that worked at the company and knew of multiple assaults cared more about keeping their job than the rape and molestation of multiple women.