Tag: Harvey Weinstein

Ed Pilkington on Weinstein’s aggressive lawyer from earlier this month:

Last week, Rotunno reduced one of the two main accusers in the trial, who alleges she was raped by Weinstein in a New York hotel in 2013, to uncontrollable sobbing during a total of nine hours of relentless grilling over two days. On the first of those days, the presiding judge had to halt proceedings after the witness suffered a panic attack.

Rotunno had been firing questions at her like bullets, ending each query with a shotgun “Correct?” “You were manipulating Mr Weinstein so you’d get invited to fancy parties, correct?” “You wanted to benefit from the power, correct?” “You wanted to use his power, correct?”

The lawyer self-identifies as the “ultimate feminist”, but again you wouldn’t know that from her courtroom posture. She has deployed all the old shibboleths that have been used over decades to discredit sex crimes accusers.

The witness was after the money, she was a serial liar, she may not have wanted sex with Weinstein but she did it anyway to get on in the film business – all those arguments and insinuations have been used by Rotunno and her henchmen.

Most extraordinarily, she has turned the very core of #MeToo – the notion that powerful men wield and abuse their power to force sex on women – on its head, suggesting to the jury that it was the six accusers who were the ones doing the manipulating and that the victim here was Weinstein.

And somehow the New York police and prosecutors were unable to ferret that out, and for some strange reason they believed the victims instead.

More on Harvey Weinstein from the Guardian Live:

His lawyer decided it was a good time to troll everyone:

Donna Rotunno, Weinstein’s lead lawyer, has also been talking to reporters outside court, promising an appeal and saying of her client, in a remark which may prove controversial: “He took it like a man.”

Oh yes? Meaning what? He jumped on the prosecutors and raped them? He used his superior strength to overpower women and then terrorized them into staying silent? He tried to threaten reporters and publishers into staying silent?

Saying “the fight is not over”, the Chicago-based lawyer said: “It is absolutely horrible for me to watch my client be taken into custody. We don’t feel good about that at all.”

“Harvey is very strong,” she added. “Harvey is unbelievably strong. He took it like a man. He knows that we will continue to fight for him and knows that this is not over.”

We know Harvey’s very strong. Several witnesses testified about his great strength.

Cyrus Vance gave a press conference after the verdict.

Vance had a stern message for Weinstein’s defense team, lead by the highly contentious Chicago lawyer Donna Rotunno, who approached the court proceedings as though it was #MeToo that was on trial and not her client. She even reduced one of the key witnesses – a woman the Guardian is not naming who alleged rape for which Weinstein was found guilty in the third degree today – to uncontrollable sobbing.

The witness didn’t take it like a man.

“I hope that after this verdict it will become more obvious that those kinds of attacks on survivors and victims will no longer work in this day and age,” he said. “It’s time that the defense stop using them.”

They probably do work though.

Harvey Weinstein found guilty.

The jury of seven men and five women at the New York supreme court took five days to reach their verdict. They found the defendant guilty of a criminal sex act in the first degree for forcing oral sex on the former Project Runway production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006.

The count carries a minimum prison sentence of five years and a maximum of up to 25 years.

The jury also convicted Weinstein of rape in the third degree. This relates to him raping a woman the Guardian is not naming, as her wishes for identification are not clear, in a New York hotel in 2013.

Weinstein was acquitted of three further charges, including the two most serious counts of predatory sexual assault which carried a possible life sentence and an alternative count of rape in the first degree.

Weird about the predatory part because as everyone is saying, what could be more predatory than Harvey Weinstein? But then, that’s the overall view we get from reading the papers, while the specific case is another matter.

He’s now in jail waiting to be sentenced.

The conviction marks the final comeuppance for a towering figure who wielded his power in the movie industry – as well as his commanding physical presence – over vulnerable young women seeking his help.

He should have decided he was trans. “My commanding physical presence is not a rape-assistant but a burden, a torment, a prison from which I have at last escaped.”

The details of the prosecution are very interesting.

The guilty verdict could also have a profound impact on the way sex crimes are prosecuted. The New York district attorney’s office took an enormous gamble in how they set up the trial.

Prosecutors chose as main accusers two women, both of whom continued to have close – and at times sexual – contact with Weinstein after they were attacked. In the past, prosecutors have almost always balked at such cases where coerced and consensual sex exists side-by-side, considering them too messy to secure guilty verdicts.

The fact that the tactic succeeded with the jury is a sign of the shifting sands of #MeToo. It suggests that prosecutors might have far more leeway in future to take on cases where victims continue to be in the thrall of their attackers after sexual assaults – a scenario which sex crimes experts say is all too common and yet up til now has been almost entirely neglected by the criminal courts.

It’s almost as if women matter.

Such a striking victory can be credited to the two intrepid prosecutors, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon and Meghan Hast, who meticulously laid out the defendant’s culpability. They did so against the headwinds generated by Weinstein’s lawyers led by the Chicago-based sex crimes defender Donna Rotunno who was so aggressive towards witnesses that she induced in one of the two main accusers a fully fledged panic attack.

There, spotted in the wild – one of the reasons rape is so seldom prosecuted and even more seldom convicted.

The prosecutors called 27 witnesses over 12 days, building up a profile of the movie producer as a cold and calculating sexual predator that ultimately overwhelmed defense arguments. They emphasized the vast gulf in power – and girth – between Weinstein and his victims.

He was a “famous and powerful Hollywood producer living a lavish lifestyle that most of us will never know”, Hast said, pointing out that he counted among his friends not only the elite of Hollywood but also world leaders like Bill Clinton. By contrast, the unnamed rape victim was brought up on a Washington state dairy farm.

It’s bizarre, when you think about it – he’s already got all kinds of power, and surely more sexual opportunity than he could use up, so what’s the point? It must be the predation itself that’s the point – i.e. the sadism.

But I’d better be careful, I wouldn’t want to kink-shame him.

Weinstein, 67, meticulously planned his attacks, carefully selecting his victims for their vulnerability and neediness. He set them loyalty tests that if they passed would then lead onto the next stage of his predatory grooming.

Which, being interpreted, means: he is one sick motherfucker.

I’m kink-shaming; sue me.

The rape victim described the defendant as a Jekyll and Hyde. “If he heard the word ‘no’, it was like a trigger for him,” she said.

As the evidence unfolded in courtroom 99, through the eerily similar accounts of all six women, it became clear that sex for Weinstein had nothing to do with seduction, romance and affection, let alone intimacy or love. As the rape victim testified, her attacker had to use a needle to inject himself in the penis with an erectile dysfunction medicine before he could carry out the assault.

It didn’t even have to do with sex in the ordinary sense, unless you consider sex to be inextricably entwined with sadism, which clearly some people do.

Harvey Weinstein will be the stuff of nightmares for a generation.

Speaking of horrible dudes who should not be allowed out –

A woman comedian was booed and two attendees kicked out after they protested the appearance of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein at an event for young performers in lower Manhattan on Wednesday night.

Weinstein turned up with an entourage to watch Actor’s Hour, a monthly event “dedicated to artists” at the Downtime bar in the Lower East Side.

Weinstein was welcome, it was the people who objected to his presence who were not. Power and money always come out on top, it seems.

One comedian, Kelly Bachman, called him out in her act onstage, referring to him as “the elephant in the room” and “Freddy Krueger.”

“I didn’t know we had to bring our own Mace and rape whistles to Actor’s Hour,” said Bachman in a video posted to Instagram.

Some audience members, ostensibly men, then started booing. “Shut up,” said one person.

“Ostensibly” isn’t the right word there; it should be “apparently” or “reportedly” or the like. Anyway the point is, male solidarity and closing the ranks against women who don’t think women should be treated as public receptacles.

Bachman told BuzzFeed News that she’d previously had nightmares about Weinstein and that seeing him in the audience during her gig was her “nightmare come to life.”

“It kind of felt like old-school Harvey to me — having his own table in a Lower East Side bar, surrounded by actors,” said Bachman.

At one moment during her comedy set, which is about sex, she yelled “consent is important” and stared directly at Weinstein.

“I didn’t want to make everyone comfortable,” said Bachman. “I didn’t want to make light of this person and make everyone feel good about it.”

Really? But that’s the American way – endless redemption for men, endless hostility for women.

Later, a male comedian joked about Bachman bringing up Weinstein.

“I’d like to address the elephant in the room,” said Andrew B. Silas, a comedian visiting from Florida. “Who in this room produced Good Will Hunting? ‘Cause that shit was great.”

Aw yeah, that’s the important thing, he produced a good movie (though the screenwriter and director and actors and photographer probably also had something to do with the quality). Who cares about the women he gored along the way?

One woman confronted Weinstein and was told to leave.

Moments after Stuckless confronted Weinstein, so did Amber Rollo, a 31-year-old comedian who had attended the show to support her friend, Bachman.

“She’s right,” Rollo told Weinstein, she recalled. “You’re a fucking monster. What are you doing out here? Fuck you.”

Rollo said one of the men accompanying Weinstein called her a “cunt” in response, while another woman at Weinstein’s table guided her outside. Rollo said she was disappointed that Weinstein was welcomed at the event and that those who questioned his presence were booed or removed from the venue.

It is quite “disappointing.”

As if in preparation for the new Brett Kavanaugh allegations, last week Terry Gross interviewed Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in the Times. Weinstein fought even more dirty than we knew. Men rape or assault women; women report it; men circle the wagons to punish women for reporting it; rinse and repeat.

Terry Gross: Harvey Weinstein created many obstacles to prevent women from revealing his alleged sexual misconduct and prevent reporters from investigating it. My guests, New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, were the first reporters to manage to get enough sources and documents to break the story. They tell how they did it in their new book “She Said.” It includes new information about how and why the women came forward and what they allege. The book also reveals new information about Weinstein’s legal team and what they did to protect him, discredit his accusers and create obstacles for journalists.

Kantor and Twohey found that the legal system and government agencies often work in favor of the harasser, not the victim. Weinstein is now awaiting criminal trial for alleged rape and other sexual abuse and faces several civil suits from actresses and employees. Kantor and Twohey have become experts in reporting on the issue of sexual abuse. Between the two of them, they’ve reported on allegations against Donald Trump, Louis C.K., Brett Kavanaugh and Jeffrey Epstein.

The whole unsavory rotting swampy stew we’re in.

They start with the confidentiality agreements.

GROSS: One of the obstacles you faced in reporting this story was the confidentiality agreements that Harvey Weinstein had women sign. At what point did he pressure women to sign these confidentiality agreements? There were also payoffs because it was, like, money to the woman in exchange for her signing this confidentiality agreement, this nondisclosure agreement.

JODI KANTOR: So here’s the pattern we found again and again with these suffocating nondisclosure agreements that women signed – after an allegation of harassment or assault, a woman would go to a lawyer for help, and often that woman would feel like, OK, the lawyer’s going to make this right. I’m going to get help. We’re going to be able to rectify the situation in some way. And again and again, we found that what these women were told was, well, actually, your best option is a settlement, a confidential settlement.

And what that means is that the woman gets money, and it’s essentially money for silence. It’s hush money. And in most cases, she has to agree to really restrictive conditions in terms of who she can ever tell about this again. Some of the conditions we found in some of the Weinstein settlements were so extreme, like women not being able to tell therapists or accountants about what had happened without special permission. Rowena Chiu, one of the alleged victims, never told her husband what had happened to her.

They never actually spell out how the lawyers convince the women that signing away their right to talk for a sum of money is their best option. I wish they had, but no doubt it’s in the book. My guess is that it’s because prosecution of rape and/or sexual abuse is so difficult and convictions are so vanishingly rare.

But, Kantor points out, what this means is that the abusers are protected.

And so in the moment, these settlements, these confidentiality agreements, can seem like the best available option because if you’re a woman who’s faced something like this, you get to keep your privacy, you get some recompense, financially. But when you look at them as a pattern, you see that they have protected alleged predators again and again; not just in the Weinstein case – this is something much larger.

These were used by Bill O’Reilly to silence women. These were used by Larry Nassar to silence women. Megan and I had both covered women and gender and sexual violence combined for many, many years before we came to this, and yet we never understood, until 2017, that there was this kind of secret settlement system happening all over the country that sort of pretends to be a way of dealing with sexual harassment and assault but also, in a way, kind of enables it.

Women who get such settlements are terrified of breaking them.

And so this is, like, you know, two years after this story; these settlements are extremely prevalent. They’re being signed. Women are being pressured into signing them every single day in this country. And it’s not just the restrictive clauses that we found so jaw-dropping. I think it’s the fact that there are these lawyers, some of these kind of self-proclaimed women’s advocates, like Gloria Allred for example. You know, she’s been involved in, you know, negotiating these settlements that have silenced women, including one of the victims of Harvey Weinstein in 2004.

GROSS: Yes, and that was kind of remarkable because Gloria Allred is famous for defending women who stand up and accuse their harassers, and she led one of her clients to sign an NDA. But she justified that to you. She said, this was going to be the best outcome for my client.

KANTOR: That’s the traditional argument. But what these – Gloria Allred and her firm were also involved in at least one confidential settlement involving Bill O’Reilly and also another involving Larry Nassar. And so she and her firm had a role in keeping all of these stories quiet. When you look at these settlements individually, they don’t look so bad because, truly, it can often seem like a woman’s best option, you know, given a very difficult situation. She can avoid being branded a tattletale or a traitor, can preserve her hiring prospects. She’s able to keep it really private.

But then when you look at the whole landscape of these settlements, you say, first of all, this appears to have enabled a lot of predators. And second of all, is this really the way we want our country to be dealing with the problem of sexual harassment and assault – by paying women to not talk about their own experiences? And a lot of these clauses, to be honest, they kind of defy common sense. How could you not tell your mother or your brother or a guy you meet six months later and marry that this happened to you and that you got potentially a sizable payment because of what happened?

They talk about Lisa Bloom, a prominent lawyer and putative feminist, but she ended up working for Weinstein.

TWOHEY: Right. Right. So there was, once again, you know, Lisa Bloom – this, you know, prominent feminist attorney who has publicly battled against sexual harassment and sexual assault and has been such a prominent victims advocate – in 2016, submitted a memo to Harvey Weinstein basically documenting all of the efforts that she was willing to take to help him undermine his accusers. She basically is saying, I’m going to harness all of what I’ve learned in the course of working with so many victims over the years. And I’m going to help you use that against victims.

And so she says, for example, I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world – and she’s speaking about Rose McGowan in this case – because I’ve represented so many of them. They start out as impressive, bold women. But the more one presses for evidence, the weaknesses and lies are revealed. She goes on to sort of spell out, in bullet points, all the different tactics that she’s willing to help Weinstein take.

One, initiating friendly contact with her through me or other good intermediary, and after establishing a relationship, work out a, quote, unquote, “win-win.” Key question, what does she want? But then (laughter), in the second one, she’s saying – she’s spelling out a plan for a counter-ops online campaign to push back and call her out as a pathological liar. A few well-placed articles now will go a long way if things blow up for us down the line. We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued so that when somebody Googles her, this is what pops up, and she is discredited.

And guess what, that’s exactly what happened. I remember it.

And the memo goes on and on. And so it was really one of those moments where, when we were able to obtain this – and we obtained some other confidential records – her billing records that she submitted to Harvey, in which she spelled out all of the other work that she did for him over the course of the many months in 2017, including meeting with sort of private investigators, who had been hired to dig up dirt on his accusers. Our jaws dropped when we read these records.

Well, let’s be realistic: Harvey had all the money.

Then they talk about Gwyneth Paltrow, and Weinstein’s obsession with her, and the mystery of why he was so obsessed.

Kantor: He showed up at a party at her house early. She called us from the bathroom completely panicked. In the sort of series of final confrontations about the story that took place at the New York Times, Weinstein kept hammering us. Are you talking to Gwyneth? Is Gwyneth in the story? And at that point, she was still a totally secret source. And we couldn’t figure out why he was so obsessed with something that wasn’t even part of the story. The answer only became clear over a course of weeks and months after we broke the story.

As more and more Weinstein victims came forward, they said publicly, they told us and they even told Paltrow that what Weinstein had said to them, in the course of harassing or assaulting them, was essentially, don’t you want what Gwyneth has? Meaning, he was implying to them that she had slept with him and that this was the bargain of sex to – sex for work, right? If you go along with this, you can have the Oscar, the wealth, the fame, the golden girl status.

So essentially, what we – two things happened. First of all, Paltrow was very, very upset to learn this. Not only had she never sexually succumbed to Weinstein, but she was so horrified to find out that she had been used, essentially, as a tool of predation. She spent a long time on the phone in the fall of 2017 with other Weinstein victims coming to terms with the way he had used her and with feeling like she had somehow been used as an accessory in this.

But then the other thing we finally realized is that this was probably why he had been so obsessed with whether or not we were talking to Paltrow – because as soon as other women heard Paltrow’s story and heard that she had never given in to him and that she had refused him, then they would understand so much more about the way his scheme worked and that it would all fall apart, in a sense.

Creepy enough? Apart from all the rest of it, Weinstein was basically telling all these women that Paltrow had fucked her way to success when she hadn’t. He was saying she hadn’t done good work, she had simple spread her legs in exchange for good movie roles.

This isn’t the Paltrow of jade eggs and expensive magic water, this is Paltrow the professional actor, and I feel outrage for her.

Then they talk about David Boies, Weinstein’s lawyer.

KANTOR: And I think there are a couple of tough questions for David Boies on this. OK, everybody deserves a lawyer, but David Boies is a really talented lawyer. And how does he want to use that talent and influence? And then I think another tough question for him is that you could argue that he went way beyond the role of strictly defending into a realm of manipulation and PR. Like, he would come to The Times – and he did this several times in the course of the Weinstein investigation – and say, oh, I’m not here as Harvey’s attorney. I’m here as his friend.

You know, our team, including Dean Baquet, the editor of The Times, found that very disingenuous because he had been Harvey’s attorney for 15 years at that point. And second of all, what does that mean? That shows us that he is going way beyond, you know, I’m defending this guy in a courtroom. He’s seeking to exert influence, for example, over articles in The New York Times.

As a lawyer, presumably. I don’t suppose random friends of Weinstein’s could just show up at the Times and get to talk to Kantor and Twohey, much less Dean Baquet. Sleazy, sleazy.

 

There’s a lot more.

Harvey Weinstein turned himself in this morning.

Harvey Weinstein turned himself in to New York City detectives and appeared in court on Friday on charges that he raped one woman and forced another to perform oral sex, a watershed in a monthslong sex crimes investigation and in the #MeToo movement.

Around 7:30 a.m., Mr. Weinstein walked into a police station house in Lower Manhattan, flanked by several sex crimes detectives. Toting three large books under his right arm, he looked up without saying a word as a crush of reporters and onlookers yelled, “Harvey!”

…

He was fingerprinted and formally booked. Then about an hour later, he was led from the First Police Precinct in TriBeCa and taken to court on Centre Street to face rape charges, his arms pinned behind him in three sets of handcuffs to accommodate his girth, a law enforcement official said.

Jodi Kantor – one of the reporters, along with Megan Tuohy, who broke the story in the Times – underlined a moment.

One of the symbols of the day: this female detective leading Harvey Weinstein around in handcuffs. pic.twitter.com/3lU03pWv1b

— Jodi Kantor (@jodikantor) May 25, 2018

Back to the Times:

Around 9:25 a.m., Mr. Weinstein was escorted into a courtroom in Manhattan Criminal Court by two police investigators, one holding each of his elbows. They were Sergeant Keri Thompson and Detective Nicholas DiGuadio from the department’s Special Victims Division, both of whom have long been involved in tracking down Mr. Weinstein’s accusers and corroborating their accounts.

Ah, so they’re not just leading him around today, they’ve been on his case. They’re his Benson and Stabler.

[Weinstein’s lawyer Benjamin] Brafman said he would “move quickly” to dismiss the charges, calling them “constitutionally flawed and factually unsubstantiated.”

“I anticipate that the women who have made these allegations, when subjected to cross-examination — in the event we get that far — will not be believed by 12 people,” Mr. Brafman said. He continued, “Assuming we get 12 fair people who are not consumed by the movement that seems to have overtaken this case.”

Indeed. Women are always not believed…except when there’s a wicked “movement” to report on and talk about all the many many many not-believed women who have been assaulted or raped over the years.

Mr. Weinstein reigned as one of Hollywood’s top producers, known as much for his bullying and aggression as for his cinematic success. Over the years, journalists and investigators, chasing leads from a whisper network of women and a handful of complainants, tried to expose the accusations and hold him accountable, but came up empty. Mr. Weinstein’s power was enormous, his and his lawyers’ connections were extensive, and he was often able to buy or coerce the silence of any accusers.

It helps to have lots of money to make sure women are not believed.

The sale is off for now, boys.

The fire sale of the Weinstein Company hit a last-minute snag on Sunday, when Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, filed a lawsuit against the studio and its fraternal founders alleging that they repeatedly violated state and city laws barring gender discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual abuse and coercion.

Harvey and Bob were hoping to avoid bankruptcy.

But the final-stage talks came to a screeching halt on Sunday afternoon, according to the two people briefed on the process, as the investor group received word that Mr. Schneiderman was about to file a lawsuit based on an ongoing four-month investigation into the Weinstein Company’s internal dealings.

The lawsuit, which refers to Harvey Weinstein by his initials, says that the company’s management and board of directors “were repeatedly presented with credible evidence of HW’s sexual harassment” of company employees and interns “and his use of corporate employees and resources to facilitate sexual activity with third parties.”

In one instance, a woman who complained to human resources later discovered that it was forwarded by email to Mr. Weinstein, the legal papers say. The lawsuit added that, by guaranteeing the silence of victims and other employees through nondisclosure agreements, the company enabled Mr. Weinstein’s “unlawful conduct to continue far beyond the date when, through reasonable diligence, it should have been stopped.”

The lawsuit detailed, in the words of one employee, a “toxic environment for women. The suit says Mr. Weinstein had used female employees to aid him in his pursuit of sexual targets. It says that two employees described having to procure injectable erectile dysfunction medication for Mr. Weinstein and says that one of them received a bonus for obtaining the medication “and was at times directed by HW to administer the injections.”

It was just Harvey’s little hobby. Can’t a guy have a hobby?

So that’s pretty stunning:

Film director Peter Jackson has admitted to blacklisting actors Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino in response to a “smear campaign” orchestrated by accused sexual predator Harvey Weinstein.

“I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs,” Jackson said, referencing the production company Weinstein ran with his brother Bob. As a direct result, he said, both women fell out of the running for parts in his Lord of the Rings series.

“At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us. But in hindsight, I realize that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing. I now suspect we were fed false information about both of these talented women.”

He Weinstein not only perved on them, he also deliberately damaged their careers. A twofer: harm people and then punish them for being harmed by you.

Sorvino and Judd have both claimed they refused Weinstein’s pressure to have physical relationships, and Sorvino has said she felt “iced out” of the industry after rejecting his advances.

On seeing Jackson’s interview, Sorvino tweeted on Friday: “I burst out crying. There it is, confirmation that Harvey Weinstein derailed my career, something I suspected but was unsure. Thank you Peter Jackson for being honest. I’m just heartsick.”

That’s so awful.

The New York Times and the New Yorker previously reported that Weinstein cultivated a far-reaching network of entertainment professionals, spies, and media allies to help him deflect potential exposure or retaliate against the source of those threats.

Weinstein is alleged to have told multiple women he could enhance their careers or ruin them depending on how they responded to his sexual advances. One actor, Annabella Sciorra, has accused Weinstein of violently raping her and suspects him of ruining her reputation.

“From 1992, I didn’t work again until 1995,” she told the New Yorker. “I just kept getting this pushback of ‘We heard you were difficult; we heard this or that.’ I think that that was the Harvey machine.”

One guy. One twisted dick-driven bully of a guy.

[Edited to remove an unintentional ambiguity]

The Times ran an immense piece Tuesday (really immense, it goes on for pages in the hard copy) on Harvey Weinstein’s complicity machine. Jaw-droppers abound. He had an elaborate web of people who threatened harm to any woman who dared try to report what he did to her. He befriended people high up in the Sleaze Media, who would pour sleaze on Weinstein’s victims. It’s bottomlessly disgusting.

Executives at Mr. Weinstein’s film companies who learned of allegations rarely took a stand, cowed by their volatile boss or worried about their careers. His brother and partner, Bob, participated in payoffs to women as far back as 1990. Some low-level assistants were pulled in: They compiled “bibles” that included hints on facilitating encounters with women, and were required to procure his penile injections for erectile dysfunction. His lawyers crafted settlements that kept the truth from being explored, much less exposed.

Emphasis added. His assistants had to both pimp for him and make sure his dick was in working order.

Agents and managers across Hollywood, who wanted in on Mr. Weinstein’s star-making films, sent actresses to meet him alone at hotels and advised them to stay quiet when things went wrong. “That’s just Harvey being Harvey,” more than one agent told a client. At C.A.A., for example, at least eight talent agents were told that Mr. Weinstein had harassed or menaced female clients, but agents there continued to arrange private meetings.

Agents there continued to pimp for him without the knowledge or consent of the women they were sending to Weinstein’s hotel room.

The studio chief once paid a gossip writer to collect juicy celebrity tidbits that Mr. Weinstein could use to barter if other reporters stumbled onto an affair he was trying to keep quiet.

That right there. That’s just one quiet sentence in the middle of a paragraph – and it’s a horror. A studio chief paid someone to provide Weinstein with blackmail material.

He was so close to David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The Enquirer, that he was known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable “F.O.P.,” or “friend of Pecker.” That status was shared by a chosen few, including President Trump.

The Enquirer – the filthy supermarket rag. The Enquirer buddies up with Weinstein and Trump. Rich abusive sexist cruel men get special protection from the supermarket rag, while people without those flaws are fair game.

Minutes before The New York Times published the first allegations about Mr. Weinstein this fall, he called the reporters who wrote it. Swinging between flattery and threats, he said that he had ways of knowing who had cooperated with the investigation and the means to undermine it.

“I am a man who has great resources,” he warned.

That’s one installment of jaw-droppers. There are a lot more.

Harvey Weinstein knew they were coming for him. He drew up a list of people to try to silence.

The Observer has gained access to a secret hitlist of almost 100 prominent individuals targeted by Harvey Weinstein in an extraordinary attempt to discover what they knew about sexual misconduct claims against him and whether they were intending to go public.

The previously undisclosed list contains a total of 91 actors, publicists, producers, financiers and others working in the film industry, all of whom Weinstein allegedly identified as part of a strategy to prevent accusers from going public with sexual misconduct claims against him.

The names, apparently drawn up by Weinstein himself, were distributed to a team hired by the film producer to suppress claims that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women.

But it didn’t work. He got away with it for decades, but not for the duration of his life.

He started the list in early 2017. All that work, all those months, and it failed.

Weinstein, the list confirms, was aware that the New York Times was gathering testimony from his victims long before it first ran the story. A public relations professional is named alongside a note stating that “HW [Harvey Weinstein] in contact w/him. Friends w/Jodi Kantor”. Kantor is the New York Times journalist who broke the story that immediately engulfed the producer and the film production company he co-founded with his brother.

List or no list.

It is unclear whether Weinstein intended subsequently to approach any of the individuals on the list with a non-disclosure agreement. Evidence has emerged which shows that over the past three decades Weinstein reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on condition of anonymity, after he was confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact.

Not surprisingly, considering the psychological abuse and bullying allegations emerging from his former film studio Miramax, more of the film studio employees are also named. Among them is Kathy DeClesis, former assistant to Weinstein’s brother Bob, who has revealed that she told him about Harvey sexually harassing women over a period of 25 years.

So far, more than 50 women have come forward with allegations of rape, harassment and inappropriate behaviour, prompting police investigations in the US and UK.

But he’s getting therapy. Why get the police involved?

Here’s another jaw-dropper from Ronan Farrow.

In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.

That’s shocking enough. The next paragraph is worse.

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press.

That is filthy.

The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.

Well thank god he’s now getting “therapy,” right? I’m not sure what illness it is that causes a guy to hire spies to trick women he’s raped into confiding in them, but I’m definitely glad he’s getting “therapy” for it.

Techniques like the ones used by the agencies on Weinstein’s behalf are almost always kept secret, and, because such relationships are often run through law firms, the investigations are theoretically protected by attorney-client privilege, which could prevent them from being disclosed in court. The documents and sources reveal the tools and tactics available to powerful individuals to suppress negative stories and, in some cases, forestall criminal investigations.

Now is that the same illness or an additional one?

Harvey Weinstein could have more problems than just the disappearance of his career.

The police in New York on Friday said that they have developed a strong criminal case against Harvey Weinstein after an actress’s claim that he raped her seven years ago.

Speaking at a news conference at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan, officials in the Police Department said they were gathering evidence with an eye toward preparing a warrant to arrest Mr. Weinstein, whose representatives have said is undergoing therapy outside of New York.

Undergoing therapy, forsooth, as if it were a medical problem as opposed to a moral one. He treated women with contempt, which is all too normal; “therapy” seems like an easy escape.

The claims of the actress, Paz de la Huerta, have been a focus of investigators in the department’s Special Victims Division for several days, since Mr. Weinstein’s long history of sexual harassment of women was detailed in reports by The New York Times and other news organizations early last month. Those reports prompted a mountain of tips to the police in New York and London about other episodes.

A mountain of tips. He’s been a busy busy guy, with his bathrobe and his “massages” and his “come up to my room.”

If Mr. Weinstein had been in the city, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, Robert K. Boyce, said that his investigators would have sought to arrest him immediately. But with him out of the jurisdiction of the New York police, and with seven years having elapsed since the attacks are said to have taken place, the police will instead continue gathering evidence.

“We have an actual case going forward,” Chief Boyce said. “If this person was still in New York and it was recent we would go right away and make the arrest, no doubt. But we’re talking about a seven-year-old case. And we have to move forward gathering evidence.”

The DAs office says they haven’t decided anything yet.

“We are taking it seriously and we are investigating it,” an official with the district attorney’s office said. “We are hoping to build a case. If we can build one, we will build one.”

In general, the Manhattan district attorney’s office will not go forward with a sex crimes prosecution unless prosecutors in its sex crimes unit are absolutely convinced they have enough evidence. This high bar for sex crimes exists largely to avoid subjecting a victim to a humiliating cross-examination that would doom the case and deter other victims from coming forward, prosecutors say.

That is one reason Mr. Vance has said he decided not to prosecute Mr. Weinstein in 2015, when Ambra Battilana, an Italian model, accused him of groping her during a job interview at his office.

Maybe Harvey can proceed with his therapy in peace.

Mimi Kramer on Harvey Weinstein and all that.

I spend a lot of time reading about the Weinstein scandal. Like most women, I imagine, I’m fascinated by it and by everything that seems to be happening — and not happening — as a result of it. My interest probably derives from the two years I spent being sexually harassed by a married writer at The New Yorker. There’ve been some wonderful things written on the subject, not only the original exposés by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in The New York Times, and by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker, but also “think” pieces, mostly by women, that have made my heart soar: Rebecca Traister in The Cut, Lena Dunham in the op-ed section of The Times, Jia Tolentino again in The New Yorker, Amanda Marcotte in Salon, and Megan Garber, in The Atlantic, who used the history of the phrase “open secret” to craft the most elegant and purely literary treatment of the subject I’ve come across.

I’m not sure, though, that anyone had really put their finger on what this kind of behavior is all about and what makes it possible — until yesterday morning, when news broke that Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic and one of our premier moral intellectuals, had been harassing female colleagues for decades. More than once in Wednesday’s coverage, a statement Wieseltier made in a 1994 essay (“Against Identity”) was cited, albeit out of context, and quoted as well on Twitter: “I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?”

That, right there — I’d argue — is the impulse behind sexual harassment. It’s about getting away with something. It’s about seeming to be one sort of person, a “pillar of the community” — responsible, dignified, respectable, a family man, a liberal, a progressive, Presidential, whatever — while really being A Very Bad Boy. That’s exciting for some men. Not the being bad part. The getting-away-with-it part. It isn’t just about power over individuals, the women you victimize. It’s about power over society and the court of public opinion, the thrill of risking everything on one roll of the dice, knowing that it isn’t really all that much of a risk — because nobody will believe her.

Hmm. I’m not convinced. I think it’s more about self-image – about being both an intellectual Top Dog and a rakish sexy beast and dominator of women. Being a male intellectual always risks being seen as a sissy, a weak nerdy indoors type who can’t play basketball, a girl. Solution: be a dawg.

What goes through the mind of every woman who has ever been sexually harassed in the workplace — and what working woman has not? — is, “Who will survive this? And who will control the narrative?” It’s largely men who control the fate and the perception of women in the workplace. And when it isn’t men, it’s the powerful women who enable them. Women like Tina Brown, who co-founded Talk magazine with Weinstein and with great alacrity went on the talk show circuit trying to distance herself from him.

This is, as Smith pointed out in the same Weekly Standard piece, a bit of a farce. Brown did more than anyone else in America to blur the lines between print journalism and Hollywood, creating the very climate that made someone like Weinstein untouchable. “The catchword,” Smith writes, “was ‘synergy’ — magazine articles, turned into books, turned into movies, a supply chain of entertainment and information that was going to put these media titans in the middle of everything and make them all richer.”

It’s actually even more of a farce for Brown to hold herself out as a champion of women. (“This is a purifying moment.”) Brown fired more women staffers at The New Yorker than Elvis fires up engines in Viva Las Vegas, and when you pointed this out to men on the staff, the response tended to be something along the lines of, “Well, she wants to be the only chicken in the henhouse.” I remember one editor using exactly those words not long before I was fired, after Brown had fired Veronica Geng, a celebrated New Yorker writer and editor who, oddly, had had an affair with the same married writer who targeted me.

I didn’t know that about Tina Brown. I knew she’d made the New Yorker more ordinary and less interesting, but I didn’t know she’d fired a bunch of women.

Sure, women got published in Tina Brown’s New Yorker — now and then, from time to time, especially if they were willing to write about sex, particularly their own sex lives. But through 1995 at least, when I stopped taking notice, there were very few women’s bylines in the magazine on a regular basis. And the phenomenon of women writers who were associated with a particular sphere or field of expertise actually publishing on their subject became virtually unheard of. The back of the book, meanwhile — the culture section— which traditionally had been a breeding-ground for critics, some of them women like Pauline Kael and Arlene Croce who had invented new ways of writing about a particular art form, was largely de-feminized, its columns filled by generic male voices that could have been found in any publication, like the very ones some of them had been hired away from.

Why that sounds like PBS panel shows, stuffed as they are with generic dull male voices.

I remember a story told me by Veronica, who was in on a few of Brown’s early editorial meetings. The question of how certain managerial roles would be meted out came up and someone brought up the name of the editor who had stopped me in the hall that time. Veronica told me that Brown quipped, “Oh, you mean the fat, homely girl with glasses,” and the men all laughed. Yes, they agreed, that was who was meant. Veronica pointed out that the woman under discussion was an accomplished poet and translator, and the men, chastened, all quickly agreed, “Yes, yes, very accomplished.”

Tina Brown was the enabler-in-chief. It’s absurd for her to carry on as though she didn’t know of Weinstein’s depredations and wasn’t complicit. She’s the woman who put a young actress who wouldn’t sleep with Weinstein on the cover of the premiere issue of Talk dressed in S&M garb, crawling painfully toward the camera on her stomach like a submissive, and so generically made up as to render her unrecognizable as an individual. What the hell did she think that was saying?

It’s equally hard to stomach Brown on the subject of Weinstein’s grossness and unloveliness. Brown did more to vulgarize and uglify American letters than any other single person in America. She was the queen of the nothing-is-sacred mentality, establishing a redefinition of writing and journalism whereby nothing had any value at all but sex, shock, money, power, or celebrity.

And here we are today.

Emma Thompson talked to the BBC about Harvey Weinstein.

“One of the big problems in the system we have is that there are so many blind eyes and we can’t keep making the women to whom this happens responsible. They are the ones we have got to speak. Why?” she told Emily Maitlis.

She railed against the “conspiracy of silence” and described Weinstein as “the top of a very particular iceberg” in “a system of harassment and belittling and bullying and interference” and warned that there were many more like him in Hollywood.

Asked if she was a friend of Weinstein, who was credited with transforming the British film industry in the 1990s, she replied emphatically: “No, and that is the understatement of the century.”

She didn’t “rail.” That’s an obnoxiously loaded word – it makes her sound irrational.

Thompson said she was unaware of the specific incidents but was not surprised. She said she only had business dealings with Weinstein and clashed with him over Nanny McPhee when Miramax owned the film.

“I spent my twenties trying to get old men’s tongues out of my mouth” – Emma Thompson on being a woman in Hollywood pic.twitter.com/5A52R3tC11

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) October 12, 2017

“I think there are probably about a million missed opportunities to call this man out on his disgusting behaviour,” Thompson said.

“I don’t think you can describe him as a sex addict, he’s a predator. That’s different. He’s at the top of, as it were the ladder of, a system of harassment and belittlement and bullying and interference. This has been part of our world, women’s world, since time immemorial.

“So what we need to start talking about is the crisis in masculinity, the crisis of extreme masculinity which is this sort of behaviour.”

I suppose it’s feminism. If women refuse to be underlings any more, then men will pay them back.

Alicen Grey points out that Harvey Weinstein is no anomaly, he is the norm.

There seems to be this unspoken rule that if you want to be a successful man, you must use women—and if you want to be a successful woman, you must be used by men. Wait, no. Scratch that. It’s not unspoken. It’s actually pretty well-known and widely accepted. It’s a culture-wide joke that women get career promotions in exchange for sexual favors. There’s even a porn genre called the “casting couch” where women are given fake job offers as a bribe for sex. When this sexual coercion is framed as consensual–funny, even—we spit in the face of every woman who has ever known the terror of being preyed upon by a man with more money, and more power, than her.

Until recently she has avoided working under men.

But recently, my life has taken a turn, and this is why the Weinstein Thing is getting to me. I just finished producing my first play, GYNX (coincidentally, it’s about castrating rapists). If you know theater, you know that every playwright’s goal is to get produced in bigger and bigger venues–so typically, your first production is self-funded or crowdfunded, or both, and then you’ve “made it” once a “real” producer decides to fund your next production. Because theater is so absurdly expensive, self-production is not a sustainable option for most emerging playwrights, particularly female ones. If you want to make it, you inevitably must go through men—either that, or drive yourself into copious amounts of debt trying to remain in total control of your art. But even then, men own the more prestigious venues and dominate most design and production teams.

Besides being a first-time playwright, the biggest reason I self-produced GYNX was to set a precedent for its future productions. Going into a field as blatantly misogynistic as theater, where sexual harassment abounds, I have chosen a gruesomely difficult path by seeking female producers and directors only–which means my play may never see the audience I think it deserves. The only other option is to trust GYNX in the hands of powerful men, and potentially get eaten alive in the process. Either way, one could argue that my choice is self-sabotaging. At the risk of sounding dramatic, there’s almost nowhere to turn where you won’t eventually have to compromise, if not totally surrender, to a man.

We need, she goes on, to come up with a strategy; just expressing outrage doesn’t change anything. We need to create our own media.

Let the Harvey Weinstein scandal be a call to arms. Let it be the last hand-wringing and the next reckoning. We need more than a handful of women making personal choices to boycott certain production companies; we need a massive movement to overhaul all media as it currently stands. We need to create solid networks of women if we are to counteract the unacceptable media system that men like Harvey Weinstein have created to denigrate us. I want us all to be so furious that it inspires real, tangible change. We will know the change is real if measurable resources—money and space, for instance—are being transferred out of the hands of abusive men and into the hands of women.

We need to seize the means of production.

Harvey Weinstein wasn’t just a groper or rapist. He had a system.

A storyline stretching over 20 years with a rotating cast of actors, multiple locations across the US and Europe, a disciplined crew of assistants, producers and fixers, savvy dealmaking, and a publicity machine like no other.

But this was not The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, The King’s Speech or any other of his films that earned more than 300 Oscar nominations.

It was a shadow production, an inverted version of Hollywood that leveraged entertainment industry might into an alleged spree of sexual harassment and assaults, including rape, and into a methodical way of hushing it all up with payments, threats and non-disclosure agreements.

Facilitators included colleagues and associates who set up meetings under false pretences and teams of lawyers and publicists who suppressed complaints.

That’s a lot of people.

“There are enablers all over the place,” said Jeff Herman, an attorney who represents sex abuse victims and is investigating options for some of Weinstein’s alleged victims. Predators’ companies often facilitated abusive encounters masquerading as work meetings, he said. “Sending limousines to pick up the victim, making flight arrangements. These guys aren’t making their own plans, making reservations.”

Oh well, it’s only women.

Here we foolishly thought Harvey Weinstein was at fault for three decades of (allegedly) sexually harassing and assaulting women, but it turns out it was Emma Thompson’s fault for not stopping him.

The @maitlis interview of Emma Thompson was PR for latter. ET not pressed on what she’d done to tackle the abuse she claimed was everywhere

— Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 (@montie) October 12, 2017

And this is interesting. Apparently Ronan Farrow took his story first to NBC and they said no thanks. Why? Pressure.

Video: Smart of @Maddow to press @RonanFarrow about why NBC didn't greenlight/support him pushing his Weinstein investigation #TTT pic.twitter.com/JApEs07xoL

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) October 11, 2017

Harvey Weinstein as symbol of Hollywood sexism and misogyny.

It is the perverse, insistent, matter-of-factness of male sexual predation and assault — of men’s power over women — that haunts the revelations about Mr. Weinstein. This banality of abuse also haunts the American movie industry. Women helped build the industry, but it has long been a male-dominated enterprise that systematically treats women — as a class — as inferior to men. It is an industry with a history of sexually exploiting younger female performers and stamping expiration dates on older ones. It is an industry that consistently denies female directors employment and contemptuously treats the female audience as a niche, a problem, an afterthought.

Still. After all this time. Feminism might as well not have bothered as far as the movie industry is concerned.

It’s greatly encouraging that women like Gwyneth Paltrow have gone public about Mr. Weinstein. But he is not an aberration. He is an ordinary, malignant symptom of systemic sexism, as is everyone who facilitated him, shrugs it off now or offensively asks why women didn’t say something sooner. What largely separates Mr. Weinstein from other predators, within and without the entertainment world, is that he was once powerful, he got caught and a number of gutsy women are on the record. Together, their voices are creating a forceful rejoinder to an industry that runs on fear and in which silence is at once a defense and a weapon as well as a condition of employment.

But will the forceful rejoinder make any difference?

Jenni Konner, the co-showrunner for the HBO series “Girls,” has said that the revelations about Mr. Weinstein are a tipping point: “This is the moment we look back on and say, ‘That’s when it all started to change.’” I hope she’s right. One problem is that the entertainment industry is extraordinarily forgiving of those who have made it a lot of money, as Mel Gibson can tell you. It might glance at the fallen comrade on the floor, but only so it can step over the body en route to the next meeting. And if that comrade somehow gets on his feet again, the industry will ask if he has a new project. This forgiveness is often ascribed to the familiar line that the only thing the business cares about is money.

Well, money plus abundant opportunities to grab them by the pussy.

Although the allegations against Mr. Weinstein may not prove to be the necessary tipping point, they are part of growing feminist pressure to change the industry. Activists inside and outside the entertainment bubble are calling out its biases — and showing how those biases affect employment, which in turn affects representations and audiences. (According to The Los Angeles Times, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — spurred to action by the American Civil Liberties Union — began contacting female film and TV directors in 2015 to see what issues they’re facing.)

I hope real change comes soon, especially for the women working in the industry who each day are forced to fight sexism just so that they can do their jobs. I hope change comes because the movies need new and different voices and visions, something other than deadening, damaging stereotypes and storybook clichés. And I hope change comes for those of us who love movies. I’ve spent a lifetime navigating the contradictions of that love, grappling with the pleasures movies offer with the misogyny that too often has informed what happened behind the camera and what is onscreen. The movies can break your heart, but this isn’t the time only for tears. It is also the time for rage.

We need change to come not just because we love the movies but also because the movies are part of what shapes us.