Harvey throttled someone. Harvey called an employee a fucking moron.
Harvey threw the shoes, the book, the phone, the eggs. Harvey went to
work with his shirt on inside-out and no one had the courage to tell
him. If you fucking say anything to him, the assistant said to the
other assistant, I’m dead. Harvey would eat the fries off your plate,
smash them in his face, and wash them down with a cigarette and a Diet
Coke. He belittled and berated: You can’t name three Frank Capra
movies? What the fuck are you even doing here? He was funny; he was
grotesque, a boisterous, boorish, outrageous, gluttonous caricature of a
man, a Hollywood type. A “man of appetites”; a philanderer; a cartoon
beast, surrounded by beauties. Years later, the people who worked for
him—survivors, they called themselves, of Miramax and the Weinstein
Company—still met regularly to tell stories about Harvey Weinstein. “I
always thought it was interesting that a lot of people who left Miramax
either ended up running shit in Hollywood or became social workers,” an
alumna of the company told me.
Harvey stories have a new valence now, in the aftermath of revelations
by the Times and by The New Yorker, and the term “survivors” must be reserved for those who have alleged intense sexual harassment, assault,
and rape. (Through a representative, Weinstein has denied all
accusations of non-consensual sex.) The stories aren’t funny anymore, because
now we know the story behind them. Weinstein was not a philanderer,
with inordinately, unaccountably attractive “girlfriends”; he was,
apparently, according to the forty-some women who have come forward so
far, including many of Hollywood’s most visible celebrities, engaged in
quid-pro-quo harassment that, in certain cases, involved coercion and
physical force. But, unlike Donald Trump, our show-biz President, a
bully who has boasted of sexual assault and been accused of sexual
misconduct numerous
times,
Weinstein is finally being condemned and punished for his treatment of
women. (Trump denies all allegations of sexual misconduct.)
Workplace sexual assault, according to the feminist legal scholar
Catharine MacKinnon, is “dominance eroticized.” More than misplaced
desire, she writes, it is “an expression of dominance laced with
impersonal contempt, the habit of getting what one wants, and the
perception (usually accurate) that the situation can be safely exploited
in this way—all expressed sexually.” Among the many painful ironies of
Weinstein’s public activities (the professorship in Gloria Steinem’s
name that he helped endow, his support of Hillary Clinton), the one I
find the most brutal and defeating is that he made movies with substantial
and three-dimensional parts for women, and it was this rare commodity
that he is said to have used to exploit the women who wanted those
roles. Their desire for professional advancement demeaned them—even after he’d made some of them into stars. (He never let them forget it: who made
them, who owned them.) There were rumors, yes, of the
did-she-or-didn’t-she variety. Because the actresses were ambitious,
they were seen as “ambitious,” and his predation went on, hiding in
plain view. No one ever asked, Did he? That was the given, and it is
only now that the abuse is being called by its true name. The company’s
reputation for artistic integrity and highbrow fare was a disguise that
Harvey Weinstein wore, his version of the black-ski-mask cliché.
Terry Press, the president of CBS Films, told me that Weinstein’s
legendary bullying contributed to the silence within his company. “I
worked at DreamWorks for ten years,” she said. “It’s a private company.
No one threw an ashtray at someone’s head. Nobody called someone the
C-word in a meeting. I consider many people at the Weinstein Company to
have suffered some sort of Stockholm syndrome. You’d say to them,
‘Hello, in the real world this is actionable.’ In a private company, the
owners dictate the culture. If you go to meetings and someone’s
physically accosting an employee, the message it sends is, It’s a
free-for-all, no rules and no decorum.”
In the past two weeks, discussing who knew what and when has become a grim, un-fun
Hollywood parlor game, playing out on social media, at dinner parties,
over drinks. The screenwriter Scott Rosenberg, who benefitted from
Weinstein’s largesse and support for the better part of a decade, in the
heyday of Miramax, recently
posted a screed on Facebook (since taken down or made private), addressing his
own complicity and that of “You, the big producers; you, the big
directors; you, the big agents; you, the big financiers. And you, the
big rival studio chiefs; you, the big actors; you, the big actresses;
you, the big models. You, the big journalists; you, the big
screenwriters; you, the big rock stars; you, the big restaurateurs; you,
the big politicians.” He writes, “You know who are. You know that you
knew. And do you know how I know that you knew? Because I was there with
you. And because everybody-fucking-knew.” They didn’t literally know
about the rape, he writes, but “We knew something was bubbling
under. Something odious. Something rotten.” Judd Apatow wrote on
Twitter, “Sell that company for
scrap.” A few
days later, speaking at an industry luncheon hosted by Variety, he
expanded on his remark. “And what about his staff? People say, ‘Did they know?’ Of course they knew.”
But many current and former Weinstein Company employees have come
forward in recent days to insist that, in fact, they didn’t know. This
week, several employees at the Weinstein Company’s New York office
drafted a statement defending themselves, which they submitted to The
New Yorker. The document, which they say has the support of
approximately thirty of their colleagues at the Weinstein Company, is
anonymous: it’s unclear, with the company in turmoil, whether the
nondisclosure agreements they signed as a condition of employment will
be enforced. One supporter of the statement told me, “This awful
helpless feeling of being vilified for something you never knew was
creating this feeling of true despair.” The statement reads, in part:
An assistant who co-wrote the letter described to me, by phone, the
events of October 5th, the day the first Times story was published.
Harvey came in to work at 375 Greenwich Street, his fiefdom (his brother
Bob worked at a different address), where he had a “lair”: in addition
to an office, there was a large living room with a commodious couch and
trophy walls of photographs of Harvey and his stars. He expressed
satisfaction that the piece had come out on a Thursday rather than a
Sunday, when, by his reckoning, more people would have seen it. The assistant told Harvey that he was resigning from his position. (He is hoping to be reassigned within the company.) Harvey offered to provide a reference—he didn’t yet understand how undesirable that would be. Later, as the assistant was leaving to spend the afternoon drinking and strategizing with his colleagues at
a nearby pub, he says that Harvey reached for his arm. Sobbing, Harvey said, “I’m not
that guy. I’m not that guy.”
On the following Tuesday, the staff convened in a conference room, with
soul-food takeout from Bubby’s. As they gathered, someone mentioned that
The New Yorker story was up. The assembled employees read in silence.
They listened to the tape. They knew that voice too well. Some began to shake, and many of them wept as
they contemplated the roles they might have played as accomplices,
unwitting or not. “People were having a wave of retroactive memories,” a
creative executive who worked on the letter told me. “Some of the
stories were within the time frame of people who still worked there.” A
longtime employee offered to answer questions based on his experiences
travelling with Harvey. There was a silence, and then, according to the
creative executive, “One of the female assistants was, like, ‘Tell us
everything.’ ”
In the time since, people both inside and outside Hollywood have been
processing the reality that Harvey Weinstein is “that guy.” In fitting
revenge for his reduction of women to bodies, there has been thorough
discussion of Weinstein’s own ungainliness and girth (not incidental, as
he allegedly used his imposing size to threaten, impede, and overwhelm
his victims). Fired from the Weinstein Company, external validation
stripped away, he’s now just a body and its urges—not the passionate
filmmaker responsible for eighty-one Oscar wins but the animal who
allegedly masturbated into a potted plant, or a kitchen pot, or both. (A
Weinstein spokesperson told The New
Yorker, “There are
many stories about Harvey Weinstein that have become urban legend. Some
are true and some are not.”)
On Saturday evening, a few hours after Weinstein was expelled from the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a group of women, former
assistants and executives at Miramax and the Weinstein Company, gathered
at a house in Los Angeles. They stood around a kitchen island, nibbling
on grapes and cheese and drinking wine, while the rice water boiled and
the hostess’s husband put the kids to bed. The women said they hadn’t
known—they were not “honeypots”—but they were struggling to make sense
of how Weinstein’s behavior had gone unchecked. They were dealing with
the twin discomforts of having their entire professional community
wonder if they were complicit in or victims of his assaults, or both.
They wanted Harvey’s downfall to mean something and to create real
change within their industry and in the world.
“You feel a little bit like an idiot,” the hostess said. “There were
things you knew. Clearly there was also a strategy on his part. He could
be flamboyant in his ‘People can know I’m a womanizer.’ But the idea
that he took it to sexual assault or even rape was really well hidden.”
The woman standing to my left, in bluejeans, said, “Looking back, the
problem is that the unspoken message we were being given from the powers
that be across media, Hollywood, and politics is that he can get away
with this shit.”
“But get away with what?” a woman in black said. “At the time, you
didn’t know this was happening. What you knew was that he was a bully, a
screamer, a yeller, a thrower, a pig—not that he was a rapist.” She said
that she and her husband got into a fight when the news broke. He
insisted that she and her friends must have known.
The hostess said, “The public lynching has been so severe that I think
it’s a huge warning call to men in the future. Probably there are
people—any number of agents—”
“I want to talk about that,” the woman in jeans said. “The larger
culture of harassment and bullying, because you don’t feel like you can
come out and report something. The patriarchy is creating this
environment for men and women of misogyny and sexism. There is somehow
this understanding that you can be this caricature of being bombastic
and bullying and treating your underlings—”
“As inhuman,” a fourth woman, chopping chicken, said.
“When this shit happens, a woman doesn’t know who she can turn to,
because everyone seems to have a blind eye to it,” the woman in jeans
said. “The people around him, his enablers, and there had to have been
enablers, men and women, perpetuated the bullying culture. As long as
that’s O.K., we’re in trouble, we can’t get out from under it.”
The woman in black said, “It’s naïve to think that Harvey is the only
Harvey out there.” (On Tuesday, Harvey Weinstein’s business partner and
brother, Bob, who has called Harvey “indefensible and
crazy,” was accused of sexual
harassment by a showrunner on a Weinstein Company television project, a claim he
denies.)
After a while, the hostess said that she had a Harvey story, one whose
import she only now understood. She had never told her friends; it
didn’t seem like a big enough deal before. After she’d worked at Miramax
for a couple of years, a position opened to be Weinstein’s assistant.
She wanted to be a producer, so she interviewed for the job. “You’re too
pretty to be working for Harvey,” a senior female executive told her.
“It will embarrass him.” Confused but undeterred, she persisted.
Finally, one of Weinstein’s former assistants took her out to lunch. “Do
not take this job,” the former assistant said. “You will see things you
will never be able to unsee, and you will do things you will never
forgive yourself for.” She didn’t have enough information to comprehend
the warning, but she heeded it anyway. The gravity of her near-miss is
still sinking in. “There are obviously people that knew,” she said. “And,
if they knew, and they knew you, they would protect you.”
The hostess walked me to the door. She had one last point to make. As
Hollywood reckoned with its own culture and how to evolve it, there was
a more pressing change she did not want people to lose sight of.
“Please, may this empower people to step forward about Trump, and we can
bring him down,” she said. With Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie and
countless others speaking out about Weinstein—and more than five hundred
thousand women sharing their own experiences with sexual harassment
under the hashtag #metoo—the floodgates are open. (On Sunday, BuzzFeed
reported that a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” who has accused
Trump of groping and kissing her, had subpoenaed his
campaign for documentation related to “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump
touched her inappropriately.” Trump has denied her allegations.) The
hostess told me, “Trump women can come through and throw him down. That
would be the biggest play women can make. That’s what we need to do.”