Wednesday, October 11, 2017




"They (Paltrow and Jolie) wanted to come forward in the wake of the first story we broke. They wanted to support other women."



By LINDSEY BAHR

NEW YORK -- They waited years to speak, but two of Hollywood's most powerful women might have helped seal the fate of Harvey Weinstein.

Both Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie added their first-person accounts of uncomfortable experiences with Weinstein to the ever-growing list of accusations against the movie mogul from women alleging decades of systematic sexual harassment and assault. The accusers have come from everywhere - actresses you've heard of, actresses you haven't, models, assistants, employees, a reporter and young women who found themselves in the orbit of the powerful executive.

But, as the story often goes, no one expected it to go this high.

Speaking to The New York Times, in the paper's second round of Weinstein exposés, Paltrow describes a now familiar-sounding scene of her at age 22 being asked to meet Weinstein, who had just cast her as the title character in the adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma." She was summoned to Weinstein's hotel room, where he proceeded to touch her and suggest a massage in the bedroom.

Jolie also remembered Weinstein making advances in a hotel room early in her career. She never worked with him again.

The damning accounts came just hours after The New Yorker published its own explosive investigation into Weinstein's conduct that included three accusations of rape: One from Italian actress and director Asia Argento. There were accounts of harassment from Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette and others too. The New Yorker also reported that 16 former and current executives and assistants at The Weinstein Co. and Miramax either witnessed or knew of Weinstein's unwanted sexual advances: "All sixteen said the behavior was widely known within both Miramax and the Weinstein Company."

It is a list that continued to grow Tuesday as the minutes ticked by. After the one-two punch of the Times and The New Yorker articles Tuesday, more accusations followed too. One from a former actress who recounted Weinstein meeting her wearing a bathrobe with nothing on underneath at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, the other from actress Heather Graham, who says he implied she would have to sleep with him for a role.

A representative for the mogul vehemently denied allegations of non-consensual sex in a statement to the magazine.

"I can't think of a movie-business scandal of this scale," author and entertainment writer Mark Harris tweeted on Tuesday. "It pushes into and implicates every corner of the industry."

The entertainment industry, which Weinstein ruled for so long, is quaking at the revelations from Paltrow, Jolie and others.

"These are people who everyone knows and everyone respects," said Anne Thompson, the editor at large of IndieWire. "I thought he was done before."

Paltrow might have been early in her career when she met Weinstein in that hotel room, but she was hardly an unknown in Hollywood circles.

"Gwyneth Paltrow is a child of Hollywood," Thompson said. "She's Steven Spielberg's goddaughter. This is someone who all the powerful people in Hollywood know very well as a family friend."

Tuesday's revelations might be the death knell for the era of Harvey Weinstein.

After last week's initial report from the Times, which spotlighted accounts from Ashley Judd and sexual harassment settlements given to people like Rose McGowan, condemnations trickled in from Hollywood and Washington D.C. But as the days went by and accusations both continued and escalated, it soon turned into a flood. Now President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Bob Iger, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Judd Apatow, Judi Dench, Glenn Close and more and have all come out with statements against him and in support of the women who are speaking out.
Even Weinstein's wife of 10 years, Marchesa designer Georgina Chapman, said Tuesday that she plans to divorce him. The company he helped co-found not only fired him, but its board of directors, including his brother Bob Weinstein, stated that Weinstein's "alleged actions are antithetical to human decency" and that they had no knowledge of this conduct. The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts rejected a $5 million pledge from Weinstein that was intended for a female filmmaker endowment.

Weinstein, it seems, has no one left on his side but his lawyers, and possibly Lindsay Lohan, who said in an Instagram story late Tuesday that she feels "very bad" for him.

For now, everyone is waiting to see where the chips will fall and who will be implicated or exposed in what The New Yorker described as a "culture of complicity" that could extend far outside the confines of Miramax and Weinstein Company employees.

Weinstein himself has not commented since the initial Times expose published last week. Others are wondering whether accusations will come out against more powerful men in the industry, or if real changes might start to be implemented.

"I worry that when predators like Weinstein go away, the whole web of obstacles for women in business remains," wrote actor Alan Alda on Twitter. "Still lots of work to be done."

The same thing is on the mind of Cathy Schulman, the president of the advocacy group Women in Film, who says that the culture that allowed Weinstein to operate for so long is related to the vast underrepresentation of women in Hollywood in all aspects of the business.

"One thing I haven't seen is a lot of statements from the big corporations. I haven't seen the studios and networks and agencies make comments. At the end of the day, what are they going to do? It's those people who make decisions about which content to finance. Are they going to make a change because of all this? That's the big question mark," she asked.

"Frankly if everyone is going to speak up and it's going to be yesterday's fish wrap and let's wait for a hiatus and bring the guys back, then what have we really done?"
___
AP Film Writer Jake Coyle contributed from New York.


variety

Disney CEO Bob Iger weighed in on the sexual harassment allegations against media mogul Harvey Weinstein.
“Harvey Weinstein’s reported behavior is abhorrent and unacceptable, and it has no place in our society,” Iger said in a statement obtained by Variety on Tuesday.
The Walt Disney Company owned Weinstein’s Miramax from 1993 to 2005. Disney said it was “unaware of any complaints, lawsuits or settlements” regarding Weinstein’s sexual behavior while Miramax’s was owned by Disney, according to the New York Times. Weinstein left Disney in 2005 to found the Weinstein Company, where he was recently ousted following the New York Times misconduct bombshell.
In Disney’s statement to the Times, the company said Weinstein and his brother, Bob Weinstein, “operated and managed their business with virtual autonomy” during their tenure there.
Michael Eisner, who ran Disney while the Weinsteins operated Miramax there, responded to the allegations earlier on Tuesday. “Fired Weinsteins because they were irresponsible, and Harvey was an incorrigible bully. Had no idea he was capable of these horrible actions,” he wrote on Twitter.
On Tuesday, the New Yorker published a devastating article alleging Weinstein raped three women. The news follows the New York Times’ original investigation last Thursday, which detailed three decades of sexual harassment allegations against Weinstein. Since, dozens of women including Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Heather Graham have come forward with their accounts of Weinstein’s sexual assault and harassment.



The dam finally burst on the Harvey Weinstein story. Now everyone is writing that it’s amazing it took this long. For years there were the whispers, but not the evidence. Harvey spent most of the hours of his working day ensuring that all the bad stories went away, killed, evaporated, spun into something diametrically its opposite. It was a common sight outside a Harvey opening party to see one of his publicists trapped in a car on the phone, spinning — spinning the dross of some new outrage into gold.
When I founded Talk magazine in 1998 with Miramax, the movie company Harvey founded with his brother Bob, I also took over the running of their  fledgling book  company with Jonathan Burnham as editor in chief. Strange contracts pre-dating us would suddenly surface, book deals with no deadline attached authored by attractive or nearly famous women, one I recall was by the stewardess on a private plane. It was startling — and professionally mortifying — to discover how many hacks writing  gossip columns or entertainment coverage were on the Miramax payroll with a “consultancy” or  a “development deal” (one even at The New York Times).
Harvey engaged sexual harassment’s legal bulldog, Lisa Bloom, she who brought down Bill O’Reilly and recently appeared on the stage of Women in the World’s Canada Summit as thrilling feminist avenger. Then, it emerged The Weinstein Company bought Bloom’s book on Trayvon Martin for a movie — classic Harvey M.O. Even Bloom’s mother, Gloria Allred was appalled (and perhaps the critical voice in making her daughter quit).
An occupational hazard of editing Talk was aborting the pieces Harvey assigned on his nightly trolling from reporters who had tried to get a bad rumor confirmed. Another of his co-opting tactics was to offer a juicy negative nugget about one of the movie stars in his films or people in his media circle (fairly often, me) in a trade to quash a dangerous piece about himself.
What I learned about Harvey in the two years of proximity with him at Talk was that nothing about his outward persona, the beguiling Falstaffian charmer who persuaded — or bamboozled — me into leaving The New Yorker and joining him, was the truth. He is very Trumpian in that regard.
He comes off as a big, blustery, rough diamond kind of a guy, the kind of old-time studio chief who lives large, writes big checks and exudes bonhomie. Wrong. The real Harvey is fearful, paranoid, and hates being touched (at any rate, when fully dressed).
Winning, for him, was a blood sport. Deals never close. They are renegotiated down to the bone after the press release. A business meeting listening to him discuss Miramax deals in progress reminded me of the wire tap transcripts of John Gotti and his inner circle at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens. “So just close it fast, then fuck him later with the subsidiary rights.”
Like all bullies, he folds when he’s faced down and becomes wheedling and sycophantic. His volcanic rage erupts from raw insecurity. I often used to wonder if the physical dissonance between his personal grossness and his artistic sensibility — which was genuine — made him crazy. It’s no accident that Harvey’s preferred routine for sexual entrapment was to strip down and open the door of his hotel suite in an open bathrobe, or nothing at all. A rich, powerful movie mogul could now do what he couldn’t all those years in high school and tell a beautiful, cowering girl: This is who I am. Now that everyone knows the truth, deep down it may be, for him, a relief.
It takes one brave whistleblower and then two to get the ball rolling and give the shattered sharers of the same story permission to speak out to The New York Times. Kudos to Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan, and now all the many new voices captured by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker. Harvey is an intimidating and ferocious man. Crossing him, even now, is scary. But it’s a different era now. Cosby. Ailes. O‘Reilly, Weinstein. It’s over, except for one — the serial sexual harasser in the White House.



















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