I don't know what Georgina Chapman did or didn't know, but her statement here is incorrect. Our first article about Weinstein had three decades of allegations, 1990-2015. https://t.co/jrMiXrZE2L pic.twitter.com/fkprW0hxiL

— jodikantor (@jodikantor) May 10, 2018

An inside look at Angelina Jolie's influence on patients seeking preventative mastectomy and breast reconstruction. https://t.co/Au18sl37So #PlasticSurgery

— American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) (@ASPS_News) May 10, 2018

Five years ago, Ms. Angelina Jolie elected to proceed with prophylactic double mastectomy after undergoing genetic screening and learning that she had a significantly elevated risk of developing breast cancer due to mutation of the BRCA1 gene. As a member of her surgical team, I was deeply moved by her courage and benevolence as Ms. Jolie shared with the world her journey through mastectomy, breast reconstruction and recovery.
Today, her story continues to inspire increasing numbers of high-risk women to undergo genetic screening. A greater number of women are now aware of the concept of preventative mastectomy and reconstruction. The media has dubbed this the "Angelina Jolie effect." To me, it is an ongoing source of inspiration and an example of how one woman has made such a tremendously positive impact upon the lives of others.
I have personally seen women whose lives were likely saved as a result of the public awareness that has resulted from the "Angelina Jolie effect."
During the past five years, breast cancer risk assessment has continued to evolve. Today we understand that BRCA mutations are only two of many mutations that significantly elevate breast cancer risk. Multi-gene panels now assess for a variety of mutations – including those affecting the CHEK2, PALB2, PTEN and TP53 genes, as well as many others. Identification of these gene mutations help to assess breast cancer risk during a woman's lifetime.
We now recognize a number of factors in one's personal and family history that might make genetic testing advisable. These include:

• Personal history of breast cancer, including bilateral breast cancer or diagnosis of triple negative breast cancer by age 60
• Personal history of ovarian cancer
• Family history of breast cancer before age 50 in two or more close relatives, including a mother, sister or daughter
• Close relatives of Eastern European Jewish ancestry who have a history of breast, ovarian or pancreatic cancer
• A close male relative with breast cancer

Breast cancer risk drops by approximately 90% among women who undergo prophylactic mastectomy. However, it is important to consider both the major and very personal nature of this decision. Undergoing a preventative mastectomy isn't right for every high-risk woman. Factors such as her estimated lifetime breast cancer risk, her willingness to tolerate that risk and her overall health must be considered.
Once the decision to undergo prophylactic mastectomy is made, the reconstructive options must be considered. As a plastic surgeon, I believe that it is very important to address with the patient the approaches that include the use of implants, as well as one's own tissues, to create the new breast.
Each patient is unique, and a personalized plan must be developed. In order to arrive at this plan, patient preferences, body type, lifestyle and overall health should all be taken into account.
During the process, it is essential that every patient take the time to develop a support team in which she is comfortable and confident. This team may include both general and plastic surgeons, medical and radiation oncologists, an internist, a geneticist and others. While the patient is the captain of her team, it is the privilege of each member of her team to strongly stand with her in helping to minimize long-term risk, maintain or achieve good health and restore wholeness.

Other objectors to an asset sale include Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Jake Gyllenhaal, Stephen King, Bill Murray, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and, yes, Harvey Weinstein https://t.co/0nSYwI15mz

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 30, 2018

Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt file objections in Weinstein bankruptcy https://t.co/9ghDacdraF

— Variety (@Variety) April 30, 2018

Several A-listers filed objections on Monday to the bankruptcy sale of the Weinstein Co., on the day that bids are due in advance of Friday’s auction.
Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bill Murray, Julia Roberts, Rachel McAdams, and Stephen King were among those filing limited objections to the sale. Several alleged that they are owed profit participation on various projects, and objected to transferring the rights to those projects without first paying the default amounts. Many of the stars were represented by the same two law firms — Landau Gottfried & Berger in Los Angeles and Cross & Simon in Wilmington, Del.
Quentin Tarantino also filed an extensive objection, alleging he is owed more than $4.5 million from four film projects, and Creative Artists Agency alleged it is owed $300,000 in packaging fees on the TV series “Waco.”
Additionally, the committee of unsecured creditors — which represents alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct — filed an objection to a sale to Lantern Capital, the stalking horse bidder. Lantern has offered $310 million in cash, plus the assumption of project-based liabilities, for the company.
But the committee — which also represents vendors, law firms, and studios — argued that Lantern’s bid was not properly allocated across various asset classes, and that the Weinstein Co. cannot be sure that it represents the best value for all stakeholders.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman also issued an open letter on Monday calling on bidders to establish a separate fund to compensate Weinstein victims, and commit to implementing workplace reforms that would address harassment.
“Bidders should propose bid enhancements that set aside financial resources to compensate and provide support services for injured employees and industry talent, both of whom are essential to the company’s future success,” Schneiderman wrote. “Bid enhancements also should include nonmonetary terms that protect future employees and contractors and avoid rewarding wrongdoers.”

My legal complaint. I am suing for economic remedy due to damage done to my career as a result of sexual harassment. Financial recuperation goes to @TIMESUPNOW @TIMESUPLDF so that American workers who experince sexual harassment & retaliation have help. https://t.co/Nod3fXgVk3

— ashley judd (@AshleyJudd) April 30, 2018

How @nytimes reporters Megan Twohey (@mega2e) and @jodikantor broke Hollywood’s biggest sexual harassment story https://t.co/5MZC2oWjjT #HollywoodUncovered pic.twitter.com/4fddUQLAbQ

— Variety (@Variety) December 13, 2017

....
Did you have any idea that the Weinstein reporting would open the floodgates on other stories of powerful media figures engaging in sexual abuse?
Kantor: It’s counterintuitive. One of our editors said to us, “You know he’s not that famous.” It was true, because Weinstein was Hollywood famous, but he wasn’t a household name. One of our editors, Matt Purdy, has an interesting theory, which is that this was the rare situation in which the accusers were more famous than the accused.
I’m of two minds about the potency of fame in making this story impactful. On one hand, I kind of resist and resent it, because I believe every woman’s story counts. Harvey Weinstein appears to have done the same thing to a lot of women regardless of their stature in the industry. As a journalist and as a human being, I don’t like the idea of weighting the more famous women’s stories more heavily than the lesser-known women’s stories. That said, I have to concede that the impact of big stars like Ashley Judd, Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow going on the record was enormous, in part because they were saying it’s not shameful to tell your story. I ask myself would it have played out the same way if the really famous women had not come forward? I’m not sure it would have.

Harvey Weinstein hired private investigators, including ex-Mossad agents, to track actresses and journalists: https://t.co/fleH7lZFzY pic.twitter.com/JMOnQDxVlW

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) November 7, 2017

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.

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. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.

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.

In some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers, including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Times story about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times, including in a libel case.

Boies confirmed that his firm contracted with and paid two of the agencies and that investigators from one of them sent him reports, which were then passed on to Weinstein. He said that he did not select the firms or direct the investigators’ work. He also denied that the work regarding the Times story represented a conflict of interest. Boies said that his firm’s involvement with the investigators was a mistake. “We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct,” he told me. “At the time, it seemed a reasonable accommodation for a client, but it was not thought through, and that was my mistake. It was a mistake at the time.”

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.

In a statement, Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, said, “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”

In May, 2017, McGowan received an e-mail from a literary agency introducing her to a woman who identified herself as Diana Filip, the deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Filip told McGowan that she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace, and asked McGowan, a vocal women’s-rights advocate, to speak at a gala kickoff event later that year. Filip offered McGowan a fee of sixty thousand dollars. “I understand that we have a lot in common,” Filip wrote to McGowan before their first meeting, in May, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Filip had a U.K. cell-phone number, and she spoke with what McGowan took to be a German accent. Over the following months, the two women met at least three more times at hotel bars in Los Angeles and New York and other locations. “I took her to the Venice boardwalk and we had ice cream while we strolled,” McGowan told me, adding that Filip was “very kind.” The two talked at length about issues relating to women’s empowerment. Filip also repeatedly told McGowan that she wanted to make a significant investment in McGowan’s production company.

Filip was persistent. In one e-mail, she suggested meeting in Los Angeles and then, when McGowan said she would be in New York, Filip said she could meet there just as easily. She also began pressing McGowan for information. In a conversation in July, McGowan revealed to Filip that she had spoken to me as part of my reporting on Weinstein. A week later, I received an e-mail from Filip asking for a meeting and suggesting that I join her campaign to end professional discrimination against women. “I am very impressed with your work as a male advocate for gender equality, and believe that you would make an invaluable addition to our activities,” she wrote, using her wealth-management firm’s e-mail address. Unsure of who she was, I did not respond.

Filip continued to meet with McGowan. In one meeting in September, Filip was joined by another Black Cube operative, who used the name Paul and claimed to be a colleague at Reuben Capital Partners. The goal, according to two sources with knowledge of the effort, was to pass McGowan to another operative to extract more information. On October 10th, the day The New Yorker published my story about Weinstein, Filip reached out to McGowan in an e-mail. “Hi Love,” she wrote. “How are you feeling? . . . Just wanted to tell you how brave I think you are.” She signed off with an “xx.” Filip e-mailed McGowan as recently as October 23rd.

In fact, “Diana Filip” was an alias for a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who originally hailed from Eastern Europe and was working for Black Cube, according to three individuals with knowledge of the situation. When I sent McGowan photos of the Black Cube agent, she recognized her instantly. “Oh my God,” she wrote back. “Reuben Capital. Diana Filip. No fucking way.”

Ben Wallace, a reporter at New York who was pursuing a story on Weinstein, said that the same woman met with him twice last fall. She identified herself only as Anna and suggested that she had an allegation against Weinstein. When I presented Wallace with the same photographs of Black Cube’s undercover operative, Wallace recalled her vividly. “That’s her,” he said. Like McGowan, Wallace said that the woman had what he assumed to be a German accent, as well as a U.K. cell-phone number. Wallace told me that Anna first contacted him on October 28, 2016, when he had been working on the Weinstein story for about a month and a half. Anna declined to disclose who had given her Wallace’s information. Over the course of the two meetings, Wallace grew increasingly suspicious of her motives. Anna seemed to be pushing him for information, he recalled, “about the status and scope of my inquiry, and about who I might be talking to, without giving me any meaningful help or information.” During their second meeting, Anna requested that they sit close together, leading Wallace to suspect that she might be recording the exchange. When she recounted her experiences with Weinstein, Wallace said, “it seemed like soap-opera acting.” Wallace wasn’t the only journalist the woman contacted. In addition to her e-mails to me, Filip also e-mailed Jodi Kantor, of the Times, according to sources involved in the effort.

The U.K. cell-phone numbers that Filip provided to Wallace and McGowan have been disconnected. Calls to Reuben Capital Partners’ number in London went unanswered. As recently as Friday, the firm had a bare-bones Web site, with stock photos and generic text passages about asset management and an initiative called Women in Focus. The site, which has now been taken down, listed an address near Piccadilly Circus, operated by a company specializing in shared office space. That company said that it had never heard of Reuben Capital Partners. Two sources with knowledge of Weinstein’s work with Black Cube said that the firm creates fictional companies to provide cover for its operatives, and that Filip’s firm was one of them.

Black Cube declined to comment on the specifics of any work it did for Weinstein. The agency said in a statement, “It is Black Cube’s policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s work. Black Cube supports the work of many leading law firms around the world, especially in the US, gathering evidence for complex legal processes, involving commercial disputes, among them uncovering negative campaigns. . . . It should be highlighted that Black Cube applies high moral standards to its work, and operates in full compliance with the law of any jurisdiction in which it operates—strictly following the guidance and legal opinions provided by leading law firms from around the world.” The contract with the firm also specified that all of its work would be obtained “by legal means and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.”

Last fall, Weinstein began mentioning Black Cube by name in conversations with his associates and attorneys. The agency had made a name for itself digging up information for companies in Israel, Europe, and the U.S. that led to successful legal judgments against business rivals. But the firm has also faced legal questions about its employees’ use of fake identities and other tactics. Last year, two of its investigators were arrested in Romania on hacking charges. In the end, the company reached an agreement with the Romanian authorities, under which the operatives admitted to hacking and were released. Two sources familiar with the agency defended its decision to work for Weinstein, saying that they originally believed that the assignment focussed on his business rivals. But even the earliest lists of names that Weinstein provided to Black Cube included actresses and journalists.

On October 28, 2016, Boies’s law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, wired to Black Cube the first hundred thousand dollars, toward what would ultimately be a six-hundred-thousand-dollar invoice. (The documents do not make clear how much of the invoice was paid.) The law firm and Black Cube signed a contract that month and several others later. One, dated July 11, 2017, and bearing Boies’s signature, states that the project’s “primary objectives” are to “provide intelligence which will help the Client’s efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY newspaper” and to “obtain additional content of a book which currently being written and includes harmful negative information on and about the Client,” who is identified as Weinstein in multiple documents. (In one e-mail, a Black Cube executive asks lawyers retained by the agency to refer to Weinstein as “the end client” or “Mr. X,” noting that referring to him by name “will make him extremely angry.”) The article mentioned in the contract was, according to three sources, the story that ultimately ran in the Times on October 5th. The book was “Brave,” a memoir by McGowan, scheduled for publication by HarperCollins in January. The documents show that, in the end, the agency delivered to Weinstein more than a hundred pages of transcripts and descriptions of the book, based on tens of hours of recorded conversations between McGowan and the female private investigator.

Weinstein’s spokesperson, Hofmeister, called “the assertion that Mr. Weinstein secured any portion of a book . . . false and among the many inaccuracies and wild conspiracy theories promoted in this article.”

The July agreement included several “success fees” if Black Cube met its goals. The firm would receive an additional three hundred thousand dollars if the agency “provides intelligence which will directly contribute to the efforts to completely stop the Article from being published at all in any shape or form.” Black Cube would also be paid fifty thousand dollars if it secured “the other half” of McGowan’s book “in readable book and legally admissible format.”

The contracts also show some of the techniques that Black Cube employs. The agency promised “a dedicated team of expert intelligence officers that will operate in the USA and any other necessary country,” including a project manager, intelligence analysts, linguists, and “Avatar Operators” specifically hired to create fake identities on social media, as well as “operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering.” The agency also said that it would provide “a full time agent by the name of ‘Anna’ (hereinafter ‘the Agent’), who will be based in New York and Los Angeles as per the Client’s instructions and who will be available full time to assist the Client and his attorneys for the next four months.” Four sources with knowledge of Weinstein’s work with Black Cube confirmed that this was the same woman who met with McGowan and Wallace.

Black Cube also agreed to hire “an investigative journalist, as per the Client request,” who would be required to conduct ten interviews a month for four months and be paid forty thousand dollars. Black Cube agreed to “promptly report to the Client the results of such interviews by the Journalist.”

In January, 2017, a freelance journalist called McGowan and had a lengthy conversation with her that he recorded without telling her; he subsequently communicated with Black Cube about the interviews, though he denied he was reporting back to them in a formal capacity. He contacted at least two other women with allegations against Weinstein, including the actress Annabella Sciorra, who later went public in The New Yorker with a rape allegation against Weinstein. Sciorra, whom he called in August, said that she found the conversation suspicious and got off the phone as quickly as possible. “It struck me as B.S.,” she told me. “And it scared me that Harvey was testing to see if I would talk.” The freelancer also placed calls to Wallace, the New York reporter, and to me.

Two sources close to the effort and several documents show that the same freelancer received contact information for actresses, journalists, and business rivals of Weinstein from Black Cube, and that the agency ultimately passed summaries of those interviews to Weinstein’s lawyers. When contacted about his role, the freelancer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that he had been working on his own story about Weinstein, using contact information fed to him by Black Cube. The freelancer said that he reached out to other reporters, one of whom used material from his interviews, in the hopes of helping to expose Weinstein. He denied that he was paid by Black Cube or Weinstein.Weinstein also enlisted other journalists to uncover information that he could use to undermine women with allegations. A December, 2016, e-mail exchange between Weinstein and Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer, shows that Howard shared with Weinstein material obtained by one of his reporters, as part of an effort to help Weinstein disprove McGowan’s allegation of rape. In one e-mail, Howard sent Weinstein a list of contacts. “Let’s discuss next steps on each,” he wrote. After Weinstein thanked him, Howard described a call that one of his reporters made to Elizabeth Avellan, the ex-wife of the director Robert Rodriguez, whom Rodriguez left to have a relationship with McGowan.

Avellan told me that she remembered the interview. Howard’s reporter “kept calling and calling and calling,” she said, and also contacted others close to her. Avellan finally called back, because “I was afraid people might start calling my kids.” In a long phone call, the reporter pressed her for unflattering statements about McGowan. She insisted that the call be off the record, and the reporter agreed. The reporter recorded the call, and subsequently passed the audio to Howard.

In subsequent e-mails to Weinstein, Howard said, “I have something AMAZING . . . eventually she laid into Rose pretty hard.” Weinstein replied, “This is the killer. Especially if my fingerprints r not on this.” Howard then reassured Weinstein, “They are not. And the conversation . . . is RECORDED.” The next day, Howard added, in another e-mail, “Audio file to follow.” (Howard denied sending the audio to Weinstein.) Avellan told me that she would not have agreed to coöperate in efforts to discredit McGowan. “I don’t want to shame people,” she said. “I wasn’t interested. Women should stand together.”

In a statement, Howard said that, in addition to his role as the chief content officer at American Media Inc., the National Enquirer’s publisher, he oversaw a television-production agreement with Weinstein, which has since been terminated. He said that, at the time of the e-mails, “absent a corporate decision to terminate the agreement with The Weinstein Company, I had an obligation to protect AMI’s interests by seeking out—but not publishing—truthful information about people who Mr. Weinstein insisted were making false claims against him. To the extent I provided ‘off the record’ information to Mr. Weinstein about one of his accusers—at a time when Mr. Weinstein was denying any harassment of any woman—it was information which I would never have allowed AMI to publish on the internet or in its magazines.” Although at least one of Howard’s reporters made calls related to Weinstein’s investigations, Howard insisted that he strictly divided his work with Weinstein from his work as a journalist. “I always separated those two roles carefully and completely—and resisted Mr. Weinstein’s repeated efforts to have AMI titles publish favorable stories about him or negative articles about his accusers,” Howard said. An A.M.I. representative noted that, at the time, Weinstein insisted that the encounter was consensual, and that the allegations were untrue.

Hofmeister, Weinstein’s spokesperson, added, “In regard to Mr. Howard, he has served as the point person for American Media’s long-standing business relationship with The Weinstein Company. Earlier this year, Mr. Weinstein gave Mr. Howard a news tip that Mr. Howard agreed might make a good story. Mr. Howard pursued the tip and followed up with Mr. Weinstein as a courtesy, but declined to publish any story.”

Weinstein’s relationship with Kroll, one of the other agencies he contracted with, dates back years. After Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, an Italian model, accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her, in 2015, she reached a settlement with Weinstein that required her to surrender all her personal devices to Kroll, so that they could be wiped of evidence of a conversation in which Weinstein admitted to groping her. A recording of that exchange, captured during a police sting operation, was released by The New Yorker last month.

During the more recent effort to shut down emerging stories, Kroll again played a central role. E-mails show that Dan Karson, the chairman of Kroll Americas’ Investigations and Disputes practice, contacted Weinstein at his personal e-mail address with information about women with allegations. In one October, 2016, e-mail, Karson sent Weinstein eleven photographs of McGowan and Weinstein together at different events in the years after he allegedly assaulted her. Three hours later, Weinstein forwarded Karson’s e-mail to Boies and Weinstein’s criminal-defense attorney, Blair Berk, and told them to “scroll thru the extra ones.” The next morning, Berk replied that one photo, which showed McGowan warmly talking with Weinstein, “is the money shot.”

Berk defended her actions. “Any criminal-defense lawyer worth her salt would investigate unproven allegations to determine if they are credible,” she said. “And it would be dereliction of duty not to conduct a public-records search for photographs of the accuser embracing the accused taken after the time of the alleged assault.”

Another firm, the Los Angeles-based PSOPS, and its lead private investigator, Jack Palladino, as well as another one of its investigators, Sara Ness, produced detailed profiles of various individuals in the saga, sometimes of a personal nature, which included information that could be used to undermine their credibility. One report on McGowan that Ness sent to Weinstein last December ran for more than a hundred pages and featured McGowan’s address and other personal information, along with sections labelled “Lies/Exaggerations/Contradictions,” “Hypocrisy,” and “Potential Negative Character Wits,” an apparent abbreviation of “witnesses.” One subhead read “Past Lovers.” The section included details of acrimonious breakups, mentioning Avellan, and discussed Facebook posts expressing negative sentiments about McGowan. (Palladino and Ness did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Other firms were also involved in assembling such profiles, including ones that focussed on factors that, in theory, might make women likely to speak out against sexual abuse. One of the other firm’s profiles was of Rosanna Arquette, an actress who later, in The New Yorker, accused Weinstein of sexual harassment. The file mentions Arquette’s friendship with McGowan, social-media posts about sexual abuse, and the fact that a family member had gone public with an allegation that she had been molested as a child.

All of the security firms that Weinstein hired were also involved in trying to ferret out reporters’ sources and probe their backgrounds. Wallace, the reporter for New York, said that he was suspicious when he received the call from the Black Cube operative using the pseudonym Anna, because Weinstein had already requested a meeting with Wallace; Adam Moss, the editor-in-chief of New York; David Boies; and a representative from Kroll. The intention, Wallace assumed, was to “come in with dossiers slagging various women and me.” Moss declined the meeting.

In a series of e-mails sent in the weeks before Wallace received the call from Anna, Dan Karson, of Kroll, sent Weinstein preliminary background information on Wallace and Moss. “No adverse information about Adam Moss so far (no libel/defamation cases, no court records or judgments/liens/UCC, etc.),” Karson wrote in one e-mail. Two months later, Palladino, the PSOPS investigator, sent Weinstein a detailed profile of Moss. It stated, “Our research did not yield any promising avenues for the personal impeachment of Moss.”

Similar e-mail exchanges occurred regarding Wallace. Kroll sent Weinstein a list of public criticisms of Wallace’s previous reporting and a detailed description of a U.K. libel suit filed in response to a book he wrote, in 2008, about the rare-wine market. PSOPS also profiled Wallace’s ex-wife, noting that she “might prove relevant to considerations of our response strategy when Wallace’s article on our client is finally published.”

In January, 2017, Wallace, Moss, and other editors at New York decided to shelve the story. Wallace had assembled a detailed list of women with allegations, but he lacked on-the-record statements from any victims. Wallace said that the decision not to run a story was made for legitimate journalistic reasons. Nevertheless, he said, “There was much more static and distraction than I’ve encountered on any other story.”

Other reporters were investigated as well. In April, 2017, Ness, of PSOPS, sent Weinstein an assessment of my own interactions with “persons of interest”—a list largely consisting of women with allegations, or those connected to them. Later, PSOPS submitted a detailed report focussing jointly on me and Jodi Kantor, of the Times. Some of the observations in the report are mundane. “Kantor is NOT following Ronan Farrow,” it notes, referring to relationships on Twitter. At other times, the report reflects a detailed effort to uncover sources. One individual I interviewed, and another whom Kantor spoke to in her separate endeavor, were listed as having reported the details of the conversations back to Weinstein.

For years, Weinstein had used private security agencies to investigate reporters. In the early aughts, as the journalist David Carr, who died in 2015, worked on a report on Weinstein for New York, Weinstein assigned Kroll to dig up unflattering information about him, according to a source close to the matter. Carr’s widow, Jill Rooney Carr, told me that her husband believed that he was being surveilled, though he didn’t know by whom. “He thought he was being followed,” she recalled. In one document, Weinstein’s investigators wrote that Carr had learned of McGowan’s allegation in the course of his reporting. Carr “wrote a number of critical/unflattering articles about HW over the years,” the document says, “none of which touched on the topic of women (due to fear of HW’s retaliation, according to HW).”

Weinstein’s relationships with the private investigators were often routed through law firms that represented him. This is designed to place investigative materials under the aegis of attorney-client privilege, which can prevent the disclosure of communications, even in court.

David Boies, who was involved in the relationships with Black Cube and PSOPS, was initially reluctant to speak with The New Yorker, out of concern that he might be “misinterpreted either as trying to deny or minimize mistakes that were made, or as agreeing with criticisms that I don’t agree are valid.”

But Boies did feel the need to respond to what he considered “fair and important” questions about his hiring of investigators. He said that he did not consider the contractual provisions directing Black Cube to stop the publication of the Times story to be a conflict of interest, because his firm was also representing the newspaper in a libel suit. From the beginning, he said, he advised Weinstein “that the story could not be stopped by threats or influence and that the only way the story could be stopped was by convincing the Times that there was no rape.” Boies told me he never pressured any news outlet. “If evidence could be uncovered to convince the Times the charges should not be published, I did not believe, and do not believe, that that would be averse to the Times’ interest.”

He conceded, however, that any efforts to profile and undermine reporters, at the Times and elsewhere, were problematic. “In general, I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to pressure reporters,” he said. “If that did happen here, it would not have been appropriate.”

Although the agencies paid by his firm focussed on many women with allegations, Boies said that he had only been aware of their work related to McGowan, whose allegations Weinstein denied. “Given what was known at the time, I thought it was entirely appropriate to investigate precisely what he was accused of doing, and to investigate whether there were facts that would rebut those accusations,” he said.

Of his representation of Weinstein in general, he said, “I don’t believe former lawyers should criticize former clients.” But he expressed regrets. “Although he vigorously denies using physical force, Mr. Weinstein has himself recognized that his contact with women was indefensible and incredibly hurtful,” Boies told me. “In retrospect, I knew enough in 2015 that I believe I should have been on notice of a problem, and done something about it. I don’t know what, if anything, happened after 2015, but to the extent it did, I think I have some responsibility. I also think that if people had taken action earlier it would have been better for Mr. Weinstein.”

Weinstein also drafted individuals around him into his efforts—willingly and not. In December, 2016, Weinstein asked the actress Asia Argento, who ultimately went public in The New Yorker with her allegation of rape against Weinstein, to meet in Italy with his private investigators to give testimony on his behalf. Argento, who felt pressure to say yes, declined after her partner, the chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain, advised her to avoid the meeting. Another actress, who declined to be named in this story, said that Weinstein asked her to meet with reporters to extract information about other sources.

Weinstein also enlisted two former employees, Denise Doyle Chambers and Pamela Lubell, in what turned out to be an effort to identify and call people who might speak to the press about their own, or others’, allegations. Weinstein secretly shared the lists they compiled with Black Cube.

Hofmeister, speaking on Weinstein’s behalf, said, “Any ‘lists’ that were prepared included names of former employees and others who were relevant to the research and preparation of a book about Miramax. Former employees conducting interviews for the book reported receiving unwanted contacts from the media.”

Doyle Chambers declined an interview request. But Lubell, a producer who worked for Weinstein at Miramax decades ago, told me that she was manipulated into participating. In July, 2017, Lubell visited Weinstein’s offices to pitch him on an app that she was developing. In the middle of the meeting, Weinstein asked Lubell if they could have a private conversation in his office. Lubell told me that a lawyer working with Weinstein was already there, along with Doyle Chambers. Weinstein asked if Lubell and Doyle Chambers could write a “fun book on the old times, the heyday, of Miramax.” “Pam,” she recalled him saying, “write down all the employees that you know, and can you get in touch with them?”

A few weeks later, in August, after they had made the list, Weinstein “called us back into the office,” Lubell recalled. “And he said, ‘You know what, we’re going to put a hold on the book.’ ” He asked Doyle Chambers and Lubell to “call some of your friends from the list and see if they got calls from the press.” In early September, Weinstein summoned Lubell and Doyle Chambers to his office and asked them to start making calls to people connected to several actresses. “It got kind of intense,” Lubell recalled. “We didn’t know these people, and all of a sudden this was something very different from what we signed up for.” Several of the targeted women said that they felt the calls they received from Lubell and Doyle Chambers, and from Weinstein himself, were frightening.

Lubell told me that hours before the first Times story broke, on October 5th, Weinstein summoned her, Doyle Chambers, and others on his team, including the attorney Lisa Bloom, who has since resigned, to his office. “He was in a panic,” Lubell recalled. “He starts screaming, ‘Get so-and-so on the phone.’ ” After the story was published, the team scrambled to respond to it. Bloom and others pored over pictures that, like the ones featured in the Kroll e-mails, showed ongoing contact between Weinstein and women who made allegations. “He was screaming at us, ‘Send these to the board members,’ ” Lubell recalled. She e-mailed the photographs to the board ahead of the crisis meeting at which Weinstein’s position at his company began unravelling.

Since the allegations against Weinstein became public, Lubell hasn’t slept well. She told me that, although she knew that Weinstein “was a bully and a cheater,” she “never thought he was a predator.” Lubell has wondered if she should have known more, sooner.

After a year of concerted effort, Weinstein’s campaign to track and silence his accusers crumbled. Several of the women targeted, however, said that Weinstein’s use of private security agencies deepened the challenge of speaking out. “It scared me,” Sciorra said, “because I knew what it meant to be threatened by Harvey. I was in fear of him finding me.” McGowan said that the agencies and law firms enabled Weinstein’s behavior. As she was targeted, she felt a growing sense of paranoia. “It was like the movie ‘Gaslight,’ ” she told me. “Everyone lied to me all the time.” For the past year, she said, “I’ve lived inside a mirrored fun house.”

Ronan Farrow, a television and print reporter, is the author of the upcoming book “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.”

NYT statement on David Boies’s involvement in the effort to undermine its reporting on Harvey Weinstein https://t.co/IyqwYgihhi pic.twitter.com/z684NI86kB

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 7, 2017

“We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters,” the statement read. “We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies.”

On Monday night, David McCraw, The Times’s deputy general counsel, declined to say what those remedies might be. But, he said, “I think that what they owe us is an explanation of what actually happened,” adding, “We need to know much more.”

Mr. Boies did not respond to an email inquiry on Monday. But he told The New Yorker that while he oversaw the contract, he himself did not select the firm or direct its agents. And while he said he did not believe his work for Mr. Weinstein and his firm’s representation of The Times represented a conflict, “We should not have been contracting and paying investigators that we did not select and direct.”

Black Cube promotes itself as “a select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units.”

Terrific story on the hardship of coming forward by @JocelynNoveckAP: https://t.co/HLQrNPC1rf

— Jake Coyle (@jakecoyleAP) November 2, 2017

NEW YORK (AP) — Day by day, the accusations pile up, as scores of women come forward to say they were victims of Harvey Weinstein. But others with stories to tell have not.
For some of these women who’ve chosen not to go public, the fear of being associated forever with the sordid scandal — and the effects on their careers, and their lives — might be too great. Or they may still be struggling with the lingering effects of their encounters.
Canadian actress Erika Rosenbaum, 37, had just gone public with her own allegations of sexual misconduct by Weinstein when, about 10 days ago, she received a Facebook message from a young woman, asking if they could speak.
The aspiring filmmaker and actress had listened to Rosenbaum’s recorded interview with The New York Times, in which she described several disturbing incidents in hotel rooms with the producer some 15 years ago. And she wanted to tell Rosenbaum about her own, remarkably similar but much more recent experiences with Weinstein — a series of harrowing hotel-room encounters which, she says, took place just last year, when she was 21.
She told Rosenbaum that she’d developed a relationship with Weinstein, that was really two relationships: “One where he was very much a mentor ... and another that I kept locked inside a secret compartment in my mind where he was manipulating me in a way that I didn’t know how I’d got there, or how to get out.”
“It really was like speaking to myself at that age,” Rosenbaum says.
“I felt like I was talking to an older version of myself,” says the young woman.
She wanted Rosenbaum’s advice: Should she go public with her story? She wanted her experience to serve as a warning for other young women about what can happen in friendships with powerful older men. But she was just beginning her career, and worried about being tainted by association with the scandal. And because the encounters were so recent, she was only beginning to process it all.
Rosenbaum told her that going public was a personal decision, not right for everyone — “If she’s not ready to come forward, she’s not ready.”
The young woman has decided that for now, she is not. “I’m not Gwyneth or Angelina or Lupita,” she says of some of the most famous women who have accused Weinstein. “I think I deserve to build my career without being linked to Harvey Weinstein every time somebody Googles my name.”
___
As any advocate for victims of sexual harassment or assault will tell you, the decision of whether to come forward can be an excruciating one — even when the assailant is not a famous Hollywood figure.
“It is an agonizing decision for everyone,” says Jeanie Kurka Reimer, who’s spent 30 years working in the field of sexual assault in Wisconsin, as an advocate, therapist and consultant. But in a high-profile case like Weinstein’s, she adds, there’s yet another layer of difficulty. “You can’t ever take it back,” she says of the choice to go public. “It’s a life-changing decision.”
Anita Hill, a symbol for many women in the fight against sexual harassment, understands well why a woman, especially at the beginning of her career, would stay silent. “When a person has moved on and become a star, it’s easier for that person to be embraced and not feel the repercussions of speaking out,” says Hill, who was excoriated by many when she famously testified in 1991 that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her.
“But when they’re young,” she said in a recent interview, “it’s a big question mark as to how people are going to react. And they still have their lives to think about. There still can be a negative public reaction, even though we say (sexual harassment) is wrong.”
This is why, Hill and others note, many victims accept confidential settlements in sexual harassment cases. And, she notes, only a fraction of cases are even reported at all.
....
Like Rosenbaum, the young woman, who related her story in multiple interviews with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, met Weinstein at a party. It was the spring of 2016. According to her account, Weinstein asked to see a film she’d made and gave her his cell number.
She called, eager for his mentorship. They met three times and simply discussed cinema. “Whatever you want to say, he’s a genius about film,” she says.
But then, after an evening event with Weinstein and others, they ended up back at his hotel, she says. She assumed everyone was meeting for dinner. They had a drink in his suite; still no others arrived. Suddenly, in a scenario that matches that of many accusers, Weinstein made a brief exit and returned naked, the woman alleges. He asked her to strip; she said no, repeatedly, but he kept negotiating. Eventually, the woman alleges, both were naked, and he convinced her to give him a massage and then lie on the bed as he masturbated.
Even before she left the room, she says she was blaming herself. “I’m feeling, ‘I did this,’” she recalls thinking. “‘I put myself here, and now I have to clean up my mess.’” But she hoped it was just a one-time thing. And, she stresses, she wanted to keep the mentorship — and what she believed was a friendship — on track.
More meetings followed. Some, but not all, ended up in hotel rooms, she says. The woman says she refused to have intercourse with Weinstein. But she says he persisted in other ways, including pressuring her into oral sex. On three occasions, when she refused to participate in three-way sex, he directed her to watch him engage in activity with the other woman, she says. And what became “the norm,” she says, is that he would pleasure himself behind her as she stood naked in front of a mirror.
The young woman says she felt so debased and ashamed by these encounters that she lied to all her close friends and family, saying everything was above board. After nine months, she finally told her parents what had been happening.
“You’re going to hate me, you’re going to hate me,” she repeated over and over to her mother, according to the accounts of both women, weeping and shaking as they sat in the family car. She recalls even recoiling from her mother’s sympathetic hug, saying “I’m disgusting.”
Soon after, the young woman deleted all texts from Weinstein, she says. The AP has seen written journal entries referring to him, and emails of a non-intimate nature; it has also spoken to family members and her manager, who feel she should stay anonymous, given her young age and fledgling career.
Through a spokesman, Weinstein has consistently denied all allegations of non-consensual sex. (Representatives did not reply to repeated requests for comment on this story.)
The woman finds that questionable. “I said ‘No’ the first few times but then I just did it,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t have an option.” She adds: “I wasn’t sure what he would do if I said no. I had heard he could make someone completely obsolete in a second. I was scared of that.”
___
Rosenbaum, too, was in her early 20s when she met Weinstein. “I was the same age and probably a very similar young woman — a little bit of talent and ambition and brains,” she says.
She too ended up in a hotel room, where she alleges he coaxed her into a massage. She decided complying was the safe way out. “I didn’t want to humiliate the all-powerful Oz,” she told the Times.
The next time Rosenbaum found herself in a hotel room with Weinstein, the producer brought her into a bathroom, where, she alleges, he stood her in front of a mirror, held her by the back of the neck and masturbated behind her. She had one more encounter, in his office, where she says he also made sexual advances.
“He didn’t have a gun to my head, he didn’t wrestle me to the floor,” Rosenbaum told the Times of their meetings, which took place over an extended period. “I just didn’t know how to get out.” After that, she says, “I lied to cover my embarrassment and my shame,” keeping the secret from others.
But when the Weinstein story broke this month, Rosenbaum, who lives in Montreal, was in a far different place than she was 15 years ago. Now a mother of three small children, she says the intervening years had provided needed perspective. “My life is full and balanced in a way it wasn’t when I was young,” she says. “It’s bigger than just work. I see the long game now. That balance gave me the ability to be honest.”
Still, the decision to go public wasn’t simple. “I still very much believed that I could be blackballed as a troublemaker,” she says. Even now, when so many more women have come out, she says she realizes “there may well be people who don’t want to work with me. But there will also be people who do.”
She has been buoyed, she says, by the “sisterhood of women” who have been reaching out to her — some to thank her, others to tell their own stories.
As the young woman did. When they spoke by telephone, Rosenbaum says, one question the younger woman grappled with was how she had allowed herself to get into those unwanted sexual situations with Weinstein.
And then Rosenbaum told her something that she found comforting.
“I told her something about consent, that I did not know at her age,” Rosenbaum says. “I told her that if you’re afraid to say no, then it isn’t consent.”

Gross allegations about Brett Ratner show the Weinstein scandal is continuing to empower women to come forward https://t.co/GONMc7r6t5

— Matthew Garrahan (@MattGarrahan) November 1, 2017

Working on this story about Brett Ratner over the past two weeks has been one of the most intense, emotional experiences of my career.

— Amy Kaufman (@AmyKinLA) November 1, 2017

I know a lot of women are coming forward about sexual harassment in the wake of Harvey Weinstein. I hope it is not lost that that is still an incredibly hard thing to do, often involving serious legal threats.

— Amy Kaufman (@AmyKinLA) November 1, 2017

This is our 9th update to the full list of Harvey Weinstein accusers, from fledgling actresses to Hollywood royalty https://t.co/YRwXWN7UxB pic.twitter.com/3LEr1Yn4Lk

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 31, 2017

Many Weinstein accusers are still silent. Annabella Sciorra, who alleges rape, Daryl Hannah, and others explain why. https://t.co/hbkCt092aW

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) October 28, 2017

Continued relationships between victims of sexual misconduct and attackers—often bosses, relatives, spouses—are common. For many reasons. https://t.co/lx1tXfD8y4

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) October 28, 2017

This is the list of all the 82 women who were sexually assaulted/raped/molested by #HarveyWeinstein. We,the victims, have compiled this list pic.twitter.com/eReShhtme8

— Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) October 28, 2017

Harvey Weinstein goes down in flames as anger of Hollywood women ignites https://t.co/qGimBTtIDs pic.twitter.com/oKVzWuAw6G

— LAT Entertainment (@latimesent) October 20, 2017

Quentin Tarantino has known for decades about Harvey Weinstein's alleged misconduct, he said in an interview https://t.co/ZevU5qW9aG pic.twitter.com/mEYkmNMFU7

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 19, 2017

Quentin Tarantino, the Hollywood director most closely tied to Harvey Weinstein, has known for decades about the producer’s alleged misconduct toward women and now feels ashamed he did not take a stronger stand and stop working with him, he said in an interview.

“I knew enough to do more than I did,” he said, citing several episodes involving prominent actresses. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”

“I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard,” he added. “If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him.”

Allegations of sexual harassment and assault by Mr. Weinstein were disclosed this month in The New York Times and The New Yorker, which prompted other women to share their accounts of his alleged abuse, set off criminal investigations, roiled the entertainment world and triggered a social media movement of women from other industries and backgrounds telling their stories.

But Mr. Tarantino said in the interview on Wednesday that he had heard about Mr. Weinstein’s behavior long before those articles. His own former girlfriend, Mira Sorvino, told him about unwelcome advances and unwanted touching by Mr. Weinstein. Another actress told him a similarly upsetting story years later. He also knew that the actress Rose McGowan had reached a settlement with the producer.

But Mr. Tarantino said he had failed to consider whether the women he knew were part of a larger pattern of abuse. Though he continued to hear alarming stories over the years, he proceeded to make film after film with Mr. Weinstein, his greatest champion — a decision he now regrets.

“What I did was marginalize the incidents,” he recalled, saying he wrote them off as mild misbehavior. “Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse.”

In the hourlong conversation, Mr. Tarantino, 54, apologized for not doing more while also explaining why; admitted his own culpability while also calling for sweeping change in Hollywood’s treatment of women; and condemned Mr. Weinstein, 65, while acknowledging their father-son closeness.

The producer and director have been symbiotic for decades: from 1992, when Mr. Weinstein distributed “Reservoir Dogs,” through “Pulp Fiction,” the “Kill Bill” films, “Inglourious Basterds” and “The Hateful Eight,” until a few weeks ago, when he threw Mr. Tarantino an engagement party.

When Mr. Tarantino read the articles about Mr. Weinstein, he was horrified by the scope and severity of the alleged abuse, especially the rape accusations, he said. But some of the accounts were deeply familiar to him. “Everyone who was close to Harvey had heard of at least one of those incidents” chronicled in the first few articles, he said. “It was impossible they didn’t.”

When he and Ms. Sorvino started dating in 1995, she told him that not long before, Mr. Weinstein had massaged her without asking, chased her around a hotel room and even showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, a story she recently shared with The New Yorker.

“I was shocked and appalled” back then, Mr. Tarantino said. “I couldn’t believe he would do that so openly. I was like: ‘Really? Really?’ But the thing I thought then, at the time, was that he was particularly hung up on Mira.” She had won accolades for her performance in “Mighty Aphrodite,” and “I thought Harvey was hung up on her in this Svengali kind of way,” Mr. Tarantino said. “Because he was infatuated with her, he horribly crossed the line.”

The problem was resolved, he said he felt at the time, because he and Ms. Sorvino were dating. “I’m with her, he knows that, he won’t mess with her, he knows that she’s my girlfriend,” Mr. Tarantino said, describing his attitude back then.

Over the years, he learned of other accounts. Another actress friend told him a troubling story of unwanted advances by Mr. Weinstein in a hotel room. Mr. Tarantino confronted Mr. Weinstein, who offered the woman what the director described as a weak apology. (She confirmed the account to The Times but declined to be identified.)

Mr. Tarantino also knew that Ms. McGowan had reached a settlement with Mr. Weinstein after an episode in a hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival. Recently, she tweeted that Mr. Weinstein had raped her.

Mr. Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex made by Ms. McGowan and others.

There were rumors too, shadowy accounts that Mr. Tarantino continued to hear second- or thirdhand and never pursued further. Now Mr. Tarantino said he regretted not taking the women’s stories seriously enough. “I chalked it up to a ’50s-’60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk,” he said. “As if that’s O.K. That’s the egg on my face right now.”

In the interview, Mr. Tarantino issued several calls to action. In its treatment of women, Hollywood has been “operating under an almost Jim Crow-like system that us males have almost tolerated,” he said. “We allowed it to exist because that’s the way it was.”

On the discussion of who knew what about Mr. Weinstein and when, he said: “I’m calling on the other guys who knew more to not be scared. Don’t just give out statements. Acknowledge that there was something rotten in Denmark. Vow to do better by our sisters.”

He added, “What was previously accepted is now untenable to anyone of a certain consciousness.”

His own relationship with Mr. Weinstein, who has been fired from his own company and ousted from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, spanned deals and shoots, publicity tours and film festivals. But when Mr. Tarantino tried to call Mr. Weinstein several times recently after the disclosures, he said, he got no reply. Mr. Weinstein needs to “face the music,” he said.

Despite their closeness, he said he could offer no insight into Mr. Weinstein’s alleged misdeeds. “I don’t have an answer for why he could do this and be stripped of his entire legacy,” he said.

Asked how the news about Mr. Weinstein would affect how the public views his own record and body of work, Mr. Tarantino paused. “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t.”

I speak up to contribute to the end of the conspiracy of silence, says @Lupita_Nyongo https://t.co/X1X32jvxn8

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) October 20, 2017

Random Fuzzy


FTKMF credit: Now, left and last January 12, right

-- She fully expected that by this time, the far end of the 6 months - to 1 year time frame quoted in Wasser's email, they would be out to it.

-- She didn't mention FTKMF at all in the Harper's spread.  It was The Breadwinner's turn and she didn't want it to have to share the spotlight.

-- She was careful not to pose holding or touching the cheetahs so as to reinforce her message that they are not pets.


-- She didn't provide details about her encounter with Weinstein.  She wanted to go on the record but she didn't want her story to be the story.  It is inevitable that she will be asked about it in a future interview.

... Angelina Jolie, who said that during the release of “Playing by Heart” in the late 1990s, he made unwanted advances on her in a hotel room, which she rejected.

“I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,” Ms. Jolie said in an email.

-- When asked on CBS how the NYTimes got Angelina and Gwyneth to talk about their long-ago experiences, writer Jodi Kantor said, "They wanted to come forward in the wake of the first story we broke. They wanted to support other women."  Angelina wrote, “This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.”  Gwyneth said, “This way of treating women ends now.”   It appears to me like they had coordinated their statements and actions: coming forward for the same reason, sending the same message and at the same time.

Several days ago, additional actresses began sharing with The Times on-the-record stories of casting-couch abuses. Their accounts hint at the sweep of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged harassment, targeting women on the way to stardom, those who had barely acted and others in between. Fantasies that the public eagerly watched onscreen, the women recounted, sometimes masked the dark experiences of those performing in them....
Now, with the process of tallying the size and scope of Mr. Weinstein’s abuse allegations underway, Ms. Paltrow and others said they wanted to support women who had already come forward and help those in similar situations feel less alone.

Angelina and Gwyneth decided to reveal their own experiences because they know firsthand how difficult it is to go up against Weinstein and his cabal.  They encountered him when they were just starting their careers and he was at his peak.  They knew the victims needed to draw more strength in numbers to prevail.  Even though his power and stature had diminished in recent years, Weinstein was still a master at coercion and intimidation.  He succeeded in shutting down Ronan Farrow's story at NBC and had repeatedly attempted to intimidate both the NYTimes and Farrow.

...Weinstein threatened to sue The Times this month.  "He had one high-priced consultant or lawyer after another -- " Ms. Kantor began.
"An army," Ms Twohey confirmed.; "It was an army attacking us."*

Weinstein and his team thought they could overwhelm his accusers as they had done in the past.

“It relies on mostly hearsay accounts and a faulty report, apparently stolen from an employee personnel file, which has been debunked by 9 different eyewitnesses,” (Weinstein's lawyer, Charles Harder) said on October 5 on the NYT article. “We sent the Times the facts and evidence, but they ignored it and rushed to publish. We are preparing the lawsuit now. All proceeds will be donated to women’s organizations.”

It wasn't until the New Yorker posted Farrow's piece, underpinned by incriminating audio from a NYPD sting operation, and followed quickly by the NYTimes' 2nd post with Gwyneth and Angelina, that Weinstein's efforts at intimidation lost potency and his combative lawyers fell silent.

The AP wrote, "They waited years to speak, but two of Hollywood's most powerful women might have helped seal the fate of Harvey Weinstein .... no one expected it to go this high."  A reporter who exposed sexual harassment in Silicon Valley for the NYTimes said, “Now that Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow have come forward, I wonder if it will take some of the weird societal sting out of it.”   With their reputation and credibility bolstering the standing of the women, they emboldened many other victims to come forward.  It was the tipping point.   The floodgates swung open and Weinstein was finally no match for the public outrage that exploded on social media and that scorched even his lawyers. 


-- Peter Biskind's 2004 book depicted Weinstein as a "brutish, violent man" and described years of his bullying tactics.  The author now notes that his sexual misconduct was an open secret even then.  I find it very hard to believe that anyone working actively in Hollywood, especially those who worked with Weinstein, did not know what he was about.  He liked to openly brag about who he had slept with.  The likes of Streep and Tarantino may not have known the full extent or all the details, but they knew what he was like and what he was capable of.  Given his appearance, power, temperament and proclivities, it did not require a stretch of the imagination or much sleuthing to see that he was a sexual predator forcing his way on many aspiring actresses.  The AMPAS statement noted "the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity."  All those who knew Weinstein well but claimed not to know what he was doing were complicit. 

Comparisons have been made to Roger Ailes and Bill Cosby, but while Ailes wielded power and influence most notably in shaping the political conversation, I don't think he had anything to compare with Weinstein's well organized army of enablers -- publicists, writers and reporters, employees, consultants and lawyers -- a force he could instantly mobilize to defend him and silence his accusers.  Weinstein had power over his victims to an extent that neither Ailes nor Cosby exercised over theirs.


--- At the Inglourious Basterds Cannes red carpet, she had kept her distance from the Weinsteins, the film's distributors, while waiting for Brad to come back for her.   She was on the left behind Bryan Lourd while the Weinsteins were on the far right.  In retrospect, it was probably the reason why Brad kept looking back to check on her while posing with his cast mates.


youtube



youtube

They didn't mingle with the Weinsteins at the after party and stayed in a separate section.


youtube


-- Fussy


*****

NYTimes

How to Break a Sexual Harassment Story
By ALEXANDRIA SYMONDS  OCT. 15, 2017

It starts with a whisper. A prominent man has used his wealth and power to harass or abuse a woman — or worse — and then to intimidate her, or to buy her silence.

As several reporters at The New York Times have learned this year, it rarely ends with a single woman, a single whisper.

...

And on Oct. 5, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey revealed that the Hollywood megaproducer Harvey Weinstein has been confronted with sexual harassment allegations for nearly three decades, and in at least eight cases has reached settlements with his accusers. Many more accusations of harassment and assault have been leveled at Mr. Weinstein — on the pages of The Times, in other publications and on social media — in the days since. As with the case of Mr. O’Reilly, their findings were bolstered not just by testimony but by legal documents and company records.

All of these journalists say they experienced much the same thing while reporting: ever more women telling the same stories about a small handful of powerful men.

...

Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey were likewise unaware of the dimensions of the Weinstein case when they began working on it. “In a way, we’re asking the same questions now as we were at the start of the reporting,” Ms. Kantor said, “which is, what is the scale and scope of this thing?”

There are a number of factors that make allegations of sexual harrassment difficult to report. In all three cases, reporters said sources were hesitant to speak out because their allegations were so intimate; because they feared reprisal by powerful men; and in many instances, the women involved had entered into settlements that included nondisclosure agreements.

...

Given the challenges, these stories required weeks or months of painstaking work. “Getting people to speak on the record about these painful experiences requires time, patience and establishing trust,” said Matt Purdy, a deputy managing editor at The Times. “We have given reporters that time and the support of editors because this is a subject that absolutely demands to be brought into the open in a big way.”

...

The reporters weren’t immune, either, to much the same kind of intimidation and bullying their sources said they’d faced. “The people who carried out the unacceptable behavior threw up as many hurdles as possible,” said Pui-Wing Tam, The Times’s technology editor, who worked on the Silicon Valley story. “Many used threats, yelling and blamed the victims. At times, they called me to try and undermine the credibility of the reporters themselves.”

(“What can I say?” she added. “That just won’t work, folks.”)

And Mr. Weinstein threatened to sue The Times this month. “He had one high-priced consultant or lawyer after another — ” Ms. Kantor began.

“An army,” Ms. Twohey confirmed. “It was an army attacking us.”

...

For all three cases, that process of uncovering has had a dual effect. On one hand, to discover the extent of the allegations — and the pervasiveness of the culture — has been overwhelming. The reporters said they spent days afterward sorting through dozens of tips; Ms. Steel said people working across a range of industries asked her to look into their similar experiences. As she put it, “It’s disheartening to see that there’s still this power imbalance and that this culture of misogyny really remains in our businesses and in our lives.”

On the other hand, the investigations are beginning to have powerful real-life consequences. Mr. Weinstein was fired by the Weinstein Company three days after The Times’s first report was published. Mr. O’Reilly was ousted by Fox News on April 19. And the venture capitalist Dave McClure stepped down from his company, 500 Startups, several days after Ms. Benner’s report.

The journalists agreed that there has also been an accompanying shift in the culture around disclosure. “I think that what you saw almost immediately was a growing safe space for more women to come forward and tell their stories,” Ms. Twohey said. One source, she said, had been particularly frightened about potential blowback but has since received many notes of gratitude — even flowers, Ms. Twohey said.

Ms. Steel said she was struck, in the course of doing research, by how differently the media portrays these women’s stories even since Andrea Mackris first filed suit against Mr. O’Reilly (and her personal life was subsequently dragged through the mud in the tabloids) in 2004.

“I’ve thought a lot about that,” Ms. Steel said. “There’s this whole history of women who have made these allegations before. How would their stories have been told today?”

“Now that Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow have come forward, I wonder if it will take some of the weird societal sting out of it,” Ms. Benner said. “We are so much more than the bad things that happen to us.”

deadline

Joining the likes of the already exited Lisa Bloom and Lanny Davis, Charles Harder is now no longer working for the ex-The Weinstein Company co-chair, Deadline has confirmed. “He has been gone for about a week,” a source says of the Harder Mirell & Abrams attorney, adding that Harder’s services were “no longer required.”
With Harder’s departure, the notion of a multi-million action against the NYT has disappeared as well.

Harder nor Weinstein’s PR team at Sitrick and Company did not respond to request for comment on the situation.
Which is a contrast to October 5 when Harder was very outspoken.
“It relies on mostly hearsay accounts and a faulty report, apparently stolen from an employee personnel file, which has been debunked by 9 different eyewitnesses,” the lawyer said on October 5 on the NYT article. “We sent the Times the facts and evidence, but they ignored it and rushed to publish. We are preparing the lawsuit now. All proceeds will be donated to women’s organizations.”



latimes

In Hollywood, what should've been scandal was long met with a shrug. A new outcry has changed that

Lorraine Ali
October 13, 2017

Until very recently, women who came forward with their accounts of sexual harassment at the hands of powerful men who held sway over their careers were viewed as traitors, whiners or pitifully naive to the ways of industries where a barter system — sex for fame — was all but implicit.
They sold their sexuality on screen and on stage, after all, the thinking went, so what did they expect when the cameras stopped rolling or the arena lights dimmed?

The few who were brave enough to come forward with accounts of being groped, coerced, threatened and even raped were sidelined, careers destroyed. Their stories rarely made the news, until recently, when the sheer number of allegations against power brokers and gatekeepers like Bill Cosby, Fox News’ Roger Ailes, music’s L.A. Reid and now Harvey Weinstein literally forced the media’s hand.

Historically the hardest part for women coming forward with accounts of sexual abuse wasn’t just proving that the sickening events actually happened — it’s been convincing anyone who would listen that what happened was wrong, even if it was business as usual.

Those of us who’ve worked on film sets, in recording studios, around green rooms or in the vicinity of the dreaded casting couch know that drawing attention to the problem puts you on a path paved with land mines. Covering all these industries over the years has taught me and most of the other women I’ve worked with or observed to proceed with caution.

Is the world of entertainment very different than other fields? Probably not; certainly women have had to work around or submit to misogyny, subjugation and sexism in every arena. But the behavior in Hollywood seemed more blatant — and the stakes could be much higher.

Speak up and your chances of becoming a star are over. So it’s best just to move fast, stay on your toes, and laugh at the open secret — which has become the most oft-repeated phrase when talking about the Weinstein scandal — that so-and-so’s door is always open, until you walk in and it locks behind you.

How else would some abusers have been so emboldened over a period of decades? It takes a village full of apathy and fear, with a leadership emboldened by blockbuster films, hit records, must-see TV shows.

It took dozens and dozens of women breaking protocol and coming forward with similar stories of abuse, a social media outcry over their allegations, and a newly energized wave of investigative journalism to expose such abuses outside the studio gates.
.....

A timeline of the Harvey Weinstein scandal https://t.co/k1ViBF5MXh

— LAT Entertainment (@latimesent) October 12, 2017

Oct. 4, 2017

Weinstein lawyers up in anticipation of stories

Word leaks out that the New Yorker and the New York Times are preparing stories about Weinstein’s alleged misconduct when it becomes public that he has hired a virtual army of lawyers and crisis managers to fight the reports. The team includes attorney David Boies, the controversial Lisa Bloom (also the daughter of Gloria Allred), and Charles Harder, who famously won Hulk Hogan’s invasion of privacy trial case against the Gawker website. Weinstein preemptively denies any accusations, telling the Hollywood Reporter, "The story sounds so good, I want to buy the movie rights."

Oct. 5, 2017

The New York Times publishes its report

Hollywood is shaken when the New York Times report is published, stating that Weinstein has had a long history of sexual misconduct over the last two decades and has settled eight separate alleged sexual harassment cases. Among the numerous actresses and employees involved in the allegations are Judd, who names Weinstein as her attacker, and McGowan.

Weinstein announces a leave of absence

After issuing a statement reading, in part, “I so respect all women and regret what happened,” Weinstein announced he’d be taking a leave of absence from the Weinstein Co. effective immediately.

Hollywood begins to respond

Performers, news anchors and creative types, including Lena Dunham, Gretchen Carlson, Jenni Konner, Jake Tapper and others, begin to take to social media to condemn Weinstein, although his most famous collaborators and political allies largely remain silent. McGowan tweets without using his name.

Oct. 6, 2017

Weinstein Co. orders investigation of allegations

The Weinstein Co. board retains attorney John Kiernan of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP to investigate the allegations, but, for the moment, refrains from firing Weinstein.

Oct. 7, 2017

Legal advisor Lisa Bloom quits

After being criticized for representing Weinstein, two key members of Weinstein’s crisis team part ways with their client, including Los Angeles attorney Lisa Bloom. “I have resigned as an advisor to Harvey Weinstein,” Bloom wrote on Twitter. “My understanding is that Mr. Weinstein and his board are moving toward an agreement.”

Oct. 8, 2017

Weinstein is fired from his company

After a review, the board of TWC ousts Weinstein from the company he co-founded alongside his brother, Bob. “In light of new information about misconduct by Harvey Weinstein that has emerged in the past few days, the directors of The Weinstein Company ... have determined, and have informed Harvey Weinstein, that his employment with The Weinstein Company is terminated, effective immediately,” the company said in a statement.

Oct. 9, 2017

A-listers start to respond

Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, Emmy Rossum, Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Seth Rogen, Jessica Chastain and other stars begin tweeting their outrage at Weinstein and their support for the women who have come forward. Director Kevin Smith, a longtime Weinstein associate, says he feels “ashamed’ for working with him.

Oct. 10, 2017

New Yorker report alleges that Weinstein assaulted multiple women

Just five days after the New York Times published the initial allegations, the New Yorker publishes a lengthy investigation by Ronan Farrow that accuses Weinstein of further incidents, some involving actresses such as Rosanna Arquette, Mira Sorvino and Asia Argento. The report also includes an audio recording of Weinstein verbally pressuring Gutierrez to enter his hotel room in 2015.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie detail 'unacceptable' encounters

In a follow-up piece in the New York Times, Oscar winners Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie also accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct. The latter says, “this behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.”

Oct. 11, 2017

BAFTA suspends Harvey Weinstein's membership

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts announces that Weinstein has been suspended from the prestigious organization, effective immediately. A statement reads, "Whilst BAFTA has previously been a beneficiary of Mr. Weinstein’s support for its charitable work, it considers the reported alleged behavior completely unacceptable and incompatible with BAFTA’s values.”

Timeline of Weinstein allegations dating back decades
By Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) - A timeline of allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, who has denied having any nonconsensual sexual conduct with any women.
- 1984: Tomi-Ann Roberts, a 20-year-old aspiring actress, meets Weinstein in his New York hotel room to discuss a film. Weinstein is nude in the bathtub and asks Roberts to bare her breasts, she told The New York Times. She leaves the hotel room, she said.
- 1988: Lisa Rose, then a 22-year-old assistant in Miramax's London office, is sent to work for a day at The Savoy hotel and while alone in a suite with Weinstein, he requests a back rub and a massage, saying others complied, she told the BBC. She leaves immediately.

- Around 1990: British actress Kate Beckinsale, then 17 years old, arrives to meet with Weinstein at The Savoy hotel in London and is told by reception to go to his room. He opens the door in his bathrobe and offers her alcohol, she wrote in an Instagram post. She tells Weinstein she has school in the morning and leaves, she said. A few years later, Beckinsale said Weinstein asked if he'd made advances at the London hotel, apparently unable to remember.
- Early 1990s: Actress Rosanna Arquette, then in her early 30s, stops by The Beverly Hills Hotel to pick up a movie script from Weinstein, who is in the bathroom when she arrives and asks for a massage, she told The New Yorker magazine and The New York Times.
- Early 1990s: Louise Godbold, then 28 and seeking a film industry internship, is touring Weinstein's New York offices when he leads her to an empty meeting room, begs for a massage and places his hands on her shoulders as she moves to leave, she wrote on the website of the childhood trauma social network ACEs Connection.
- Early 1990s: English actress Sophie Dix, 22, accepts Weinstein's invitation to dinner at an American restaurant in London, Joe Allen, and then visits his room at The Savoy hotel to offer suggestions on film footage from a movie he was producing, she told The Guardian newspaper. Instead, Weinstein discusses a massage before he tries to pull off her clothes and pin her down on a bed, she said. Dix locks herself in the bathroom. When she opens the bathroom door, she sees Weinstein masturbating, so she locks the door again until room service arrives and she can flee, she said.
- 1991: Laura Madden, then an employee, is asked by Weinstein to give him massages at hotels in Dublin and London, she told The New York Times.
- 1993: Actress Katherine Kendall, 23, arrives at Weinstein's New York apartment for a business meeting, and he returns from the bathroom in his bathrobe, then nude, chasing her around the room and asking to see her breasts, she told The New York Times. She said she refused his advances.
- 1994: Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, 22, is summoned to Weinstein's suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a meeting, where she refuses his suggestion of a massage, she told The New York Times. Paltrow said her then-boyfriend, actor Brad Pitt, confronted Weinstein soon after.
- 1994-95: French actress Florence Darel, 26, meets Weinstein at a movie preview screening in New York City in 1994 and fends off his requests to meet following an after-party by claiming she's dating a costar, she told the newspaper Le Parisien. During a 1995 meeting in Weinstein's hotel suite at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, with Weinstein's wife next door, Darel quickly excuses herself, she said, when Weinstein makes advances while implying that to appear in American movies, she had to go through him.
- 1995: Liza Campbell, a British artist and writer then in her mid-30s, arrives to meet with Weinstein at The Savoy hotel in London, but he instead asks her to join him for a bath as she hears him undress, she wrote in The Sunday Times of London. She immediately leaves, she said.
- September 1995: Actress Mira Sorvino, 27 and attending the Toronto International Film Festival, meets with Weinstein at his hotel room where he massages her shoulders and chases her around, prompting her to leave, she told The New Yorker. Weeks later, Sorvino said, Weinstein shows up at her New York apartment after midnight and she convinces him to leave by telling him her boyfriend is coming over.
- 1996: French actress Judith Godreche, 24, attends a meeting with Weinstein and a female Miramax executive at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, she told The New York Times. The female executive leaves, and Godreche joins Weinstein at his suite to discuss a film they were working on. After Godreche says no to his suggestion of a massage, he pulls off her sweater and she leaves, she said.
- 1997: Actress Ashley Judd, then in her late 20s, arrives at a hotel in Beverly Hills for breakfast with Weinstein and learns they will be meeting in Weinstein's suite. She rejects his suggestions to give him a massage, to give him a shoulder rub, to pick out his clothes and to watch him shower, she told The New York Times. She earlier spoke of the encounter to the trade magazine Variety without naming Weinstein.
- 1997: Actress Rose McGowan, 23, reaches a financial settlement with Weinstein after an encounter in a hotel room at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, according to a legal document reviewed by The New York Times. On Thursday, McGowan tweeted "HW raped me," apparently in reference to Harvey Weinstein.
- 1997: Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director then 21 years old, arrives at what she expects to be a Miramax party at a hotel room at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, but only Weinstein is there, she told The New Yorker. After going into the bathroom he returns in his bathrobe and asks for a massage, she said. Argento gives him a massage, and Weinstein forces her legs apart and performs oral sex on her despite her protests, she said. She told the magazine they had consensual sexual relations in the years that followed.
- 1997: Model Zoe Brock, 23, is chased by a naked Weinstein, locking herself in the bathroom of his suite at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, she wrote in a post on Medium.com. She convinces him to get dressed and to allow her to stay the night in his penthouse suite at the Majestic Hotel, leaving at dawn before Weinstein returns, she said.
- Around 1997: Claire Forlani, an English actress then 25 years old, attends two meetings with Weinstein at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel and three dinners where Weinstein suggested massages and talked about actresses he has slept with, she wrote in a Twitter post. Forlani wrote she "ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there" each time.
- 1998: Zelda Perkins, a 25-year-old assistant in London, confronts Weinstein about remarks in hotel rooms she considers inappropriate, and about Weinstein's treatment of another female co-worker, her former co-workers told The New York Times.
- Late 1990s: Actress Angelina Jolie, then in her early 20s, rejects unwanted advances from Weinstein in a hotel room, she wrote in an email to The New York Times.
- Late 1990s: Actress Tara Subkoff, in her mid-20s, attends a premiere after-party where Weinstein grabs her to sit on his lap and she felt Weinstein's erection, she told Variety. After Subkoff got up from Weinstein's lap, she said he made requests that prompted Subkoff to laugh in Weinstein's face and leave the party.
- 2000: Actress Melissa Sagemiller, in her mid-20s, is filming in Toronto when Sagemiller is invited to Weinstein's hotel room ostensibly to discuss a movie script, she told HuffPost. Weinstein is wearing a robe and offers drinks, requests a massage, says he needs a shower and, as Sagemiller leaves, blocks the door and insists she kiss him, listing other actresses he said kissed him, she said.
- Early 2000s: Actress Heather Graham, then in her early 30s, is told by Weinstein while discussing movie scripts that he has an agreement with his wife allowing him to sleep with anyone he wanted when he was out of town, she wrote in Variety.
- Early 2000s: British actress Romola Garai, 18, arriving for what she expected to be a job interview at The Savoy hotel in London, is asked to go to Weinstein's hotel room, where he is waiting in a dressing gown, she told The Guardian.
- After 2000: Canadian actress Erika Rosenbaum, in her 20s, is ushered into a meeting in Weinstein's hotel suite during the Toronto International Film Festival, then left alone, she told CBC/Radio-Canada. Weinstein exits the bathroom wearing only a dress shirt and no pants, she said, and soon after grabs Rosenbaum by the neck and asks her to watch in a mirror as he begins masturbating.
- 2003: Dawn Dunning, then a 24-year-old aspiring actress, is invited to a meal at a New York City hotel, but after arriving is told to go to Weinstein's suite instead, where he is wearing a bathrobe, she told The New York Times. He said he had contracts for three films, but she would only allow her to sign them on the condition they have sex, she said. Dunning said she quickly left.
- After 2003: Actress Minka Kelly, a day after meeting Weinstein at an industry party, declines his request to hold a meeting in his hotel room, instead joining Weinstein and a female assistant the next day at a hotel restaurant, she wrote in an Instagram post. When the assistant leaves the table, Weinstein touts perks Kelly would enjoy as his girlfriend, she said. When she says she prefers to keep their relationship professional, he says he trusts she won't tell others about the conversation, she said.
- 2004: Lucia Evans, then Lucia Stoller, a college student and aspiring actress, is approached by Weinstein at the Cipriani Upstairs club in New York and accepts an invitation to meet with a female Miramax casting executive, but is led to an office where she was alone with Weinstein and he forces her to perform oral sex on him, she told The New Yorker. Weinstein later begins calling her late at night, she said. The experience led to eating problems, caused her schoolwork to suffer, ruined relationships and made roommates fear she'd kill herself, she said.
- After 2004: French actress Lea Seydoux, then in her 20s, fends off Weinstein's attempt to kiss her in his hotel room after he flirted with her at a fashion show, she wrote in The Guardian.
- Before 2007: Actress and model Angie Everhart, in her 30s, is sleeping on a yacht during the Cannes Film Festival in France, when she awakes to Weinstein blocking the door and masturbating, she told TMZ.
- Around 2007: Television anchor Lauren Sivan, 28, meets with Weinstein and others at the New York restaurant Cipriani before driving to the Cuban-themed club Socialista, where during a tour of the club's restaurant, Weinstein tells two kitchen staffers to leave, attempts to kiss Sivan and then exposes himself and masturbates into a plant while blocking her path, she told HuffPost.
- 2008: Louisette Geiss, then an actress and screenwriter, is pitching her script to Weinstein at a hotel during the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, when Weinstein changes into a bathrobe, gets into a hot tub and asks Geiss to watch him masturbate, she recounted during a news conference this week.
- 2008: Sarah Ann Masse, then an aspiring actress, comedian and writer, arrives at Weinstein's home in Connecticut for an interview to work as a nanny for his three children, and is greeted by Weinstein in his underwear, she told Variety. At the end of the interview, Weinstein gives her a long hug and says he loves her, she said. Masse said an assistant calls afterward to say that Weinstein decided not to hire her as a nanny because she was an actress.
- 2010: French actress Emma de Caunes, 34, visits Weinstein's room at the Hotel Ritz in Paris to get a movie script, she told The New Yorker. Weinstein leaves his bathroom naked with an erection, and asks her to lie on his bed, she said. De Caunes said she quickly left.
- January 2011: Actress Jessica Barth, then in her early 30s, arrives at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a business meeting with Weinstein, when he asks her over the phone to come to his room, she told The New Yorker. While there, Weinstein demands a naked massage in his bed, and she leaves, she said.
- After 2010: British model and actress Cara Delevingne, then in her early 20s, receives a call from Weinstein where he asks if she had slept with "the women I was seen out with in the media," she wrote in an Instagram post. He also tells her that her sexual orientation could limit her career prospects, she wrote. A year or two later at a hotel, Weinstein brags about sleeping with actresses, asks Delevingne to kiss another woman and tries to kiss Delevingne when she attempts to leave, she said. Delevingne wrote she regrets accepting a part afterward in a movie Weinstein produced.
- December 2014: Emily Nestor, recently hired as a temporary employee, meets with Weinstein at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel, where he promises her career help if she agrees to have sex, she told The New Yorker, and told co-workers in accounts reported by The New York Times. Co-workers notify The Weinstein Co. executives of Nestor's allegations.
- March 2015: Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, an Italian model and actress then 22 years old, arrives at Weinstein's New York office for a meeting about her career and soon after calls police, claiming Weinstein grabbed her breasts and put his hands up her skirt. The next day, Gutierrez wears a wire from New York City police and meets Weinstein at a bar. The district attorney declines to prosecute.
- 2015: Lauren O'Connor, a 28-year-old literary scout, production executive and colleague of an unnamed The Weinstein Co. employee allegedly harassed by a naked Weinstein, sends a memo detailing misconduct to executives, reported The New York Times.

EW - J.J. Abrams

"Someone said to me the other day that they are sick of hearing people talk about how disgusting it is," Abrams said of the allegations against Weinstein. "I don't think enough can be said about how viciously repulsive his abuse of power was. He's a monster. There are other monsters but there are those who fight monsters and tonight is all about those who fight monsters."

mashable
Screenwriter close to Weinstein calls out Hollywood: 'Everybody f**king knew'

Scott Rosenberg:

So, uh, yeah.
We need to talk about Harvey.

I was there, for a big part of it.
From, what, 1994 to the early 2000s?
Something like that.
Certainly The Golden Age.
The “PULP FICTION”, “SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE”, “CLERKS”, “SWINGERS”, “SCREAM”, “GOOD WILL HUNTING”, “ENGLISH PATIENT”, “LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL” years...

Harvey and Bob made my first two movies.
Then they signed me to an overall deal.
Then they bought that horror script of mine about the Ten Plagues.
For a lot of money.
Also bought that werewolf-biker script.
That no one else liked but was my personal favorite.
They were going to publish my novel.
They anointed me.
Made it so other studios thought I was the real deal.
They gave me my career.

I was barely 30.
I was sure I had struck gold.
They loved me, these two brothers, who had reinvented cinema.
And who were fun and tough and didn’t give an East Coast fuck about all the slick pricks out in L.A.

And those glory days in Tribeca?
The old cramped offices?
That wonderful gang of executives and assistants?
All the filmmakers who were doing repeat business?
The brothers wanted to create a “family of film”.
And they did just that...
We looked forward to having meetings there.
Meetings that would turn into plans that would turn into raucous nights out on the town.
Simply put: OG Miramax was a blast.

So, yeah, I was there.
And let me tell you one thing.
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing:

Everybody-fucking-knew.

Not that he was raping.
No, that we never heard.
But we were aware of a certain pattern of overly-aggressive behavior that was rather dreadful.
We knew about the man’s hunger; his fervor; his appetite.
There was nothing secret about this voracious rapacity; like a gluttonous ogre out of the Brothers Grimm.
All couched in vague promises of potential movie roles.
(and, it should be noted: there were many who actually succumbed to his bulky charms. Willingly. Which surely must have only impelled him to cast his fetid net even wider).

But like I said: everybody-fucking-knew.

And to me, if Harvey’s behavior is the most reprehensible thing one can imagine, a not-so-distant second is the current flood of sanctimonious denial and condemnation that now crashes upon these shores of rectitude in gloppy tides of bullshit righteousness.

Because everybody-fucking-knew.

And do you know how I am sure this is true?
Because I was there.
And I saw you.
And I talked about it with you.
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.

I saw you.
All of you.
God help me, I was there with you.

Again, maybe we didn’t know the degree.
The magnitude of the awfulness.
Not the rapes.
Not the shoving against the wall.
Not the potted-plant fucking.
But we knew something.
We knew something was bubbling under.
Something odious.
Something rotten.

But...
And this is as pathetic as it is true:
What would you have had us do?
Who were we to tell?
The authorities?
What authorities?
The press?
Harvey owned the press.
The Internet?
There was no Internet or reasonable facsimile thereof.
Should we have called the police?
And said what?
Should we have reached out to some fantasy Attorney General Of Movieland?
That didn't exist.

Not to mention, most of the victims chose not to speak out.
Aside from sharing the grimy details with a close girlfriend or confidante.
And if they discussed it with their representatives?
Agents and managers, who themselves feared The Wrath Of The Big Man?
The agents and managers would tell them to keep it to themselves.
Because who knew the repercussions?
That old saw “You’ll Never Work In This Town Again” came crawling back to putrid life like a re-animated cadaver in a late-night zombie flick.
But, yes, everyone knew someone who had been on the receiving end of lewd advances by him.
Or knew someone who knew someone.

A few actress friends of mine told me stories: of a ghastly hotel meeting; of a repugnant bathrobe-shucking; of a loathsome massage request.
And although they were rattled, they sort of laughed at his arrogance; how he had the temerity to think that simply the sight of his naked, doughy, carbuncled flesh was going to get them in the mood.
So I just believed it to be a grotesque display of power; a dude misreading the room and making a lame-if-vile pass.

It was much easier to believe that.
It was much easier for ALL of us to believe that.

Because...

And here’s where the slither meets the slime:
Harvey was showing us the best of times.
He was making our movies.
Throwing the biggest parties.
Taking us to The Golden Globes!
Introducing us to the most amazing people (Meetings with Vice President Gore! Clubbing with Quentin and Uma! Drinks with Salman Rushdie and Ralph Fiennes! Dinners with Mick Jagger and Warren-freaking-Beatty!).

The most epic Oscar weekends.
That seemed to last for weeks!
Sundance! Cannes! Toronto!
Telluride! Berlin! Venice!
Private jets! Stretch limousines! Springsteen shows!
Hell, Harvey once took me to St. Barth’s for Christmas.
For 12 days!
I was a broke-ass kid from Boston who had never even HEARD of St. Barth’s before he booked my travel.
He once got me tickets to the seven hottest Broadway shows in one week. So I could take a new girlfriend on a dazzling tour of theater.
He got me seats on the 40-yard-line to the Super Bowl, when the Patriots were playing the Packers in New Orleans.
Even got me a hotel room, which was impossible to get that weekend.
He gave and gave and gave and gave.
He had a monarch’s volcanic generosity when it came to those within his circle.
And a Mafia don’s fervent need for abject loyalty from his capos and soldiers.

But never mind us!
What about what he was doing for the culture?
Making stunningly splendid films at a time when everyone else was cranking-out simpering "INDEPENDENCE DAY" rip-offs.

It was glorious.
All of it.

So what if he was coming on a little strong to some young models who had moved mountains to get into one of his parties?
So what if he was exposing himself, in five-star hotel rooms, like a cartoon flasher out of “MAD MAGAZINE” (just swap robe for raincoat!)
Who were we to call foul?
Golden Geese don't come along too often in one's life.

Which goes back to my original point:
Everybody-fucking-knew.
But everybody was just having too good a time.
And doing remarkable work; making remarkable movies.

As the old joke goes:
We needed the eggs.

Okay, maybe we didn’t NEED them.
But we really, really, really, really LIKED them eggs.
So we were willing to overlook what the Golden Goose was up to, in the murky shadows behind the barn...

And for that, I am eternally sorry.
To all of the women that had to suffer this...
I am eternally sorry.
I’ve worked with Mira and Rosanna and Lysette.
I’ve known Rose and Ashley and Claire for years...
Their courage only hangs a lantern on my shame.
And I am eternally sorry to all those who suffered in silence all this time.
And have chosen to remain silent today.

I mostly lost touch with the brothers by the early 2000s.
For no specific reason.
Just that there were other jobs, other studios.
But a few months ago, Harvey called me, out of the blue.
To talk about the bygone days.
To talk about how great it would be to get some of the gang back together.
Make a movie.
He must have known then the noose was tightening.
There was a wistfulness to him that I had never heard before.
A melancholy.
It most assuredly had a walking-to-the-gallows feel.
When we hung up I wondered: “what was that all about?”
In a few short weeks I would know.
It was the condemned man simply wanting to comb some of the ruins of his old stomping grounds.
One last time.

So, yeah, I am sorry.
Sorry and ashamed.
Because, in the end, I was complicit.
I didn’t say shit.
I didn’t do shit.
Harvey was nothing but wonderful to me.
So I reaped the rewards and I kept my mouth shut.
And for that, once again, I am sorry.

But you should be sorry, too.
With all these victims speaking up...
To tell their tales.
Shouldn’t those who witnessed it from the sidelines do the same?
Instead of retreating to the cowardly, canopied confines of faux-outrage?
Doesn’t being a bystander bring with it the responsibility of telling the truth, however personally disgraceful it may be?

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.