In the past week, The New York Times and The New Yorker have both published detailed exposés about Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein in which multiple women share accounts of their encounters with the famed producer over decades, alleging rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.
Many of the stories bear similarities: Weinstein would arrange a hotel meet-up under the guise of business, he would request a massage, make intimidating sexual advances or masturbate in front of his subject. Reports corroborate that Weinstein often preyed on young actresses and offered the promise of fame or career ruin. Since the allegations have surfaced, other alleged victims have come forward with stories of their experiences with Weinstein, including Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Here is a running list of the accounts, that we’ll keep updated should more stories come out.
Actress Ashley Judd recalled a hotel breakfast meeting with Weinstein while shooting Kiss the Girls. (NYT)
Mr. Weinstein soon issued invitation after invitation, she said. Could he give her a massage? When she refused, he suggested a shoulder rub. She rejected that too, she recalled. He steered her toward a closet, asking her to help pick out his clothing for the day, and then toward the bathroom. Would she watch him take a shower? she remembered him saying.
Former Weinstein and Company employee Lauren O’Connor filed an internal memo about Weinstein’s coercive behavior. (NYT)
Though Ms. O’Connor had been writing only about a two-year period, her memo echoed other women’s complaints. Mr. Weinstein required her to have casting discussions with aspiring actresses after they had private appointments in his hotel room, she said, her description matching those of other former employees. She suspected that she and other female Weinstein employees, she wrote, were being used to facilitate liaisons with “vulnerable women who hope he will get them work.”
Former Weinstein employee Emily Nestor said she dealt with repeated sexual advances.
Via The New Yorker:
He asked to hold her hand; she said no. In Nestor’s account of the exchange, Weinstein said, “Oh, the girls always say ‘no.’ You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman. “It’s just a bizarre thing to be so proud of,” she said. “That you’ve never had to resort to doing that. It was just so far removed from reality and normal rules of consent.”
Via The New York Times:
In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.
“There is a toxic environment for women at this company,” Ms. O’Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr. Weinstein.
Ex-employee Lauren Madden recalled locking herself in a bathroom. (NYT)
Ms. Madden later told Karen Katz, a friend and colleague in the acquisitions department, about Mr. Weinstein’s overtures, including a time she locked herself in the bathroom of his hotel room, sobbing. “We were so young at the time,” said Ms. Katz, now a documentary filmmaker. “We did not understand how wrong it was or how Laura should deal with it.”
Weinstein reached a settlement with actress Rose McGowan in 1997. (NYT)
The $100,000 settlement was “not to be construed as an admission” by Mr. Weinstein, but intended to “avoid litigation and buy peace,” according to the legal document, which was reviewed by The Times.
Days after that piece came out, McGowan wrote on Twitter that “that HW raped me.”
Zelda Perkins, a former assistant in Weinstein’s London office, confronted Weinstein about his conduct in 1998. (NYT)
According to former colleagues, she and several co-workers had been regularly subjected to inappropriate requests or comments in hotel rooms, and she was particularly concerned about the treatment of another woman in the office. She told Mr. Weinstein that he had to stop, according to the former colleagues, and that she would go public or initiate legal action unless he changed his behavior.
Italian actress Lucia Stoller (who now goes by Lucia Evans) said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex during an office meeting. (The New Yorker)
“At that point, after that, is when he assaulted me,” Evans said. “He forced me to perform oral sex on him.” As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. “I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t,’” she said. “I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “He’s a big guy. He overpowered me.”
Actress Asia Argento said Weinstein coerced her into oral sex in his hotel room. (The New Yorker)
Argento said that, after she reluctantly agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. Weinstein “terrified me, and he was so big,” she said. “It wouldn’t stop. It was a nightmare.”
At some point, Argento said, she stopped saying no and feigned enjoyment, because she thought it was the only way the assault would end. “I was not willing,” she told me. “I said, ‘No, no, no.’ . . . It’s twisted. A big fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale.” Argento, who insisted that she wanted to tell her story in all its complexity, said that she didn’t physically fight him off, something that has prompted years of guilt.
Actress Mira Sorvino recalled Weinstein showing up to her apartment. (The New Yorker)
“He started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable, and then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around,” she recalled. She scrambled for ways to ward him off, telling him it was against her religion to date married men. (At the time, Weinstein was married to Eve Chilton, a former assistant.) Then she left the room.
Model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez reported her sexual assault and then worked with NYPD on a sting operation targeting Weinstein, which was recorded. (The New Yorker)
Gutierrez says no repeatedly; Weinstein persists, and after a while she accedes to his demand to go upstairs. But, standing in the hallway outside his room, she refuses to go farther. In an increasingly tense exchange, he presses her to enter. Gutierrez says, “I don’t want to,” “I want to leave,” and “I want to go downstairs.” She asks him directly why he groped her breasts the day before.
French actress Emma de Caunes said Weinstein emerged from a shower naked and erect and instructed her to lie on the bed. (The New Yorker)
“I was very petrified,” de Caunes said. “But I didn’t want to show him that I was petrified, because I could feel that the more I was freaking out, the more he was excited.” She added, “It was like a hunter with a wild animal. The fear turns him on.” De Caunes told Weinstein that she was leaving, and he panicked. “We haven’t done anything!” she remembered him saying. “It’s like being in a Walt Disney movie!”
Actress Rosanna Arquette said Weinstein exposed himself in his hotel room. (The New Yorker)
Arquette recalled that, when she arrived at the room, Weinstein opened the door wearing a white bathrobe. Weinstein said that his neck was sore and that he needed a massage. She told him that she could recommend a good masseuse. “Then he grabbed my hand,” she said. He put it on his neck. When she yanked her hand away, she told me, Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it toward his penis, which was visible and erect. “My heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,” she said. She told Weinstein, “I will never do that.”
Actress Jessica Barth said Weinstein made suggestive advances in a hotel room. (The New Yorker)
Barth said that, in the conversation that followed, he alternated between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed. “So, what would happen if, say, we’re having some champagne and I take my clothes off and you give me a massage?” she recalled him asking. “And I’m, like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ ”
When she moved toward the door to leave, Weinstein lashed out, saying that she needed to lose weight “to compete with Mila Kunis,” and then, apparently in an effort to mollify her, promising a meeting with one of his female executives.
TV reporter Lauren Sivan recalled Weinstein masturbating in front of her. (Megyn Kelly Today, NBC)
“That’s when he cornered me in this vestibule and leaned in and tried to kiss me, which I immediately rebuffed, and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, I had no idea what this was, I’m sorry, I have a very serious boyfriend and I’m not interested,’” Sivan said. “I thought it would end there.”
Instead, Sivan says, Weinstein refused to let her leave.
“That’s when he blocked the entrance,” she said, “And said, ‘Just stand there and be quiet.’”
Shocked, Sivan said she “stood there dumbfounded” as Weinstein exposed himself and began masturbating.
Actress Romola Garai said Weinstein came to the hotel room door in his robe. (The Guardian)
“I remember the feeling of seeing him opening the door in the dressing gown and thinking, ‘Oh god, this is a casting couch’. But I guess it’s now only as a much older woman that I understood what it meant. At the time I understood myself to be a commodity and that my value in the industry rested almost exclusively on the way I looked and I didn’t really think of myself to be any more than that.”
Louise Godbold, who runs the non-profit Echo Parenting & Education, wrote about an encounter with Weinstein that involved a massage request.
The details of what I have learned was not unique to me are out there now – the office tour that became an occasion to trap me in an empty meeting room, the begging for a massage, his hands on my shoulders as I attempted to beat a retreat… all while not wanting to alienate the most powerful man in Hollywood.
Gwyneth Paltrow said Weinstein sexually harassed her when she was 22 years old filming Emma. (NYT)
Before shooting began, he summoned her to his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a work meeting that began uneventfully.
It ended with Mr. Weinstein placing his hands on her and suggesting they head to the bedroom for massages, she said.
“I was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified,” she said in an interview, publicly disclosing that she was sexually harassed by the man who ignited her career and later helped her win an Academy Award.
Angelina Jolie recalled Weinstein making sexual advances in a hotel room. (NYT)
“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. “This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.”
Actress Katherine Kendall said Weinstein chased her around a hotel room. (NYT)
Ms. Kendall said she was nervous, but it was daytime, and she relaxed when she saw pictures of his wife on the wall. “He’s keeping it professional, he makes me a drink, we talk about movies and art and books for about an hour,” she recalled. “I thought: He’s taking me seriously.”
He went to the bathroom, came back in a robe and asked her to give him a massage, she said. “Everybody does it,” he said, according to Ms. Kendall, and mentioned a famous model’s name. She refused; he left the room, and returned nude, she said.
Tomi-Ann Roberts, a then-aspiring actress, said Weinstein tried to get her to take her top off in front of him. (NYT)
When she arrived, he was nude in the bathtub, she recalled. He told her that she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable “getting naked in front of him,” too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene.
If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film, Ms. Roberts recalled Mr. Weinstein saying.
French actress Judith Godrèche said Weinstein requested a massage in his hotel room. (NYT)
Upstairs, he asked to give her a massage, Ms. Godrèche said. She said no. He argued that casual massages were an American custom — he gave them to his secretary all the time, Ms. Godrèche recalled him saying.
“The next thing I know, he’s pressing against me and pulling off my sweater,” she said. She pulled away and left the suite.
Costume designer Dawn Dunning said Weinstein coerced her in his hotel room while wearing a bathrobe. (NYT)
Then his assistant invited her to a meal with Mr. Weinstein at a Manhattan hotel. Ms. Dunning headed to the restaurant, where she was told that Mr. Weinstein’s earlier meeting was running late, so she should head up to his suite.
There was no meeting. Mr. Weinstein was in a bathrobe, behind a coffee table covered with papers.
He told her they were contracts for his next three films, according to Ms. Dunning. But she could only sign them on a condition: She would have to have three-way sex with him.
Heather Graham recalled Weinstein making a sexually suggestive comment that made her uncomfortable. (Variety)
In the early 2000s Harvey Weinstein called me into his office. There was a pile of scripts sitting on his desk. “I want to put you in one of my movies,” he said and offered to let me choose which one I liked best. Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he had an agreement with his wife. He could sleep with whomever he wanted when he was out of town. I walked out of the meeting feeling uneasy. There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.
Cara Delevingne stated that Weinstein tried to kiss her on the lips in a hotel room and bragged about actresses he’d slept with.
Actress Léa Seydoux said Weinstein tried to kiss her in a hotel room and she had to fight him off. (The Guardian)
“We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me,” she told the Guardian. “I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him.
“He tried more than once,” she added, describing Weinstein as “very domineering” and “losing control”. “I pushed him physically. I think he respected me because I resisted him.”
Kate Beckinsale said Weinstein offered her alcohol in his hotel room when she was 17 and that she repeatedly declined his sexual advances over the years. (Instagram)
He opened the door in his bathrobe. I was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him. After declining alcohol and announcing that I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed. A few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn’t remember if he had assaulted me or not. I had what I thought were boundaries - I said no to him professionally many times over the years -some of which ended up with him screaming at me calling me a cunt and making threats, some of which made him laughingly tell people oh “Kate lives to say no to me.”
Actress Claire Folani said Weinstein suggested a massage in his hotel room and that she “escaped” him five times. (Twitter)
You see, nothing happened to me with Harvey — by that I mean, I escaped 5 times. I had two Peninsula Hotel meetings in the evening with Harvey and all I remember was I ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over, well just a bit. Yes, massage was suggested. The three dinners with Harvey I don’t really remember the time period, I was 25. I remember him telling me all the actresses who had slept with him and what he had done for them.
French actress Florence Darel said Weinstein propositioned her in a hotel room while his wife was next door. (People, via Le Parisien)
Things quickly took a turn though, according to Darel. After yelling there was no jacuzzi in his room, Darel claimed Weinstein began to make moves on her — seemingly unbothered by the fact that his wife was next door.
“He started to tell me that he found me very attractive and wanted to have relations with me,” Darel told Le Parisien. “I told him I was very in love with my companion. He replied that didn’t bother him at all and offered to have me be his mistress a few days a year. That way we could continue to work together. Basically, it was ‘If you want to continue in America, you have to go through me.’ ”
Actress Tara Subkoff recalled Weinstein pulling her onto his lap while erect at a party. (Variety)
“That night I was offered the role, and I went out to a premiere after party that Harvey Weinstein was also at,” she told Variety. “He motioned for me to come over to him, and then grabbed me to sit me on his lap. I was so surprised and shocked I couldn’t stop laughing because it was so awkward. But then I could feel that he had an erection. I got quiet, but got off his lap quickly. He then asked me to come outside with him and other things I don’t want to share, but it was implied that if I did not comply with doing what he asked me to do that I would not get the role that I had already been informally offered. I laughed in his face as I was in shock and so uncomfortable. I left the party right after that.”
Actress Sarah Ann Masse said Weinstein conducted an interview and hugged her while in his underwear. (Variety)
After about a month of pre-interviews, Masse said she was informed that Weinstein wanted to meet her. “They arranged for me to go to his house in Connecticut, so I drove out there.” When she arrived, she said, “Harvey Weinstein opened the door in his boxer shorts and an undershirt. My first thought was, ‘Oh, this is weird. Maybe he forgot this interview is happening. Maybe he thought I was the mailman. I’m sure he’ll be embarrassed and excuse himself and get changed.’ But he didn’t.”
She said that Weinstein had her sit down in his living room and conducted the rest of the interview in his underwear. As a young actress, meeting Weinstein already intimidated Masse, she explained, but his behavior made her feel particularly strange. “I tried to tell myself it was just an odd quirk, that it was fine, and to keep going with the interview.”
Actress Minka Kelly said Weinstein propositioned her with promises of lavish gifts if she would be his girlfriend. (Instagram)
I met Harvey at an industry party. The following day, my agent said he wanted to see me for a general meeting. The location was set for his hotel room. I wasn’t comfortable with going to his room & said so. The following day, we sat down with an assistant in the hotel restaurant. He bullshit me for 5 minutes re: movies he could put me in, then asked the assistant to excuse us. As she walked away, he said, “I know you were feeling what I was feeling when we met the other night” and then regaled me with offers of a lavish life filled with trips around the world on private planes etc. IF I would be his girlfriend. Or, “We could just keep this professional.” All I knew was not to offend this very powerful man and to get out of the situation as quickly as possible.
Actress Angie Everhart said Weinstein masturbated in front of her to completion. (KLOS)
“I went to the Venice Film Festival and I was on somebody’s boat, and I had just arrived, and I was sleeping. It was in my bed, and you know boats aren’t very big spaces sometimes. And I wake up, and Harvey is standing above my bed. That alone is frightening ... All of a sudden he takes his pants down, and starts doing his stuff. And he’s blocking the door, I can’t get out … I don’t know how to say this on the radio, but [he] finishes on the carpet on the floor.”
Actress Eva Green said that she had to “push him off” at a meeting. (Variety)
“I wish to address comments made by my mother in a recent interview regarding Harvey Weinstein. I met him for a business meeting in Paris where he behaved inappropriately and I had to push him off. I got away without it going further, but the experience left me shocked and disgusted.”
On Friday the 13th, Green’s mother Marlene Jobert said in a radio interview that Weinstein “threatened to destroy her professionally”:
“He operated with her the exact same way he acted with all the others, under the pretext of a professional meeting, of a script that had to get to her with a nice part into the bargain...
“Since his office was also in his hotel suite, [Eva] followed him, and the exact same thing happened to her as to the others. She managed to escape, but he threatened to destroy her professionally.”
British actress Lysette Anthony has told the London Metropolitan police that in the 1980s, Harvey Weinstein stalked her and raped her in her home. (The Sunday Times)
“In her account, published for the first time today by The Sunday Times, she claims that she became friendly with Weinstein after meeting him in New York. But everything changed when she met him for a drink at his rented home in Chelsea a few years later. ‘The next thing I knew he was half undressed and he grabbed me,’ she said.
‘It was the last thing I expected and I fled. That was when the predatory stalking began.’
One day he turned up at her flat at about 10am: ‘He pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack . . . He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me.’ She pushed him away but he was too heavy: ‘Finally I just gave up.’
‘As he ground himself against me and shoved inside me, I kept my eyes shut tight, held my breath and just let him get on with it...
‘He came over my leg like a dog and then left. It was pathetic, revolting...I remember lying in the bath, crying.’
Following Anthony’s interview, a second unnamed woman reported serial assaults in 2010, 2011, and 2015 to the London police, and a third anonymous woman came forward with allegations of assault in 1992. (CNN)
An unnamed former Miramax employee said that 25 years ago, Weinstein raped her in the basement of Miramax’s London mansion, in a bedroom for visiting employees. (The Daily Mail)
‘He grabbed me and he was so big and powerful. He just ripped my clothes away and pushed me, threw me down.
‘Then… I kept shouting, ‘No! Stop!’ and tried to push him off. But he forced himself on me.
‘And I remember, this is the one thing I remember most clearly: I thought, I have to keep saying ‘No!’ I was very aware that if a woman says no, it means no.
‘And that was the one thing going through my mind throughout, ‘No, no, no, no!’ It was over very quickly and then he just said, ‘Get out!’
‘I remember walking home that night and it was cold and sodden. I was mortified and ashamed. I didn’t tell anyone.
Actress Louisette Geiss said Weinstein asked her to watch him masturbate. (NY Daily News)
“He returned in nothing but a robe with the front open, and he was buck naked. When I finished my pitch, I was obviously nervous, and he just kept asking me to watch him masturbate...“He quickly got out of the tub and grabbed my forearm as I was trying to grab my purse. He led me to his bathroom, pleading that I just watch him masturbate. My heart was racing and I was very scared.”
Paula Wachowiak, a former intern for Weinstein, said he exposed himself to her and requested a massage. (Buffalo News)
Wachowiak said Weinstein took the folder and dropped the towel. He was naked. She said she kept her eyes on his face, in the email.
“He sat on the bed with the folder over his groin and pointed to checks and asked me why we were paying for this or that. There was one check for break-away glass that was very expensive and I had to explain how difficult it was to transport,” she recounted.
Then Weinstein began complaining about having a kink in his shoulder and asked for a massage, Wachowiak said.
Canadian actress Lauren Holly said Weinstein approached her while naked during a hotel meeting. (The Loop)
“He told me I looked stressed. He said that maybe he thought I could use a massage. Maybe I could give him a massage. I began sort of babbling like I was a child. I think it was fear. I said, ‘I don’t know how to give a massage, I don’t have a massage license. Maybe if I called the front desk I could get a masseuse to come here.’ I didn’t know what to do, honestly. And then he began to get angry. And I began to get really afraid to be honest. I had to get out of there.”
Actress Lena Headey recalled Weinstein making a suggestive gesture the first time she met him. (Twitter)
Actress Marisa Coughlan said Weinstein propositioned her and asked if she wanted to be one of his “special friends.” (The Hollywood Reporter)
Coughlan laughs recalling her earnest preparation for the meeting: She brought a notebook filled with ideas of projects they could do and roles she was interested in taking on. Weinstein talked about F. Scott Fitzgerald, his favorite films and suggested she read The Last Tycoon. He also said that Miramax had a film in development and “he wanted me to be the lead in that.”
Then came a proposition. “He told me that he has a lot of ‘special friends’ and they give each other massages,” Coughlan states. “It was a full-court press. He wanted me to be one of his ‘special friends’ and go into the bedroom. I told him that I had a serious boyfriend and reminded him that he was married and that we should keep this professional. I was so blindsided. Not one ounce of me anticipated it. It was the weirdest meeting I’ve ever had in my life.”
Actress Lupita Nyong’o said Weinstein invited her to his home, then asked if he could give her a massage while his kids were in the other room. Later, he propositioned her again, asking her to join him in a “private room.” (NYT)
“Before the starters arrived, he announced: “Let’s cut to the chase. I have a private room upstairs where we can have the rest of our meal.” I was stunned. I told him I preferred to eat in the restaurant. He told me not to be so naïve. If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing. He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them.”
Actress Sean Young said Weinstein once exposed himself to her. (The Hollywood Reporter)
“My basic response was, ‘You know, Harvey, I really don’t think you should be pulling that thing out, it’s not very pretty,’” Young said. “And then leaving, and then never having another meeting with that guy again, because it was like, ‘What on earth?’”
Actress Heather Kerr said Weinstein forced her to touch his penis during a private meeting. (Variety)
“He asked me if I was good,” Kerr said. “I started to tell him about my training and acting experience and he said, ‘No. I need to know if you’re good.’ He said if he was going to introduce me around town, he needed to know if I was ‘good.’ He kept repeating that word.”
Kerr, who appeared on “Facts of Life” and “Mama’s Family,” said, while she was sitting on a couch with Weinstein, he unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, grabbed her hand, forced it onto his organ, and held it there.
An Italian model-actress reportedly met with Los Angeles detectives with sexual assault allegations from an incident in a hotel in 2013. (Los Angeles Times)
Former Brazilian model Juliana De Paula says that Weinstein groped her and forced her to kiss other models in his New York loft. (Los Angeles Times)
When she tried to leave, she said, he chased her through the apartment, naked. She fended him off with a broken glass.
“He looked at me and he started to laugh,” she recalled. “I was shocked. I was completely in disbelief.”
Italian model Samantha Panagrosso said Weinstein touched her legs in a swimming pool at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival (Los Angeles Times)
When Weinstein began touching her legs under the water at a hotel pool and she rebuffed him, he pointed at another model, she recalled in an interview with The Times. “Look at her, I’m going to have her come to my room for a screen test,” she said Weinstein told her.
When Panagrosso told friends about his continuing advances, she said, they laughed it off: “Sam, don’t be so naïve, you know Harvey can make you a star.”
Australian model Zoë Brock claims that Weinstein took her to an isolated hotel and gave her a “massage” before she ran for the bathroom (Los Angeles Times)
When she finally made her way back to the yacht where she was staying around 5:30 a.m., she said, she felt — and looked — like “a whore.”
“I was wearing yesterday’s dress, with yesterday’s makeup, and messed hair,” she said. “Having to crawl back into the boat looking like that made me look like the sort of person who would have slept with Harvey Weinstein to further my career. And I am not that person.”
A former employee claims that the pool of aspiring models featured on Project Runway was designed as a trough for Weinstein. (Los Angeles Times)
Fearful of Weinstein’s reaction — because the show featured designers with sewing machines and not models — the producers figured they needed to amp up the participation of beautiful women. The producers concocted an awkward competition within the show that allowed designers to pick the model they found most appealing, which resulted in aspiring models, occasionally in tears, being dismissed.
“That was designed as a vestigial element for Harvey,” the television executive said.
Actress Brit Marling says Weinstein suggested they shower together during a meeting in a hotel room. (The Atlantic)
I, too, went to the meeting thinking that perhaps my entire life was about to change for the better. I, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man. I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?
It was clear that there was only one direction he wanted this encounter to go in, and that was sex or some version of an erotic exchange. I was able to gather myself together—a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat—and leave the room.
A former Weinstein assistant described repeated instances of sexual harassment and said, “I often had to wake him up in the hotel in the mornings and he would try to pull me into bed.” (Financial Times)
Norwegian actress Natassia Malthe said Weinstein sexually assaulted her in her hotel room in 2008. (Deadline)
“When I opened the door, he barged into the room,” and, she said, after she made it clear she did not want to have any kind of sexual relationship with him, he assaulted her against her will.
“I played dead” during the assault, she said. “Afterwards, I laid there in complete disgust.” Asked if the London attack fit the definition of rape, Allred said it qualified as sexual assault that involved non-consensual penetration.
Annabella Sciorra of The Sopranos says that she still sleeps with a baseball bat near her bed since Weinstein raped her in her apartment over 20 years ago. (The New Yorker)
Weinstein, she continued, “walked in like it was his apartment, like he owned the place, and started unbuttoning his shirt. So it was very clear where he thought this was going to go. And I was in a nightgown. I didn’t have much on.” He circled the apartment; to Sciorra, it appeared that he was checking whether anyone else was there.
...
“He shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me.” Sciorra struggled. “I kicked and I yelled,” she said, but Weinstein locked her arms over her head with one hand and forced sexual intercourse on her. “When he was done, he ejaculated on my leg, and on my nightgown.” It was a family heirloom, handed down from relatives in Italy and embroidered in white cotton. “He said, ‘I have impeccable timing,’ and then he said, ‘This is for you.’ ” Sciorra paused. “And then he attempted to perform oral sex on me. And I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me.” Sciorra said that her body started to shake violently. “I think, in a way, that’s what made him leave, because it looked like I was having a seizure or something.”
Sciorra alleges that years later, he showed up at her hotel room in his underwear “holding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape, a movie, in the other.” She called room service to save her.
Daryl Hannah says that Weinstein pounded on her hotel room door multiple times, once so loudly that once she barricaded it with furniture. Years later, he entered her room unannounced. (The New Yorker)
“He had a key,” Hannah recalled. “He came through the living room and into the bedroom. He just burst in like a raging bull. And I know with every fibre of my being that if my male makeup artist [Steeve Daviault] was not in that room, things would not have gone well. It was scary.”
Actress Cynthia Burr says Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him in a hallway in the late ’70s. (The New York Times)
“It was just him and me alone,” she said. “I was fearful I didn’t have the wherewithal to get away.”
It was the late 1970s, and Ms. Burr was an actress in her early 20s. Mr. Weinstein was in his mid-20s and a “real up-and-comer,” Ms. Burr remembers. Her manager said they should meet.
After the encounter, she recalls feeling ashamed. “The way he forced me made me feel really bad about myself,” she said. “What are you going to do when you are a girl just trying to make it as an actress? Nobody would have believed me.”
Hope Exiner d’Amore, a former employee of Weinstein’s concert promotion company in the late ’70s, says he raped her in a hotel room. (The New York Times)
“I told him no. I kept pushing him away. He just wouldn’t listen,” Ms. Exiner d’Amore said. “He just forced himself on me.” She said he forcibly performed oral sex and intercourse on her.
She did not tell her boyfriend, feeling ashamed, but she did confide in her next-door neighbors in Buffalo. She did not specifically say she was raped, but the couple, David and Irene Sipos, told The Times that they remembered her being extremely upset and crying when she told them about Mr. Weinstein and the hotel room.
Dancer Ashley Matthau says forced himself on top of her in a hotel room and masturbated. (The New York Times)
“‘Don’t worry,’” Ms. Matthau, now 36, remembers him saying as they sat in the back seat. “‘Nothing is going to happen. We’re just going to discuss future projects.’”
She said they went to his hotel room, where talk quickly became sexual: Mr. Weinstein told her that he had helped launch the careers of high-profile actresses who had slept with him, and that she should consider doing the same. When she declined, Mr. Weinstein pushed her onto the bed and fondled her breasts, she said. He then stripped, straddled her and masturbated on top of her.
“I kept telling him, ‘Stop, I’m engaged,’ but he kept saying: ‘It’s just a little cuddling. It’s not a problem. It’s not like we’re having sex.’”
Lacey Dorn says Weinstein groped her at a party in 2011. (The New York Times)
“Great meeting you,” he wrote in the subject line of an otherwise blank email sent to her at 12:26 a.m.
On her way out of the party, Ms. Dorn said goodbye to Mr. Weinstein. As she turned her back to him, he grabbed between her legs, touching her buttocks and crotch through her clothes.
“I was so naïve, I didn’t say anything. And he didn’t say anything either,” she said. “I just got out of the party as fast as possible.”
Actress Paz de la Huerta says Weinstein raped her twice in 2010. (Vanity Fair)
In de la Huerta’s account of the night, Weinstein arrived at her apartment demanding to come inside and have a drink. “Things got very uncomfortable very fast,” the actress, now 33, told Vanity Fair in a phone interview on Wednesday.
“Immediately when we got inside the house, he started to kiss me and I kind of brushed [him] away,” de la Huerta said. “Then he pushed me onto the bed and his pants were down and he lifted up my skirt. I felt afraid. . . . It wasn’t consensual . . . It happened very quickly. . . . He stuck himself inside me. . . . When he was done he said he’d be calling me. I kind of just laid on the bed in shock.”
An unnamed female film executive in London has filed a civil suit alleging Weinstein sexually assaulted her. (via Deadline)
The civil claim has been made against Weinstein as well as The Weinstein Company and The Weinstein Company UK and has been filed as damages for personal injury, expenses, consequential loss including aggravated and exemplary damages and interest arising out of a series of sexual assaults inflicted on the claimant by the defendant.
Actress Kadian Noble filed a federal lawsuit against Weinstein under sex trafficking laws, alleging that he lured her to a hotel room in Cannes were he assaulted her. (Variety)
Kadian Noble alleges that Weinstein invited her to his room at the Le Majestic Hotel in Cannes in February 2014, on the pretense of casting her in a movie. Once there, she alleges that Weinstein started massaging her and then groped her breasts and buttocks. According to the suit, Weinstein then trapped her in the bathroom and forced her to masturbate him until he ejaculated on the floor.
During the act, Weinstein allegedly told her, “everything will be taken care of for you if you relax.”