Harvey Weinstein, Bully For All Seasons
Harvey WeinsteinI've been out of town for the past week; what'd I miss?
Just kidding! The news of Harvey Weinstein's rampant sexual abuse reached far beyond New York and Los Angeles. It spread like molten lava, and each new day brought another fiery stream of damning evidence against him. The list of women who have been assaulted in one way or another is enormous and stretches back decades. Was I surprised? Only at the way it happened, with an exposé in the New York Times unleashing an explosion of accounts from actresses, models, employees--in short, any woman who came within Weinstein's thuggish reach.
I've only encountered Harvey Weinstein once, in a crowded screening room at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. I was sitting next to a young man whose name I no longer remember; as I recall, he worked in acquisitions for one of the studios. When Harvey Weinstein sat down in the next row with his entourage, he turned to me and loudly said something like, "Hope, have you ever seen such an ugly man in your life? I mean, look at him" "Shh," I muttered, "He can hear you." At that point, Weinstein turned and glared menacingly at the man. Though that might have been his usual expression, I was terrified he would start a fight. Fortunately the lights dimmed, and Weinstein turned his head toward the screen. I never saw the either man after that festival, though I've often wondered what prompted the comment--and my involvement.
That year at Cannes, Weinstein bought scores of films, far more than he could release in the next couple of years. The rumor was that he bought many simply to spite other distributors, which only added to his growing list of enemies. Though I never heard anything about sexual abuses, the fact that Weinstein was already a feared and loathed bully made the allegations easy to believe. He was so powerful that he could make or break careers, which is why he got away with so much.
In the years since, I've often wondered why certain actresses, all promising and successful in their early and mid-twenties, seemed to work very little in what should have been their prime. It made no sense to me that Gwyneth Paltrow, Rosanna Arquette, Mira Sorvino and Rose McGowan had careers that stalled; now it does.
Next time: Encounters with A-List Hollywood Creeps