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HARVEY WEINSTEIN PAID
OFF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
ACCUSERS FOR DECADES
By Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Oct. 5, 2017
Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey
Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula
Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress
expected to be a business breakfast meeting.
Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he
appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give
her a massage or she could watch him shower, she
recalled in an interview.
“How do I get out of the room as fast as possible
without alienating Harvey Weinstein?” Ms. Judd
said she remembers thinking.
In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor,
who had worked just one day as a temporary
employee, to the same hotel and made another oer:
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 mis-
conduct by their boss.
1. Write a lede that
draws on the most
powerful findings
of your reporting. In
this case, we stacked
similar on-the-
record accounts of
sexual misconduct
that demonstrated
a pattern of
wrongdoing by
Weinstein.
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2. Documents strengthen
an investigative
story. Here we were
showing readers that
we obtained many.
Getting a copy of the
Lauren O’Connor
memo from Irwin
Reiter, Weinstein’s
corporate accountant
of many years, was one
of the most significant
developments in our
reporting. Cultivating
Reiter as a source took
time and care.
“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.
An investigation by The New York Times found
previously undisclosed allegations against Mr.
Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades,
documented through interviews with current and
former employees and film industry workers, as well
as legal records, emails and internal documents
from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the
Weinstein Company.
During that time, after being confronted with
allegations including sexual harassment and
unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has
reached at least eight settlements with women,
according to two company ocials speaking on the
condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The
Times found, were a young assistant in New York
in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London
in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor
shortly after, according to records and those familiar
with the agreements.
3. Never attribute a
crucial finding, like
the number of secret
settlements that
Weinstein paid, to
a single anonymous
source. Make sure you
get a second source to
corroborate it.
In a statement to The Times on Thursday after-
noon, Mr. Weinstein said: “I appreciate the way I’ve
behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot
of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I’m
trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.”
He added that he was working with therapists
and planning to take a leave of absence to “deal with
this issue head on.”
4. Another hallmark
of investigative
reporting is fairness.
Before publishing
a story, you must
inform the subjects
of everything you
intend to say about
them and give them
an opportunity to
comment and oer
any evidence they
might have that rebuts
your findings. A
subject should never
be surprised by the
content of a story.
2
3
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Lisa Bloom, a lawyer advising Mr.
Weinstein, said in a statement that “he denies
many of the accusations as patently false.”
In comments to The Times earlier this week,
Mr. Weinstein said that many claims in Ms.
O’Connor’s memo were “o base” and that they
had parted on good terms.
Harvey Weinstein Paid O Sexual
Harassment Accusers for Decades
He and his representatives declined to comment on
any of the settlements, including providing informa-
tion about who paid them. But Mr. Weinstein said
that in addressing employee concerns about work-
place issues, “my motto is to keep the peace.”
Ms. Bloom, who has been advising Mr.
Weinstein over the last year on gender and power
dynamics, called him “an old dinosaur learning
new ways.” She said she had “explained to him that
due to the power dierence between a major studio
head like him and most others in the industry,
whatever his motives, some of his words and
behaviors can be perceived as inappropriate, even
intimidating.”
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.
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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.”
The allegations piled up even as Mr. Weinstein
helped define popular culture. He has collected
six best-picture Oscars and turned out a number
of touchstones, from the films “Sex, Lies, and
Videotape,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Good Will Hunting”
to the television show “Project Runway.” In public,
he presents himself as a liberal lion, a champion
of women and a winner of not just artistic but
humanitarian awards.
In 2015, the year Ms. O’Connor wrote her memo,
his company distributed “The Hunting Ground,”
a documentary about campus sexual assault. A
longtime Democratic donor, he hosted a fund-raiser
for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last year.
He employed Malia Obama, the oldest daughter of
former President Barack Obama, as an intern this
year, and recently helped endow a faculty chair at
Rutgers University in Gloria Steinem’s name. During
the Sundance Film Festival in January, when Park
City, Utah, held its version of nationwide women’s
marches, Mr. Weinstein joined the parade.
5
5. Investigative
journalism is about
holding the powerful
to account. It was
important here to
establish the power
that Weinstein had.
“From the outside, it seemed golden—the Oscars,
the success, the remarkable cultural impact,”
said Mark Gill, former president of Miramax Los
Angeles when the company was owned by Disney.
“But behind the scenes, it was a mess, and this was
the biggest mess of all,” he added, referring to Mr.
Weinstein’s treatment of women.
6. Many top executives
who had worked for
Weinstein refused
to discuss him on
the record. This
former executive
was an exception.
His decision came
at the very end of
our investigation.
Outraged to learn
the extent of
Weinstein’s alleged
abuses, he was finally
prepared to share his
perspective publicly.
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Dozens of Mr. Weinstein’s former and current
employees, from assistants to top executives, said
they knew of inappropriate conduct while they
worked for him. Only a handful said they ever
confronted him.
Mr. Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employ-
ees of the Weinstein Company have contracts saying
they will not criticize it or its leaders in a way that
could harm its “business reputation” or “any employ-
ee’s personal reputation,” a recent document shows.
And most of the women accepting payouts agreed to
confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speak-
ing about the deals or the events that led to them.
7. The key to this story
was getting sources to
break their silence—
in many cases silence
that was legally
binding. If you keep
encountering people
who refuse to speak
in the course of your
reporting, that can be
a signficant clue. It’s
likely that something
is being concealed,
and it’s important to
keep digging.
Charles Harder, a lawyer representing Mr.
Weinstein, said it was not unusual to enter into
settlements to avoid lengthy and costly litigation. He
added, “It’s not evidence of anything.”
7
8. More fairness:
sprinkled here and
throughout the piece
are comments by
Weinstein and his
team addressing
allegations.
At Fox News, where the conservative icons
Roger E. Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were accused of
harassment, women have received payouts well
into the millions of dollars. But most of the women
involved in the Weinstein agreements collected
between roughly $80,000 and $150,000, according to
people familiar with the negotiations.
In the wake of Ms. O’Connor’s 2015 memo,
some Weinstein Company board members and
executives, including Mr. Weinstein’s brother and
longtime partner, Bob, 62, were alarmed about the
allegations, according to several people who spoke
on the condition of anonymity. In the end, though,
board members were assured there was no need to
investigate. After reaching a settlement with Mr.
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Weinstein, Ms. O’Connor withdrew her complaint
and thanked him for the career opportunity he had
given her.
“The parties made peace very quickly,” Ms.
Bloom said.
Through her lawyer, Nicole Page, Ms. O’Connor
declined to be interviewed. In the memo, she
explained how unnerved she was by what she
witnessed or encountered while a literary scout
and production executive at the company. “I am just
starting out in my career, and have been and remain
fearful about speaking up,” Ms. O’Connor wrote.
“But remaining silent is causing me great distress.”
9. We used the Lauren
O’Connor memo in
the story because
it was valuable
documentation of the
pattern of abuse that
we had uncovered. We
also included a line
saying that O’Connor
had declined to be
interviewed, making
clear that she was
not the one who had
shared her memo
with us.
In speaking out about her hotel episode, Ms. Judd
said in a recent interview, “Women have been talking
about Harvey amongst ourselves for a long time,
and it’s simply beyond time to have the conversation
publicly.”
A Common Narrative
Ms. Nestor, a law and business school student,
accepted Mr. Weinstein’s breakfast invitation at
the Peninsula because she did not want to miss an
opportunity, she later told colleagues. After she
arrived, he oered to help her career while boasting
about a series of famous actresses he claimed to have
slept with, according to accounts that colleagues
compiled after hearing her story and then sent on to
company executives.
“She said he was very persistent and focused
though she kept saying no for over an hour,” one
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internal document said. Ms. Nestor, who declined
to comment for this article, refused his bargain, the
records noted. “She was disappointed that he met
with her and did not seem to be interested in her
résumé or skill set.” The young woman chose not to
report the episode to human resources personnel,
but the allegations came to management’s attention
through other employees.
Across the years and continents, accounts
of Mr. Weinstein’s conduct share a common
narrative: Women reported to a hotel for what
they thought were work reasons, only to discover
that Mr. Weinstein, who has been married for
most of three decades, sometimes seemed to have
dierent interests. His home base was New York,
but his rolling headquarters were luxury hotels: the
Peninsula Beverly Hills and the Savoy in London,
the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc near the Cannes Film
Festival in France and the Stein Eriksen Lodge near
the Sundance Film Festival.
Working for Mr. Weinstein could mean getting
him out of bed in the morning and doing “turndown
duty” late at night, preparing him for sleep. Like the
colleague cited in Ms. O’Connor’s memo, some junior
employees required to perform those tasks said they
were disturbing.
In interviews, eight women described varying
behavior by Mr. Weinstein: appearing nearly or fully
naked in front of them, requiring them to be present
while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or
initiating one himself. The women, typically in their
early or middle 20s and hoping to get a toehold in the
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film industry, said he could switch course quickly—
meetings and clipboards one moment, intimate
comments the next. One woman advised a peer to
wear a parka when summoned for duty as a layer of
protection against unwelcome advances.
Laura Madden, a former employee who said
Mr. Weinstein prodded her for massages at hotels
in Dublin and London beginning in 1991, said he
had a way of making anyone who objected feel like
an outlier. “It was so manipulative,” she said in an
interview. “You constantly question yourself—am I
the one who is the problem?”
10. Laura Madden
was the only
former Weinstein
employee to go on
the record with
her allegation of
sexual misconduct.
In doing so, she
buttressed the
allegations of
other former
employees who had
made allegations
against Weinstein
who were legally
prohibited from
speaking out or too
scared to.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Mr.
Weinstein said.
Most women who told The Times that they
experienced misconduct by Mr. Weinstein had never
met one another. They range in age from early 20s
to late 40s and live in dierent cities. Some said
they did not report the behavior because there were
no witnesses and they feared retaliation by Mr.
Weinstein. Others said they felt embarrassed. But
most confided in co-workers.
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.”
Others in the London oce said the same. “I was
pretty disturbed and angry,” said Sallie Hodges,
another former employee, recalling the accounts she
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heard from colleagues. “That’s kind of the way things
were.”
The human resources operation was considered
weak in New York and worse in London, so some
employees banded together in solidarity. “If a female
executive was asked to go to a meeting solo, she and
a colleague would generally double up” so as not to
be alone with Mr. Weinstein, recalled Mr. Gill, the
former president of Miramax Los Angeles.
Many women who worked with Mr. Weinstein
said they never experienced sexual harassment or
knew of anyone who did, and recalled him as a boss
who gave them valuable opportunities at young ages.
Some described long and satisfying careers with
him, praising him as a mentor and advocate.
11. Fairness in
investigative
journalism goes
beyond giving
the subject an
opportunity to
comment. It’s also
about making sure
that your story
reflects the breadth
of your findings, no
matter how nuanced
they may be.
But in interviews, some of the former employees
who said they had troubling experiences with Mr.
Weinstein asked a common question: How could
allegations repeating the same pattern—young
women, a powerful male producer, even some of the
same hotels—have accumulated for almost three
decades?
“It wasn’t a secret to the inner circle,” said Kathy
DeClesis, Bob Weinstein’s assistant in the early
1990s. She supervised a young woman who left the
company abruptly after an encounter with Harvey
Weinstein and who later received a settlement,
according to several former employees.
Speaking up could have been costly. A job with
Mr. Weinstein was a privileged perch at the nexus
of money, fame and art, and plenty of his former
assistants have risen high in Hollywood. He could
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be charming and generous: gift baskets, flowers,
personal or career help and cash. At the Cannes Film
Festival, according to several former colleagues,
he sometimes handed out thousands of dollars as
impromptu bonuses.
Mr. Weinstein was a volcanic personality,
though, given to fits of rage and personal lashings
of male and female employees alike. When a female
guest of his had to wait for a hotel room upgrade,
he yelled that Ms. O’Connor would be better o
marrying a “fat, rich Jewish” man because she was
probably just good for “being a wife” and “making
babies,” she wrote in her memo. (He added some
expletives, she said.) His treatment of women
was sometimes written o as just another form of
toxicity, according to multiple former employees.
In the fall of 1998, a 25-year-old London
assistant named Zelda Perkins confronted Mr.
Weinstein. 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 oce. 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.
Steve Hutensky, one of Miramax’s entertainment
lawyers, was dispatched to London to negotiate a
settlement with Ms. Perkins and her lawyer. He
declined to comment for this article.
Ms. Perkins, now a theater producer in London,
also declined to comment for this article, saying
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that she could not discuss her work at Miramax or
whether she had entered into any agreements.
Months after the settlement, Mr. Weinstein
triumphed at the Oscars, with “Life Is Beautiful” and
“Shakespeare in Love” winning 10 awards. A few
years later, Mr. Weinstein, who had produced a series
of British-themed movies, was made a Commander
of the British Empire, an honorary title just short of
knighthood.
‘Coercive Bargaining’
For actors, a meeting with Mr. Weinstein could yield
dazzling rewards: scripts, parts, award campaigns,
magazine coverage, influence on lucrative
endorsement deals. He knew how to blast small films
to box oce success, and deliver polished dramas
like “The King’s Speech” and popular attractions
like the “Scary Movie” franchise. Mr. Weinstein’s
films helped define femininity, sex and romance,
from Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Chicago” to Jennifer
Lawrence in “Silver Linings Playbook.”
But movies were also his private leverage. When
Mr. Weinstein invited Ms. Judd to breakfast in
Beverly Hills, she had been shooting the thriller
“Kiss the Girls” all night, but the meeting seemed too
important to miss. After arriving at the hotel lobby,
she was surprised to learn that they would be talking
in his suite; she decided to order cereal, she said, so
the food would come quickly and she could leave.
Mr. Weinstein soon issued invitation after
invitation, she said. Could he give her a massage?
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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.
“I said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he
always came back at me with some new ask,” Ms.
Judd said. “It was all this bargaining, this coercive
bargaining.”
To get out of the room, she said, she quipped that
if Mr. Weinstein wanted to touch her, she would
first have to win an Oscar in one of his movies. She
recalled feeling “panicky, trapped,” she said in the
interview. “There’s a lot on the line, the cachet that
came with Miramax.”
Not long afterward, she related what had
happened to her mother, the singer Naomi Judd, who
confirmed their conversation to a Times reporter.
Years later, Ashley Judd appeared in two Weinstein
films without incident, she said. In 2015, she shared
an account of the episode in the hotel room with
“Variety” without naming the man involved.
12. Judd had been
reluctant to go
on the record in
our story. That’s
because when she
had written about
her experience in
the 2015 article,
with a veiled
reference to
Weinstein, nothing
had changed. Her
concern helped
guide our reporting;
we knew we needed
to establish a
pattern of behavior
through documents
and on-the-record
sources.
In 1997, Mr. Weinstein reached a previously
undisclosed settlement with Rose McGowan, then
a 23-year-old actress, after an episode in a hotel
room during the Sundance Film Festival. 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.
Ms. McGowan had just appeared in the slasher film
12
13. Legal records are
among the most
valuable documents
in investigative
reporting!
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“Scream” and would later star in the television show
“Charmed.” She declined to comment.
Increased Scrutiny
Just months before Ms. O’Connor wrote her memo,
a young female employee quit after complaining
of being forced to arrange what she believed to be
assignations for Mr. Weinstein, according to two
people familiar with her departure. The woman,
who asked not to be identified to protect her privacy,
said a nondisclosure agreement prevented her from
commenting.
Soon, complaints about Mr. Weinstein’s
behavior prompted the board of his company to take
notice.
In March 2015, Mr. Weinstein had invited Ambra
Battilana, an Italian model and aspiring actress, to
his TriBeCa oce on a Friday evening to discuss
her career. Within hours, she called the police. Ms.
Battilana told them that Mr. Weinstein had grabbed
her breasts after asking if they were real and put his
hands up her skirt, the police report says.
The claims were taken up by the New York Police
Department’s Special Victims Squad and splashed
across the pages of tabloids, along with reports that
the woman had worked with investigators to secretly
record a confession from Mr. Weinstein. The
Manhattan district attorney’s oce later declined to
bring charges.
But Mr. Weinstein made a payment to Ms.
Battilana, according to people familiar with the
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settlement, speaking on the condition of anonymity
about the confidential agreement.
The public nature of the episode concerned some
executives and board members of the Weinstein
Company. (Harvey and Bob Weinstein together own
42 percent of the privately held business.) When
several board members pressed Mr. Weinstein
about it, he insisted that the woman had set him up,
colleagues recalled.
14. This story got bigger
when we were able
to show that it went
beyond a pattern
of behavior by one
man. That other
people in power at
his company were
aware of allegations
against Weinstein.
And that some
tried—and failed—to
do something about
it. In seeking to
probe the question
of complicity, it was
crucial to develop
sources within the
company and on its
board. Lance Maerov,
a board member, had
an incentive to speak
to us when he real-
ized that we had the
Lauren O’Connor
memo. He wanted
to explain why the
board did nothing
about it.
Ms. Battilana had testified in court proceedings
against associates of former Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi of Italy who are accused of procuring
women for alleged sex parties, and the Italian news
media also reported that, years ago, Ms. Battilana
accused a septuagenarian boyfriend of sexual
harassment, a complaint that was apparently
dismissed. Ms. Battilana did not respond to requests
for comment. Her lawyer, Mauro Rufini, could not be
reached for comment.
After the episode, Lance Maerov, a board
member, said he successfully pushed for a code of
behavior for the company that included detailed
language about sexual harassment.
Then Ms. O’Connor’s memo hit, with page after
page of detailed accusations. In describing the
experiences of women at the company, including
her own, she wrote, “The balance of power is me: 0,
Harvey Weinstein: 10.”
She was a valued employee—Mr. Weinstein
described her as “fantastic,” “a great person,” “a
brilliant executive”—so the complaint rattled
top executives, including Bob Weinstein. When
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the board was notified of it by email, Mr. Maerov
insisted that an outside lawyer determine whether
the allegations were true, he said in an interview.
But the inquiry never happened. Mr. Weinstein
had reached a settlement with Ms. O’Connor, and
there was no longer anything to investigate.
“Because this matter has been resolved and
no further action is required, I withdraw my
complaint,” Ms. O’Connor wrote in an email to the
head of human resources six days after sending
her memo. She also wrote a letter to Mr. Weinstein
thanking him for the opportunity to learn about the
entertainment industry.
Rachel Abrams and William K. Rashbaum contributed
reporting. Grace Ashford contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 6, 2017,
Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Sexual Misconduct Claims Trail a Hollywood Mogul
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