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Complicit was Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year for 2017, and while the notion of indirect responsibility for others’ wrongdoing seems largely to be a nod to the Trump administration (hi, Ivanka), the word is also at the center of The New York Times’s latest bombshell report on Harvey Weinstein. In “Weinstein’s Complicity Machine,” published today, the Times tackles the vast network of “enablers, silencers, and spies” who helped Weinstein shield his sexual predation from the world, allowing it to continue for three decades. Thought there couldn’t be any more wretched details about the Weinstein scandal? Think again. Here, the eight most vile revelations.
1. Weinstein forced assistants to procure and bring him his penile injections for erectile dysfunction.
There’s no other way to say this, really: Two former assistants, Michelle Franklin and Sandeep Rehal, said they were responsible not only for fetching the drug alprostadil (a chore for which Rehal says she was paid a $500 bonus) but also asked to store them at their desks and deliver the medications in brown paper bags to hotels before “meetings” with women.
2. Assistants were also pressured to facilitate his sexual predation . . .
. . . including crafting “bibles” packed with tips on how to brush off his wife, Georgina Chapman, when she called (“be a gatekeeper,” one document read, advising to say “he’s in a meeting”) and baiting women into the now-infamous “business meetings.” Ashley Matthau, a dancer in a Weinstein film, says it was an assistant who, in 2004, “ushered her into a car, told her that the meeting with the producer was for business purposes, and then waited outside a hotel room. There, she said, Mr. Weinstein pushed her on a bed and masturbated on her.” But when Matthau walked out crying, she says the assistant “wouldn’t even acknowledge me . . . . It just seemed like a well-oiled machine.”
Franklin—the aforementioned assistant asked to obtain Weinstein’s ED meds—said she was fired after she protested Weinstein’s request to help orchestrate his sexcapades. “It’s not my job, and I don’t want to do it,” she recalls telling him. His reply, according to Franklin? “Your opinion doesn’t count.” Other assistants said Weinstein threatened them—Rehal says he hinted at getting her younger sister getting kicked out of school—and that he dangled rewards for those who went along with him. “This is Harvey Weinstein University,” he reportedly told Rehal, “and I decide if you graduate.”
3. Some executives at Miramax and The Weinstein Company knew about the allegations against Weinstein for decades and did nothing.
In fact, the company shielded Weinstein’s predation. According to the Times, Weinstein’s brother and partner Bob Weinstein participated in at least three settlements with Harvey’s accusers, dating back to 1990, when a 23-year-old assistant said Weinstein sexually assaulted her at his home (Bob Weinstein denies he knew about the settlement or that his money was being used to pay off accusers). And Weinstein’s sexual advances were often funded with company money: Rehal said she was told to use Weinstein’s corporate credit card to stock rental apartments “with women’s lingerie, flowers, two bathrobes, and extra clothes for Mr. Weinstein” and that Weinstein wanted the film production to pay for expenses like a “private jet stop in Europe to pick up a model” and putting women on movie payrolls without any clear assignments.
“We fly ‘actresses’ in from all over the world for 1-2 lines of dialogue,” a Weinstein Company production executive lamented in an email. (Weinstein, through a lawyer, denies using company funds for personal expenses.)
But complaining came at a big risk, according to Amy Israel, Miramax’s former cohead of acquisitions, who said Harvey and Bob Weinstein used “fear, intimidation, psychological and emotional abuse” to silence executives and colleagues, including Harvey threatening to dig up embarrassing stories about a board member who was too outspoken.
4. Multiple Hollywood agents knew about his sexual predation for decades and did nothing.
Are we seeing a pattern here? At least eight agents at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) alone were reportedly told about Weinstein’s behavior, mainly from their female clients—but failed to act and, in some cases, continued sending actresses into potentially dangerous encounters with him. Mia Kirshner, a 19-year-old Canadian actress in 1994, said she told her CAA agent, Lisa Grode, that Weinstein propositioned her during a meeting that was supposed to be about a film on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But after a conference call with Grode and two others, “from the general tone of the conversation, she concluded she should drop the matter,” the Times wrote.
“I was told to forget about it; it was pointless to do anything about this,” Kirshner said. “It all came down to money. . . . It speaks to why he was protected as opposed to the actors.“ (In a statement, the historically male-dominated CAA apologized “to any person the agency let down for not meeting the high expectations we place on ourselves” and vowed to reform its management team to include more women and address its harassment policies and practices.)
5. Weinstein bragged about his political connections as a means of threatening people.
“I know the president of the United States. Who do you know?” Mr. Weinstein would reportedly say during the Obama administration, as he was a generous donor and fund-raiser to the former president and, later, to Hillary Clinton. “I’m Harvey Weinstein,” he was also prone to declaring. “You know what I can do.” Related: Lena Dunham told the Times that she tried to tell Clinton campaign officials about Weinstein’s reputation—“I just want you to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” Dunham said she told Clinton’s deputy communications director—but Dunham added that she doesn’t believe the information ever made it to Clinton.
6. Weinstein worked with members of the press to try to undermine his accusers.
When Rose McGowan began making veiled references to Weinstein’s sexual misconduct in 2015, Weinstein reportedly tipped off Dylan Howard, editor of the National Enquirer —where Weinstein crony David J. Pecker is chief executive of the parent company—and Howard then assigned a reporter to “collect hostile commentary about Ms. McGowan” (both Howard and Weinstein deny the ask). “This is killer. Especially if my fingerprints r not on this,” Weinstein reportedly later wrote in an email.
7. Weinstein was making “unwelcome advances” on women as recently as this past September.
Even as he knew the Times and The New Yorker were investigating his behavior, Weinstein went to the Toronto International Film Festival in September and reportedly invited two women to his hotel room, where he made his now much-reported “massage requests” and attempted to woo women with the promise of career help. A month later, three decades of his well-kept secrets were finally revealed to the world.
