Twenty years ago, Ken Auletta knew that film producer Harvey Weinstein was a sexual predator but just couldn't prove it.
The New Yorker writer and author wrote a feature story on the movie mogul in 2002, but couldn't get any victims to go on the record about what the movie mogul had done to them.
Eventually, Auletta helped other journalists get the story out that led to the arrest and conviction of Weinstein for rape and sexual assault.
But questions still bothered him: how did Weinstein get away with it for so long and why do smart people sometimes turn a blind eye to bad behaviour?
Auletta explores these themes in a new book Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence.
Photo: AFP / Getty Images
Auletta helped Ronan Farrow who, after considerable setbacks, broke the story, he tells Jesse Mulligan.
“Ronan Farrow called me up in the spring of 2017 and told me he was investigating Harvey Weinstein and asked whether he could have access to my papers which are on file at the New York Public Library and tape recordings. I granted him that access.”
Farrow also interviewed Auletta and told him he had gathered concrete evidence.
“He said 'I have three women on camera by name saying that Harvey sexually abused them. I have five women on camera with the names and faces shielded, saying that Harvey abused them, and I have the tape of the Italian model who publicly claimed for the first time ever that Harvey was a predator and in 2015 grabbed her breasts'.”
Farrow took the story to NBC, who killed it.
“Among the things I learned is that Harvey Weinstein was told by NBC News executives, a week before Ronan Farrow was told, that the Ronan Farrow story was dead, that it would not run on NBC.
“NBC claimed to me when I reported that Ronan Farrow did not have the goods on Harvey Weinstein until after he went to the New York Yorker and writes the story.”
This was untrue, he says.
Auletta personally confronted Weinstein about allegations of abuse in 2002.
“It was the final of five or six interviews I'd done with him for the profile. I said, ‘Harvey, tell me about when you attempted to rape Rowena Chiu at the Venice Film Festival in 1990’. And Harvey stood up, got up from his chair, just two of us in a small conference room, stood over me clenching his fists with his lip trembling and said, ‘If you write that it will destroy my marriage, and humiliate and shame my three teenage daughters.’
“At that point, I stood up thinking he was gonna take a poke at me while I'm sitting down. So, I stood up and faced him and at that point, he did something really surprising, he started to cry; ‘This will ruin my life, you can't do that’ blah, blah, blah.”
Auletta says in writing about the disgraced movie mogul he looked at his early life in New York for clues of what he would become, but found few. Weinstein’s predatory behaviour increased as his power increased, Auletta says.
“He only started abusing women when he had power, which he had first as a music promoter, when he dropped out of college in Buffalo. And then in the independent movie sector, where he became a very dominant force.
“And actually, the abuse of women escalated with the more power he had.”
The conclusion he eventually came to was Weinstein is a sociopath, he says.
Weinstein’s brother Bob agreed to be interviewed for the book. Bob knew about Weinstein’s sexual appetites, but not that he was a rapist, he told Auletta.
“Bob claimed to me he knew nothing, he knew that Harvey was a sexual addict, but said he had no idea that he was a rapist.”
There was certainly a culture of silence, he says.
Photo: Penguin Random House
“There were people who were with Harvey, who knew of his sexual abuse. There were agents. who actresses came to and complained of being sexually abused, who knew. There were a fair number of people who knew.
“And then there were a larger number of people who should have known who didn't want to ask.”
Weinstein understood power, Auletta says.
“Harvey went to great lengths to make sure people feared him. And if they feared him they were afraid to blow the whistle.”
Weinstein revelled in this power, he says.
“He believed that he could, if there were any holes in the dam and water was seeping out, he could put his finger in and plug the holes and he had done so his entire life.
“The first time he was ever exposed in the press as a potential sexual deviant was in 2015 when the Italian model claimed he had grabbed her breasts. That case was dismissed, all the other times that women came after him, or claimed he raped them, he paid them a nondisclosure, paid them money in return for their silence.”
But eventually, Weinstein’s dam was breached.
“With the Ronan Farrow story and the New York Times story, these two sets of reporters succeeded in getting women to stop being afraid, to talk in the group and come forward and say this man is a sexual deviant, he's a predator, and we want to expose him.
“And in October 2017 they exposed him, Harvey Weinstein's defence of the dam collapsed, and his career was over.”
