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Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein
Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein
--New Accusers, Darryl Hannah and Annabella Sciorra--
In March, Annabella Sciorra, who received an Emmy nomination for her role in “The Sopranos,” agreed to talk with me for a story I was reporting about Harvey Weinstein. Speaking by phone, I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding the producer. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she said, with an air of what seemed to be studied nonchalance. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, in which thirteen women accused Weinstein of xesual assault and harassment, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, xesually harassed her repeatedly.
“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life. . . .’ ” she said. “I really, really panicked,” she added. “I was shaking. And I just wanted to get off the phone.”
All told, more than fifty women have now levelled accusations against Weinstein, in accounts published by the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other outlets. But many other victims have continued to be reluctant to talk to me about their experiences, declining interview requests or initially agreeing to talk and then wavering. As more women have come forward, the costs of doing so have certainly shifted. But many still say that they face overwhelming pressures to stay silent, ranging from the spectre of career damage to fears about the life-altering consequences of being marked as xesual-assault victims. “Now when I go to a restaurant or to an event, people are going to know that this happened to me,” Sciorra said. “They’re gonna look at me and they’re gonna know. I’m an intensely private person, and this is the most unprivate thing you can do.”
The actress Daryl Hannah told me this week about two incidents that occurred, during the early aughts, in which Weinstein pounded on her hotel-room door until she, in one case, escaped out a back entrance. When it happened again the following day, she barricaded herself in her room using furniture. Another time, Weinstein asked her if he could touch her breasts. She believes that, after she refused, Weinstein retaliated against her professionally. “I am a private person, with a rule of speaking to the press only for professional reasons,” she told me. Hannah said that she had decided to speak publicly about her experiences for the first time, more than a decade after they occurred, because “I feel a moral obligation to support the women who have suffered much more egregious transgressions.” She, like many women who have come forward, still had doubts about the trade-offs she would have to make for speaking openly. “It’s one of those things your body has to adjust to. You get dragged into the gutter of nastiness and pettiness and shame and all of these things, and it sometimes seems healthier and wiser to just move on with your life and not allow yourself to be re-victimized.”
A woman who appeared anonymously in my previous article, alleging that Weinstein raped her while she worked for him, and who has chosen to remain nameless, told me that she has yet to tell even people close to her about the full extent of her allegation. “I want to be braver. I really do,” she told me. “I want to be able to put my name to this and talk through what happened, but I am surrounded by people who, the first thing they’ll do is read this article, and I’ll be working three desks from them, and they’ll know details of my life I haven’t even told my family.” For many women, this was the most difficult decision of their lives. Sciorra, too, still has doubts. “Even now, as I tell you, and have had all these women around saying it’s O.K.,” Sciorra told me, “I'm petrified again.”
Sallie Hofmeister, a spokesperson for Weinstein, issued a statement in response to the allegations by Sciorra and Hannah. “Mr. Weinstein unequivocally denies any allegations of non-consensual xes,” she said.
Sciorra first met Weinstein in the early nineties, when she was an emerging star after appearing in films such as “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” Her agent introduced them at an industry party in Los Angeles. Weinstein was friendly, she said, and gave her a ride home; they talked about their shared love of film. Several months later, when her friend Warren Leight was trying to get a romantic-comedy screenplay he’d written made, Sciorra called Weinstein about it. Weinstein said that he wanted to make the film, which was called “The Night We Never Met,” and to start filming with Sciorra in a leading role. He wanted her to start work immediately after she finished two back-to-back shoots she already had planned for that summer. “I said, ‘Harvey, I cannot do this right now. I need some time,’ ” she recalled. “That’s the first time he threatened to sue me.” (Sources close to Weinstein deny that he threatened to sue Sciorra.)
After Sciorra finished making “The Night We Never Met,” she said that she became ensconced in “this circle of Miramax,” referring to Weinstein’s studio, which was then gaining an increasingly dominant role in the industry. There were so many screenings and events and dinners, Sciorra said, that it was hard to imagine life outside of the Weinstein ecosystem. At one dinner, in New York, she recalled, “Harvey was there, and I got up to leave. And Harvey said, ‘Oh, I'll drop you off.’ Harvey had dropped me off before, so I didn’t really expect anything out of the ordinary—I expected just to be dropped off.” In the car, Weinstein said goodbye to Sciorra, and she went upstairs to her apartment. She was alone and getting ready for bed a few minutes later when she heard a knock on the door. “It wasn’t that late,” she said. “Like, it wasn’t the middle of the night, so I opened the door a crack to see who it was. And he pushed the door open.” She paused to collect herself. 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.
Sciorra told me that listening to a recording from 2015 that The New Yorker released earlier this month, in which Weinstein is heard demanding that a model enter his hotel room, “really triggered me.” Sciorra remembered Weinstein employing the same tactics as he cornered her, backing her into her bedroom. “Come here, come on, cut it out, what are you doing, come here,” she remembered him saying. She tried to be assertive. “This is not happening,” she told him. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”
Then Weinstein grabbed her, she said. “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 xesual 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 xes 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.”
In the weeks and months that followed the alleged attack, Sciorra didn’t tell anyone about it. “Like most of these women, I was so ashamed of what happened,” she said. “And I fought. I fought. But still I was like, Why did I open that door? Who opens the door at that time of night? I was definitely embarrassed by it. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had fµcked up.” She grew depressed and lost weight. Her father, unaware of the attack but concerned for her well-being, urged her to seek help, and she did see a therapist, but, she said, “I don’t even think I told the therapist. It’s pathetic.”
Sciorra never spoke to the police. Neither did the anonymous woman who alleged rape in the earlier New Yorker article, although two others did. The anonymous woman said that, although “I regret not being maybe stronger in the moment,” her fears that charging Weinstein publicly might change her life permanently were too great. “It’s hard to know. . . . It’s like choosing a different life path.”
Some of the obstacles that Sciorra and other women believed they faced were related to Weinstein’s power in the film industry. Sciorra said that she felt the impact on her livelihood almost immediately. “From 1992, I didn’t work again until 1995,” she said. “I just kept getting this pushback of ‘We heard you were difficult; we heard this or that.’ I think that that was the Harvey machine.” The actress Rosie Perez, a friend who was among the first to discuss Sciorra’s allegations with her, told me, “She was riding high, and then she started acting weird and getting reclusive. It made no sense. Why did this woman, who was so talented, and riding so high, doing hit after hit, then all of a sudden fall off the map? It hurts me as a fellow-actress to see her career not flourish the way it should have.”
Several years later, Sciorra did begin working again. Weinstein again pursued her with unwanted xesual advances, she said. In 1995, she was in London shooting “The Innocent Sleep,” which Weinstein did not produce. According to Sciorra, Weinstein began leaving her messages, demanding that she call him or that they meet at his hotel. “I don’t know how he found me,” she said. “I’d come home from work and there’d be a message that Harvey Weinstein had called. This went on and on.” He sent cars to her hotel to bring her to him, which she ignored. One night, he showed up at her room and began pounding on the door, she said. “For nights after, I couldn't sleep. I piled furniture in front of the door, like in the movies.” Finally, she pleaded with Matthew Vaughn, then a twenty-two-year-old producer on the film, and more recently a prominent director, to move her secretly to a different hotel. (Vaughn said that he recalled booking her a room elsewhere.)
Two years later, Sciorra appeared in the crime drama “Cop Land” as Liz Randone, the wife of a corrupt police officer. She said that she auditioned for the part without realizing at first that it was a Miramax film, and she learned that Weinstein’s company was involved only when she began contract negotiations. (A person close to Weinstein contested this, saying that the script had the studio’s name on it.) In May, 1997, shortly before the film’s release, she went to the Cannes Film Festival. When she checked into the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, in Antibes, France, a Miramax associate told her that Weinstein’s room would be next to hers. “My heart just sank,” Sciorra recalled. Early one morning, while she was still asleep, there was a knock on the door. Groggy, and thinking she must have forgotten about an early hair-and-makeup call, she opened the door. “There’s Harvey in his underwear, holding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape, a movie, in the other,” she recalled. “And it was horrific, because I'd been there before.” Sciorra said that she ran from Weinstein. “He was closing in really quickly, and I pressed all the call buttons for valet service and room service. I kept pressing all of them until someone showed up.” Weinstein retreated, she said, when hotel staff arrived.
Over time, Sciorra opened up to a small number of people. Perez said that she heard from an acquaintance about Weinstein’s behavior at the hotel in London and questioned Sciorra about what happened. Sciorra told Perez about the attack in her apartment, and Perez, who was xesually assaulted by a relative during her childhood, began crying. “I said, ‘Oh, Annabella, you’ve gotta go to the police.’ She said, ‘I can’t go to the police. He’s destroying my career.’ ”
Unlike Sciorra, Daryl Hannah, who is known for her roles in “Splash,” “Wall Street,” and many other films, told colleagues about what had happened to her. “I did tell people about it,” she told me. “And it didn’t matter.” Hannah first met Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival, in the early aughts, before she appeared in “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” which Weinstein produced. She was returning to her room at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the same hotel where Sciorra said Weinstein harassed her. She saw Weinstein, who was at a reception in the hotel bar nearby. He called her over, and told her that he loved her work. Then he asked for her room number so that he could call her to schedule a meeting.
continued
Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein
--New Accusers, Darryl Hannah and Annabella Sciorra--
In March, Annabella Sciorra, who received an Emmy nomination for her role in “The Sopranos,” agreed to talk with me for a story I was reporting about Harvey Weinstein. Speaking by phone, I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding the producer. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she said, with an air of what seemed to be studied nonchalance. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, in which thirteen women accused Weinstein of xesual assault and harassment, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, xesually harassed her repeatedly.
“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life. . . .’ ” she said. “I really, really panicked,” she added. “I was shaking. And I just wanted to get off the phone.”
All told, more than fifty women have now levelled accusations against Weinstein, in accounts published by the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other outlets. But many other victims have continued to be reluctant to talk to me about their experiences, declining interview requests or initially agreeing to talk and then wavering. As more women have come forward, the costs of doing so have certainly shifted. But many still say that they face overwhelming pressures to stay silent, ranging from the spectre of career damage to fears about the life-altering consequences of being marked as xesual-assault victims. “Now when I go to a restaurant or to an event, people are going to know that this happened to me,” Sciorra said. “They’re gonna look at me and they’re gonna know. I’m an intensely private person, and this is the most unprivate thing you can do.”
The actress Daryl Hannah told me this week about two incidents that occurred, during the early aughts, in which Weinstein pounded on her hotel-room door until she, in one case, escaped out a back entrance. When it happened again the following day, she barricaded herself in her room using furniture. Another time, Weinstein asked her if he could touch her breasts. She believes that, after she refused, Weinstein retaliated against her professionally. “I am a private person, with a rule of speaking to the press only for professional reasons,” she told me. Hannah said that she had decided to speak publicly about her experiences for the first time, more than a decade after they occurred, because “I feel a moral obligation to support the women who have suffered much more egregious transgressions.” She, like many women who have come forward, still had doubts about the trade-offs she would have to make for speaking openly. “It’s one of those things your body has to adjust to. You get dragged into the gutter of nastiness and pettiness and shame and all of these things, and it sometimes seems healthier and wiser to just move on with your life and not allow yourself to be re-victimized.”
A woman who appeared anonymously in my previous article, alleging that Weinstein raped her while she worked for him, and who has chosen to remain nameless, told me that she has yet to tell even people close to her about the full extent of her allegation. “I want to be braver. I really do,” she told me. “I want to be able to put my name to this and talk through what happened, but I am surrounded by people who, the first thing they’ll do is read this article, and I’ll be working three desks from them, and they’ll know details of my life I haven’t even told my family.” For many women, this was the most difficult decision of their lives. Sciorra, too, still has doubts. “Even now, as I tell you, and have had all these women around saying it’s O.K.,” Sciorra told me, “I'm petrified again.”
Sallie Hofmeister, a spokesperson for Weinstein, issued a statement in response to the allegations by Sciorra and Hannah. “Mr. Weinstein unequivocally denies any allegations of non-consensual xes,” she said.
Sciorra first met Weinstein in the early nineties, when she was an emerging star after appearing in films such as “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” Her agent introduced them at an industry party in Los Angeles. Weinstein was friendly, she said, and gave her a ride home; they talked about their shared love of film. Several months later, when her friend Warren Leight was trying to get a romantic-comedy screenplay he’d written made, Sciorra called Weinstein about it. Weinstein said that he wanted to make the film, which was called “The Night We Never Met,” and to start filming with Sciorra in a leading role. He wanted her to start work immediately after she finished two back-to-back shoots she already had planned for that summer. “I said, ‘Harvey, I cannot do this right now. I need some time,’ ” she recalled. “That’s the first time he threatened to sue me.” (Sources close to Weinstein deny that he threatened to sue Sciorra.)
After Sciorra finished making “The Night We Never Met,” she said that she became ensconced in “this circle of Miramax,” referring to Weinstein’s studio, which was then gaining an increasingly dominant role in the industry. There were so many screenings and events and dinners, Sciorra said, that it was hard to imagine life outside of the Weinstein ecosystem. At one dinner, in New York, she recalled, “Harvey was there, and I got up to leave. And Harvey said, ‘Oh, I'll drop you off.’ Harvey had dropped me off before, so I didn’t really expect anything out of the ordinary—I expected just to be dropped off.” In the car, Weinstein said goodbye to Sciorra, and she went upstairs to her apartment. She was alone and getting ready for bed a few minutes later when she heard a knock on the door. “It wasn’t that late,” she said. “Like, it wasn’t the middle of the night, so I opened the door a crack to see who it was. And he pushed the door open.” She paused to collect herself. 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.
Sciorra told me that listening to a recording from 2015 that The New Yorker released earlier this month, in which Weinstein is heard demanding that a model enter his hotel room, “really triggered me.” Sciorra remembered Weinstein employing the same tactics as he cornered her, backing her into her bedroom. “Come here, come on, cut it out, what are you doing, come here,” she remembered him saying. She tried to be assertive. “This is not happening,” she told him. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”
Then Weinstein grabbed her, she said. “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 xesual 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 xes 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.”
In the weeks and months that followed the alleged attack, Sciorra didn’t tell anyone about it. “Like most of these women, I was so ashamed of what happened,” she said. “And I fought. I fought. But still I was like, Why did I open that door? Who opens the door at that time of night? I was definitely embarrassed by it. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had fµcked up.” She grew depressed and lost weight. Her father, unaware of the attack but concerned for her well-being, urged her to seek help, and she did see a therapist, but, she said, “I don’t even think I told the therapist. It’s pathetic.”
Sciorra never spoke to the police. Neither did the anonymous woman who alleged rape in the earlier New Yorker article, although two others did. The anonymous woman said that, although “I regret not being maybe stronger in the moment,” her fears that charging Weinstein publicly might change her life permanently were too great. “It’s hard to know. . . . It’s like choosing a different life path.”
Some of the obstacles that Sciorra and other women believed they faced were related to Weinstein’s power in the film industry. Sciorra said that she felt the impact on her livelihood almost immediately. “From 1992, I didn’t work again until 1995,” she said. “I just kept getting this pushback of ‘We heard you were difficult; we heard this or that.’ I think that that was the Harvey machine.” The actress Rosie Perez, a friend who was among the first to discuss Sciorra’s allegations with her, told me, “She was riding high, and then she started acting weird and getting reclusive. It made no sense. Why did this woman, who was so talented, and riding so high, doing hit after hit, then all of a sudden fall off the map? It hurts me as a fellow-actress to see her career not flourish the way it should have.”
Several years later, Sciorra did begin working again. Weinstein again pursued her with unwanted xesual advances, she said. In 1995, she was in London shooting “The Innocent Sleep,” which Weinstein did not produce. According to Sciorra, Weinstein began leaving her messages, demanding that she call him or that they meet at his hotel. “I don’t know how he found me,” she said. “I’d come home from work and there’d be a message that Harvey Weinstein had called. This went on and on.” He sent cars to her hotel to bring her to him, which she ignored. One night, he showed up at her room and began pounding on the door, she said. “For nights after, I couldn't sleep. I piled furniture in front of the door, like in the movies.” Finally, she pleaded with Matthew Vaughn, then a twenty-two-year-old producer on the film, and more recently a prominent director, to move her secretly to a different hotel. (Vaughn said that he recalled booking her a room elsewhere.)
Two years later, Sciorra appeared in the crime drama “Cop Land” as Liz Randone, the wife of a corrupt police officer. She said that she auditioned for the part without realizing at first that it was a Miramax film, and she learned that Weinstein’s company was involved only when she began contract negotiations. (A person close to Weinstein contested this, saying that the script had the studio’s name on it.) In May, 1997, shortly before the film’s release, she went to the Cannes Film Festival. When she checked into the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, in Antibes, France, a Miramax associate told her that Weinstein’s room would be next to hers. “My heart just sank,” Sciorra recalled. Early one morning, while she was still asleep, there was a knock on the door. Groggy, and thinking she must have forgotten about an early hair-and-makeup call, she opened the door. “There’s Harvey in his underwear, holding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape, a movie, in the other,” she recalled. “And it was horrific, because I'd been there before.” Sciorra said that she ran from Weinstein. “He was closing in really quickly, and I pressed all the call buttons for valet service and room service. I kept pressing all of them until someone showed up.” Weinstein retreated, she said, when hotel staff arrived.
Over time, Sciorra opened up to a small number of people. Perez said that she heard from an acquaintance about Weinstein’s behavior at the hotel in London and questioned Sciorra about what happened. Sciorra told Perez about the attack in her apartment, and Perez, who was xesually assaulted by a relative during her childhood, began crying. “I said, ‘Oh, Annabella, you’ve gotta go to the police.’ She said, ‘I can’t go to the police. He’s destroying my career.’ ”
Unlike Sciorra, Daryl Hannah, who is known for her roles in “Splash,” “Wall Street,” and many other films, told colleagues about what had happened to her. “I did tell people about it,” she told me. “And it didn’t matter.” Hannah first met Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival, in the early aughts, before she appeared in “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” which Weinstein produced. She was returning to her room at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the same hotel where Sciorra said Weinstein harassed her. She saw Weinstein, who was at a reception in the hotel bar nearby. He called her over, and told her that he loved her work. Then he asked for her room number so that he could call her to schedule a meeting.
continued
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