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Ebook excerpt: “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Lifestyle of Silence”

Ebook excerpt: “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Lifestyle of Silence”

In his most recent guide, “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Lifestyle of Silence” (out there July 12 from Penguin Press), journalist and New Yorker critic Ken Auletta writes about the Hollywood energy broker and his tumble, right after allegations of sexual abuse exposed during the #MeToo movement led to Weinstein’s conviction and imprisonment.

Read the excerpt under, and don’t pass up Lesley Stahl’s job interview with Ken Auletta on “CBS Sunday Early morning” July 10!


Prologue

The Grey Concrete Carpet

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Penguin Push


At the time, he exuded energy. Movies he created and distributed garnered 81 Academy Awards and 341 Oscar nominations. Only Steven Spielberg was thanked extra typically from the awards stage. He boasted of his friendships with Presidents Clinton and Obama, and of the well known actresses he claimed to have bedded. Inside the business office, he terrified the four assistants who serviced his demands, and he bellowed at most of his executives. Outdoors the place of work, he flashed a dazzling, capped-toothed smile whilst strolling hundreds of pink carpets, trailed by clicking cameras, typically accompanied by his second spouse, trend designer Georgina Chapman, who dressed some of the stars lit by the paparazzi flashes. He was that exceptional Hollywood determine identified quickly by his initially title: Harvey.

The gray concrete sidewalk Harvey Weinstein crossed day-to-day in the wintertime of 2020 was not a red carpet, but a gauntlet. Waiting around for him to arrive at the prison court docket constructing at 100 Centre Street have been armed law enforcement officers and steel law enforcement barricades corralling a throng of reporters who did not adhere to the respectful protocols of a Hollywood opening. Due to the fact of his the latest again surgical treatment, when his black Cadillac Escalade braked in front of the New York Condition Supreme Court docket creating, Harvey had to be assisted out of the back seat by two burly males. He slowly and gradually shuffled in black orthopedic footwear towards the building’s entrance a hundred or so feet away on a four-wheel walker, trailed by his crew of attorneys and general public relations advisers. Harvey did not pause and hardly ever looked up to answer to shouted questions or to smile for the cameras. At the time inside of the setting up, he dutifully emptied his pockets and handed as a result of a metallic detector. An elevator whisked Harvey and his entourage to the fifteenth flooring, wherever he passed a second gauntlet of cameras and reporters right before getting into courtroom 1530 for his prison demo for predatory rape and sexual assault.

Harvey’s world—the environment in which he was in charge—was upended without end above a few days in early Oct 2017, when The New York Times and The New Yorker publicly proclaimed that he was a sexual beast, and the Weinstein Business fired him. Seven months later, Harvey was indicted by a grand jury convened by the Manhattan district lawyer. Now as he entered the courtroom, he confronted a legal trial that threatened to spot him powering bars for the relaxation of his daily life. For 8 weeks, beginning on January 6, 2020, Harvey walked this concrete carpet Monday as a result of Friday.

He now dressed far more like a midwestern businessman out of a Sinclair Lewis novel than a Hollywood electrical power broker—drab, boxy fits white shirts with crumpled collars and uninteresting, a little bit askew ties. He seemed depressing. He had misplaced at minimum seventy-5 lbs, his pallor was gray, and his scruffy stubble beard failed to camouflage the crevices and lines of his swollen deal with.

In court, Harvey would settle into a minimal-backed leather chair, flanked by his 5 attorneys at a desk dealing with Judge James M. Burke on his elevated system. His prosecutors, assistant district attorney and Particular Counsel to the D.A. Joan Illuzzi and her deputy, Meghan Hast, deputy chief of the Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit, had been seated at a table to his right, close to the twelve-member jury box. Every day, about just one hundred twenty-five journalists and spectators crammed into the courtroom more reporters and spectators generally waited exterior to enter or for a prospect to verbally assail Harvey and his legal professionals.

Assistant district lawyer Illuzzi would say more than when that Harvey’s walker was “a prop” to elicit sympathy, a see broadly shared

by his detractors and not a number of members of the press. In reality, Harvey Weinstein was not properly. Right after a automobile incident in 2019, he experienced been dragging his ideal foot for a sound yr, and his back again was operated on times right before the demo commenced to relieve discomfort and accurate spinal stenosis and drop foot. The operation was not thriving. He also experienced from substantial blood force, elevated cholesterol, long-term diabetic issues, a weak heart, and he was receiving what his attorney explained as “pictures in his eyes” to take care of macular degeneration. In all, Harvey experienced prescriptions for twenty distinctive drugs.

Harvey experienced been indicted on 5 counts of assault and rape of three ladies: Miriam Haley (previously Haleyi), a generation assistant at the Weinstein Corporation aspiring actress Jessica Mann and set up actress Annabella Sciorra. Woven in the course of the prosecution situation was the assertion that Weinstein abused his ability as head of Miramax, and later on the Weinstein Enterprise, to entrap aspiring actresses, types, and females on his team. Right after he coerced sexual accessibility, at times brutally, they stored silent, shamed or fearful he would sabotage their professions. They required to be in the motion picture business enterprise, and he was not only their most important but typically their only link.

Harvey’s staff considered their defense was formidable. Sexual intercourse with these women of all ages was consensual, his attorneys insisted. They pounded the jury with evidence that both equally Haley and Mann, on whose testimony the situation pivoted, held in touch with Harvey immediately after his alleged assaults, sending him email messages, asking for work and favors, and ultimately participating in voluntary sexual intercourse with him. Sciorra did not sustain call, but the protection strike back challenging at her for staying not able to establish the year—1993 or 1994—in which the rape happened, suggesting that she had lied. Two of the 3 other feminine witnesses who would testify also sought favors from Harvey following he allegedly abused them. And presented the flood of damaging publicity about Harvey in excess of the two yrs considering the fact that the stories broke, the protection claimed he was robbed of a presumption of innocence due to the fact it was not simple to identify jurors who did not have an viewpoint about Harvey Weinstein. Just about a single 3rd of the somewhere around 6

hundred opportunity jurors screened by Decide Burke in the courtroom prior to the trial had been excused when they said they could not be “neutral.”

This was recognized by all to be a watershed demo. Typically in sexual intercourse-crime scenarios, law enforcement chooses not to prosecute if there is no forensic evidence and no contemporaneous law enforcement reports. This scenario was even far more difficult due to the fact there was electronic mail evidence that the victims not only retained in contact with their abuser but in some scenarios had consensual sexual intercourse with him following becoming assaulted. By pursuing this case, District Lawyer Cyrus Vance was trying to get to enlarge possibilities to prosecute sex crimes. To the #MeToo motion and lots of other people enraged by the abusive conduct of impressive men—Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Monthly bill Cosby, Les Moonves, Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer, Russell Simmons, Kevin Spacey, United states Gymnastics health practitioner Larry Nassar, R. Kelly, amongst many others—the trial was seen as a reckoning, a call to justice for victims of sexual assault just about everywhere.

On February 25, right after a demo that lasted 20-two days around two months and was followed by 20-6 hours of jury deliberation more than 5 times, the jury foreman rose and declared that his colleagues located Weinstein guilty of two of the 5 counts.

The packed courtroom went silent, then it abruptly flooded with two dozen armed court officers, four of whom stood instantly behind Harvey at the defense table. The officers inched closer to him as Decide Burke introduced that he was remanding the defendant to the prison on Rikers Island. Before Harvey was lifted by his arms and taken by two court docket officers out a aspect doorway, the decide established sentencing for two and a half weeks later, on March 11.

On that working day, Decide Burke introduced that he was sentencing Weinstein to twenty-a few a long time in jail. Harvey’s head dropped to his upper body. He did not unleash his well-known temper. Instead, he feebly responded, as if he could not think this was going on to him, “But I am harmless.” He explained this to his attorneys three times.

It was a long, darkish street to this point. Innocent is a word handful of some others would use to explain Harvey Weinstein, in this or any other context. Championing superior videos and exhibiting excellent actions did not generally overlap in Hollywood, but Harvey broadened the chasm involving the two. How intense that divide was in the movement image field is a person of the concerns this e book explores. The pressing issue is how, and why, he was enabled, 10 years following decade, by the silence or shuttered eyes of so a lot of in Hollywood, such as so many of individuals who labored for him, to get away with sexually abusing ladies. To realize this society of silence, it is important to just take a shut appear at the architecture of collusion, the two intentional and unwitting, that he created at his firms.

All those who worked for Harvey had been daunted by his talent nevertheless terrorized by his volcanic temperament. Following a prolonged working day in the place of work, workers users would from time to time restore to a bar for a recuperative drink to ponder the supply of Harvey’s horrifying rage. As Amanda Lundberg, who commenced doing the job at Miramax in 1988 and in her 10 decades there rose to all over the world head of public relations, set it, “We applied to say of his residence, ‘They need to have carried out a selection on individuals youngsters.’ ” Stunned by Harvey’s behavior, a former personal confided, “He’s like an individual who’s been elevated by wolves.”

But upbringing can only reveal so a lot. Harvey’s everyday living gives affirmation of the Greek philosopher’s adage popularized by George Eliot, “Character is destiny.” Just as Richard Nixon or Donald Trump drowned in the currents of malice and paranoia that overwhelmed their judgment, Harvey Weinstein was unable to tame the demons that warped his habits and will form his legacy: One particular, his ferocious rage, which erupted devoid of warning, alienating colleagues and competition. Two, his predatory sexual compulsions, which he indulged and productively masked for many years. A few, his promiscuous paying on films and cost accounts, nearly bankrupting his companies. And 4, his unhinged, Shakespeare-worthy relationship with his young brother, Bob Weinstein, which gyrated from an impregnable partnership to screaming matches, stony estrangements, and, at the very least as soon as, bloody blows.

Harvey Weinstein was identified guilty of crimes prompted by his raging impulses and his unquenchable will need to dominate. But the issue his team asked still lingers, rooted in just one of the excellent movies Harvey cherished and hoped to emulate. Orson Welles spoke of his generation, Charles Foster Kane, as getting burdened by an “enraged conviction that no 1 exists but himself, his refusal to acknowledge the existence of other people today with whom just one will have to compromise, whose thoughts one must get into account.”

What is Harvey Weinstein’s Rosebud—a decline, a lack, that describes what arrived right after? Is there an clarification for a daily life lived as he has? Any these research commences in the Flushing, Queens, property in which Harvey was elevated.

     
From “Hollywood Ending” by Ken Auletta, released by Penguin Push, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random Home LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Ken Auletta.

      
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