CONTENT WARNING: This story deals with sexual assault.
When Rowena Chiu got a job working for the film producer, she thought it was her career break. Instead she was sexually assaulted – and that was just the beginning of her decades-long nightmare.
When Rowena Chiu entered Gwyneth Paltrow’s home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, for a secretive summit of abuse survivors in January 2019, more than two decades had passed since the two women had last breathed the same air. Back in 1998, Chiu and Paltrow had been colleagues of a sort, albeit operating at opposite ends of Hollywood’s pecking order and visibility spectrum. Paltrow was the star of Sliding Doors, the daughter of the director Bruce Paltrow and the actress Blythe Danner, and a red-carpet fixture. Chiu was a prodigiously intelligent British-Chinese Oxford graduate who had defied her parents’ more sober aspirations for her career by seeking a foothold in the film industry via her low-paid job at Miramax, the Disney-owned “independent” producer of The English Patient and Good Will Hunting. In their respective capacities – Chiu as a personal assistant, Paltrow as the “first lady of Miramax” – both twentysomethings reported to a man thanked in more Oscar acceptance speeches than God: Harvey Weinstein.
In 1998, Weinstein’s imperial phase was nearing its zenith. Working in his Miramax office in Soho in London, Chiu found the proximity to his bankable brand of prestige film-making exhilarating. “The rushes for Shakespeare in Love were being edited in the room below us,” she recalls. She worked on events designed to build anticipation for that movie, which starred Paltrow. “I would have been in the same room as Gwyneth but, as an invisible assistant to Harvey, she wouldn’t have known who I was. You’re standing there almost like a butler in a Downton Abbey scene.”
Fast forward 20 years and Chiu’s anonymity was not figurative but literal: now living in California, she had been persuaded by journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor to come to Paltrow’s home on the condition that her name and circumstances would not be revealed to fellow attendees. Twohey and Kantor had already published allegations regarding Weinstein’s history of predation by this point, via a late 2017 article in The New York Times. And the #MeToo movement, founded by the activist Tarana Burke in 2006, had finally erupted into a global phenomenon, spreading from the entertainment industry to other walks of life. Women at the Paltrow-hosted gathering ranged from 25-year-old McDonald’s worker Kim Lawson to Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who had recently addressed the Senate Judiciary Committee, alleging that Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her.
“I was the only person at the gathering not prepared to release my name or my story,” recalls Chiu. Indeed, since leaving her Miramax job in London while Tony Blair was still in his first term as prime minister, Chiu had adhered steadfastly to the conditions of an astonishing legal document so secretive she wasn’t even allowed to retain a copy of it.
This 30-page non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, was precipitated by events in Weinstein’s hotel room during the Venice Film Festival in September 1998 – and technically she is breaking it by speaking to me about them now, even after her former boss has been found guilty of third-degree rape and first-degree sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in jail following court proceedings in New York in 2020. A second trial in Los Angeles is ongoing.
The eldest daughter of Chinese parents who met in Hong Kong and emigrated to the UK, Chiu was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. Garrulous and good company, she jokes that like many British-Chinese, her parents strategically settled halfway between London and Cambridge because the latter was one of the two acceptable universities for their offspring. She was “the only ethnic minority” at her private all-girls’ secondary school, and felt ostracised. “I really just thought it was my personality. I didn’t think it had anything to do with race,” she says. Although Chiu excelled at maths, she noted that “the cool girls, the ones who brought Smash Hits to school, were good at English”. Immersing herself in novels in a bid for popularity precipitated a genuine love of English literature. A teacher told her parents that she was not a suitable candidate for English at degree level because “Rowena did not grow up steeped in our traditions”, but she eventually studied the subject at Oxford, the other parent-mandated university, where she became president of the prestigious drama society and vice-president of the Oxford University Film Foundation.
Her job at Miramax came after a stint in Singapore and a period working in an entry-level position at the London branch of the talent and literary agency ICM, where she heard about the Miramax job from an email titled, “Zelda is leaving.” It referred to Zelda Perkins, Weinstein’s assistant of some years who was tasked with replacing herself.
Chiu had an interview with Perkins and was astonished to be sent a mobile phone by courier by way of a job offer. “I hadn’t quite turned 24, and when I got the job offer at Miramax I was so thrilled in a way that I can’t be thrilled today because you get more cynical. It’s like your first love.”
Weinstein lived up to, then surpassed, his reputation as a formidable boss. “Someone like Harvey doesn’t wait for a second,” she says of the relentless pace when the producer was in town. “There’s no standing down, and you’re not relaxing at any point because you have to think six steps ahead. If Harvey is leaving [his hotel], you need to have brought the luggage out and tipped the bellboy. The limo has to be arriving. The private jet has to be waiting. Otherwise he’s going to be standing in the lobby of the Savoy shouting, ‘Where’s the f***ing limo?’ "
She notes that, in terms of his ferociousness, Weinstein was by no means atypical for a studio boss during this heady moment of media consolidation and big box office. “You expected to get phones and scripts thrown at you; to get treated like crap. It was a hazing thing and you had to tolerate it to get into film,” she says.
Her first encounter with Weinstein was in a private screening of a new edit of Shakespeare in Love. “My first task was simply to sit directly in front of Harvey during the screening,” she has written. “At one point, fearful that my head was blocking his view, I attempted to shuffle over. ‘Sit down!’ he instantly roared, adding an expletive. I should have known better and left the room (and the job) that very instant.”
Barely a month into her employment at Miramax came the Venice Film Festival, a marquee fixture in Weinstein’s schedule of schmoozing and deal-making.
Chiu was expected to stay in Weinstein’s suite at the Hotel Excelsior, pre-vetting scripts for his consideration while Weinstein attended events. As the designated “late-night person, attending to his needs, discussing scripts with him, placing calls for LA, basically running the office until he goes to sleep around 2am”, she had experienced enough of Weinstein’s relentless boundary-pushing to be wearing two pairs of tights, despite the heat. She had been warned by Perkins not to sit on the same couch as their boss.
On arrival that night, Weinstein went into an adjoining room and returned naked except for a bathrobe that was “sometimes closed but sometimes gaping”, says Chiu. She says this felt like an implicit challenge: “Are you gonna react to the fact that I’m naked? This is just Hollywood.”
She describes what followed over the following four hours as “a sort of attrition where he chips away at your self-defence. He chips away your self-esteem, he chips away your clothes, even.”
She refers to what happened next in the present tense. “I’m too afraid to say anything about his semi-nude state or his flaccid penis. I hope that this is going to be a professional interaction. I’m constantly redirecting Harvey back to the scripts and he’s constantly trying to ask me personal questions.”
She had read six scripts that night, one of them an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. “He uses Mansfield Park to very quickly get into some very personal details,” she says. “Then he loosens his robe and says, it’s been a very tough night, I really need a massage. While you’re telling me about Mansfield Park, why don’t you give me a massage, or I can give you a massage.”
Worried that Weinstein was going to put his hands on her (“He weighed three times as much as me”), Chiu agreed to give him a massage. “And so eventually we moved from the couch to bed. And I am really uncomfortable about this. But he’s like, oh, I’m going to be so much more comfortable.”
There, she says, Weinstein proposed “blow jobs”, “pushed me down on the bed”, parted her legs and stripped her of both pairs of tights. “The idea that I would [be able to] physically fight him off is ludicrous,” she says. She invoked her traditional Christian background and the fact that she had a long-term boyfriend, but Weinstein was unperturbed. “He said, just one thrust and it’ll all be over. Take off your pants, take off your underwear. It will be over before you know it. And then you’ll have tricks to take home to [your boyfriend]. You don’t want to make me angry. You could have a great career if you just give me five minutes.
“At this stage I was close to crying – not outright sobbing, but really frightened. I was shaking. I was really scared. I was facing such a white sheet of fear at that point that regardless of what his actual motivations were, my pure, visceral motivation was to get out of the room.”
She was able to escape, she says, after telling Weinstein that Perkins was going to be worried about her. “I was invoking Zelda when invoking my traditional Christian background didn’t help,” she says. Perkins, she says, “had some kind of power over him”.
Chiu confided in Perkins, who took action the next day, pulling Weinstein out of a meeting to confront him with the allegations. Perkins has since said that, when Weinstein swore on the lives of his wife and children (his go-to “get out of jail card”) that nothing had happened, she knew there was no doubting Chiu’s account. She made sure that Chiu was not alone with Weinstein again. “Obviously my assault triggered something in her that was sort of a last straw,” says Chiu.
Once the assistants were back in London, they attempted to escalate the matter with Miramax staff, including a senior female employee, all of whom demurred. “Every single place we turned, a door was closed in our faces,” she says.
They sought external advice. “I was told by lawyers and police that if there wasn’t any actual penetration, it’s a much more minor crime,” says Chiu. “Even though the survivor is often equally traumatised. I wonder whether he knew that, in a very subconscious or maybe even conscious way.”
Things were complicated by the fact that she hadn’t gone to the authorities in Venice. Regardless, she says, she suspects that “in Italy it was far more difficult to get [him] prosecuted relative to New York and even London – so he sort of thought that Italy was his playground”.
What she quickly learnt was that the consensus on Weinstein was that he was too powerful to be challenged. Eventually, a small firm agreed to take their case, and through two weeks of out-of-hours negotiations with Miramax’s lawyers at the powerhouse firm Allen & Overy, Chiu and Perkins were denied access to food and writing instruments (“We were treated like criminals,” she says) and pressured to accept a severance settlement of £125,000 ($240,000) each and sign an unusually restrictive NDA.
For their part, Chiu and Perkins’ priority was to include clauses that might restrain Weinstein’s future behaviour in the workplace. Specifically, they stipulated that if, within two years of the signed NDA, he settled with another woman for US$35,000 ($55,000) or more, he would resign from Miramax and report himself to the Walt Disney Company. This never happened.
The former colleagues were forbidden from contacting each other again, prohibited from seeking therapy, reporting what had happened to the police or aiding any criminal investigation. The contract included “Schedule Five”, an addendum detailing friends and family who knew about their employment at Miramax and might be somewhat aware of the circumstances under which they were leaving.
Chiu reserves special scorn for Weinstein’s large team of London lawyers – all men – who, she says, probably still like to think of themselves as upstanding members of society, despite the consequences of their complicity.
“We signed that NDA on October 23, 1998, and then disappeared into oblivion.”
Chiu tried and failed to find another job in the booming UK film industry. “I was very diligent. I went around every film and TV production company in London,” she says. Prospective employees would ask questions about Weinstein before rejecting her via email. She suspects they knew the score. “If I’m saying in an interview that I couldn’t really cope with Harvey’s legendary temper, that’s clearly code for: he assaulted me.” She speculates that “there were many young women going through London at that point using the same code. Everybody knew in the Nineties what Harvey was like.”
Her personal life suffered on account of the “black hole” that opened up before her. “My best friend at the time knew what happened in the moment and knew we were signing the NDA. After the day we signed the NDA, however, if we went to the pub for a pint then it was, OK, we can’t talk about that any more.”
Five months after the NDA, a jubilant Weinstein and team collected seven Academy awards for Shakespeare in Love. “I looked at photos of Harvey accepting the award for best picture at the Oscars and Gwyneth Paltrow crying in a pink dress and thought, ‘Wow, that happened over our dead bodies.’ "
Desperate, she dialled a number she had been given by Miramax for use in the event that she couldn’t find employment. “I said, I don’t want you to do anything else other than put a call in to [rival studio] New Line and ask if they’ll give me an unpaid position in the mail room.” Instead, she says, she was subjected to a barrage of calls from Miramax, pressuring her to take a confected vice-president position in Hong Kong: “Harvey really values you. He’s missed you. He thinks you’re so talented.” This, she says, quickly escalated to, " ‘We have the name and address of your boyfriend in London. We’ll stand outside his apartment until you sign this employment agreement.’ It was all very coercive.” After breaking up with her boyfriend of seven years, she accepted the job in Hong Kong.
It was there, far from home, that she suffered a mental health crisis and attempted suicide twice. “I was really unhappy,” she recalls. “I feared for my life, I feared for Zelda’s life and I feared for the lives of my friends and family that were listed on Schedule Five. Harvey was clear that we would be tracked and we were tracked by Black Cube [an Israeli private investigation firm] for decades.” Her attempts to engage with therapists were futile, because she couldn’t tell them anything about the events that had caused her to seek help.
Rebuilding her life has been a slow process. After leaving the film industry, she went to business school and worked internationally as a management consultant. She met her husband, Andrew Cheung, in 2004, and never told him what had happened to her.
“Lots of people focus on the fact that it must have been really difficult to be married to Andrew and to have four children and not talk to him about the events of 1998. To which I say, it’s not half as difficult as being in 1998 and suddenly being cut off from all the people who walked that whole journey,” she says.
In August 2017, Cheung was vacuuming the family minivan outside their home in Mountain View, California, when Jodi Kantor appeared on the driveway, inquiring about his wife’s connection to Weinstein. He was nonplussed and asked her to leave. Chiu, who was in London at the time, was terrified. “I ran from Jodi. I hired the civil rights lawyer Nancy Erika Smith, who told her I wasn’t ready to speak.”
It would be the best part of two years before she was comfortable enough to attend the meeting at Paltrow’s home, also attended by Zelda Perkins (she and Chiu had re-established contact by this point) and another former Miramax employee, Laura Madden, who told of being assaulted by Weinstein in a Dublin hotel in 1992. Paltrow had her own story of harassment by Weinstein, of course. The producer had placed his hands on her and proposed massages during a work meeting in his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel. “I was a kid. I was signed up. I was petrified,” she has since said. Paltrow’s boyfriend at the time, Brad Pitt, confronted Weinstein. Over decades, the producer would habitually imply that Paltrow had granted him sexual favours in return for career advancement.
Chiu did reveal her identity at the Brentwood gathering and, later in 2019, she wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times titled “Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls” in which she explained how her British-Chinese identity had played a role in her silence. “I learnt the social benefits of being deferential, polite and well behaved… Harvey may not have created this imbalance, but he and many others have capitalised on it to abuse women of colour.”
The title of the piece is ironic, given something Weinstein said to Perkins back when she was originally looking to recruit Chiu. “Unknown to me at the time, Zelda had said [to Weinstein], ‘Now you won’t mess with this one, right?’ To which Harvey replied, I don’t do Jews or Chinese.”
After that article there was, she says, “a tsunami of responses” from sexual assault survivors across the age spectrum – a sizeable majority of them Asian women. “Women in their seventies would say, ‘Fifty years ago I was assaulted by a family member or someone at work and still haven’t told anyone or laid it to rest.’ They would say things like, you are my daughter or my granddaughter and I am passing the baton on to you to represent other Asian sexual assault survivors. Then there were the women who, at the other end of the age scale, would say things like, I’m Asian, I’m 24 and I’m writing this as my boss is yet again asking me to stay late. He’s asked me to stay late every night this week and he puts his hands on me and I don’t know who to talk to.”
She now appears on panels at conferences organised by the likes of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Labour and Employment Law Section on matters relating to whistleblowing and the use of NDAs.
The recent film adaptation of Kantor and Twohey’s book, She Said, dramatising their Pulitzer prize-winning investigation, is tipped for an award at the Oscars in March. Chiu cautions that Tinseltown shouldn’t be too quick to bask in the glory of its own “transformation”. It’s been “all of half a decade”, she says, since the white heat of #MeToo, and Hollywood still has plenty of issues, particularly in the way that it treats minorities. In the film Chiu is played by Angela Yeoh, whom Chiu met in London.
“It was definitely pointed out to me that if I choose to be portrayed by an Asian actress, it wasn’t going to result in the same kind of media profile as Zelda Perkins and Laura Madden,” who are both white and played by Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle respectively. This, she notes, has been borne out in press coverage for the film. “It’s interesting,” she reflects, “how the Asian story is often erased.”
She is writing a memoir – working title The Silent Condition. One prospective publisher rejected her proposal by telling her that only English-speaking Chinese people would be interested in reading about what had happened. “I find it staggering,” she says.
In late October it was announced that Chiu would appear as a supporting, “uncharged” witness in Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial, only for the district attorney subsequently to drop her from its line-up. (Chiu won’t find out exactly why until after proceedings have concluded.) Having “waited 24 years to be able to take the stand”, she is disappointed. “I knew I was going to be raked over the coals,” she says, but she wanted an opportunity “to look Harvey in the eye and say, look what you have done. In some ways I have triumphed because I have made a successful life for myself. But at the same time, this trauma lingers.”
Where to get help:
If it’s an emergency and you feel that you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
If you’ve ever experienced sexual assault or abuse and need to talk to someone, contact Safe to Talk confidentially, any time 24/7:
- Call 0800 044 334
- Text 4334
- Email support@safetotalk.nz
- For more info or to web chat visit safetotalk.nz
Alternatively contact your local police station - click here for a list.
If you have been sexually assaulted, remember it’s not your fault.
Written by: Mark Smith
© The Times of London
