Serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 23 years' jail. Photo / AP
Serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 23 years' jail. Photo / AP
COMMENT
Last night, I watched the speech Gwyneth Paltrow made when she won an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love. When she thanked her producer, Harvey Weinstein, her throat contracted. She looked scared.
Years before, he had invited her to massage him in a suite. She "excused herself, 'but not so he would feel he had done something wrong'," she told journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the story of Weinstein's crimes in the New York Times and have since written She Said, the story of the expose. Paltrow told her family, her friends, her agent and her boyfriend at the time, Brad Pitt, who told Weinstein "to keep his hands to himself". Otherwise, nothing.
I wonder if that much-mocked speech — Paltrow really cried in her pink princess dress — was emitting trauma. I wonder if Paltrow's subsequent career as a "lifestyle guru" was denial, an attempt to exorcise Weinstein's sins. The abused sometimes try to create external perfection as a complementary act of control. If you know that the most powerful man in Hollywood, the man who created you, is an abuser, yet you have no power to denounce him, what does that do to you?
Now he has been jailed for the next 23 years, is the world a safer place? Is Hollywood the city of dreams? Or will Weinstein be the blood sacrifice that enables the abuse to go on in smaller ways?
The more I think about it, the more shocking this story is. Cinema could not invent an itinerant rape factory — Weinstein essentially lived in the Paris Ritz, the London Savoy and the Beverly Hills Hotel — into which young actresses were fed for his pleasure. If it could, it would not make the movie. Even so, people knew.
It was not about sex, of course; it was about control and destruction. Weinstein is a desperate inadequate — the fat man from Queens — and it pleased him to consume the most beautiful and the most untouched to sate himself. British actress Kate Beckinsale, for instance, was only 17 when he tried to have sex with her in the Savoy Hotel. She excused herself by saying she had school the next day. In 2001, when she wore a man's suit to a premiere, he tricked her into visiting his house and screamed that the "p****" must wear a dress on the red carpet. He destroyed women if they said no. He destroyed them if they said yes. This explains the disappearings, then — gifted women who just melted from the screen.
He controlled women with abuse, then false contrition: this is familiar to survivors of domestic violence. One of Weinstein's staff said: "You could have produced a small film on the money Miramax must have spent on Harvey-didn't-mean-it flowers". His female employees sometimes tried to stop him. They advised colleagues not to be alone with him: wear a parka, they said, wear two pairs of tights, don't sit on a sofa, he will sit beside you, sit on a chair. When the protests got loud, the lawyers arrived with the cheques and the non-disclosure agreements.
Gwyneth Paltrow in a scene from PROOF, directed by John Madden. Photo / Supplied
Weinstein's mental condition doesn't interest me. As a film distributor — it is nonsense to say he created art; he exploited Hollywood's financial structure to steal it from others — he was a parasite. What interests me is the people who protected him and then, when he was exposed, tried to spare themselves.
I read what I thought was a very moving letter to Weinstein from his brother and partner, Bob, begging him to receive help for "sex addiction".
"So slowly I have watched you get worse over the years to the point where from my point of view, there is no more person or brother Harvey, that I can recognise," Bob wrote, "but merely an empty soul acting out in any way he can to fill up that space and hurt that will not go away. More than anything, I look forward to the return of that person that was just Harvey."
Then I wondered why it was published in She Said. Did Bob Weinstein leak it? "I knew enough to do more than I did," said Quentin Tarantino, who gave every film he directed to Weinstein, in 2017. "There was more to it than just the normal rumours, the normal gossip. It wasn't second-hand. I knew he did a couple of these things."
He knew Weinstein had tried to assault his own ex-girlfriend, Mira Sorvino. He knew Weinstein paid off actress Rose McGowan after assaulting her. But this interview was enough to redeem Tarantino, even if he admitted his culpability.
Weinstein was exposed because of two female journalists, and two victims: Laura Madden, a single mother facing surgery as the story broke, who had been assaulted by Weinstein when his assistant years before, and actress Ashley Judd, who put her name to the first expose then headed into the wilderness to escape the wreckage. It would, I imagine, have felt familiar.
