Harvey Weinstein Accused of Sexual Assault *Update* Sentenced to 23 Years Imprisonment

^ Agreed. And of course some of these incidents happened at his house with his kids there. But if you're traveling and want to have a private meeting, what choice do you really have but to hold it in your hotel suite?
 
I can't stand Morrissey or The Smiths lol, but I mean.. people are going to have different opinions, especially men.. most experience society from such a dramatically different standpoint apparently that, I've found out, it's so hard for them to even relate to what women are talking about.. I see this among my male friends too, men in their 20s/30s, they do not quite relate to how hurtful or gross or diminishing harassment can be in even random contexts, they don't relate to the feeling that a fight is not even an option and it is another gender that is stronger and historically more violent. This is also a man that hasn't worked in an usual work environment and professional structure, he's spent like 4 decades of his life in a specific scene where women and men would literally lick his shoes for no reason other than a song he sings, and even after saying what he said, they will continue to do it.. anyone that goes to shows or is kind of a fanatic on musicians has seen this.. so nearing 60, he's not going to change his mind and he's speaking from personal experience.

I think journalists are just fishing for controversy when they keep going after people of the same generation for feedback... they know it's not going to be any different or suddenly empowering. They've been conditioned by society and field to pretty much be the same. Why don't they ask someone in his late teens? someone that's still giving a lot of thought on what's acceptable or not? because they'll get something more or less rational and won't have a story..

Moving on, I'm super bummed about Charlie Rose.. of all people..
 
Morrissey was well out of order to say what he did, but truth be told I'm more interested what the likes of Harry Styles and Taylor Swift think about this. Not because I care about them, but they have such a vast reach. Oftentimes silence speaks volumes, in this case, not in a good way.

What I am beginning to notice is somewhat of a tide.... people are getting bold to either openly target the victims or whitewash the scenario. Not just Morrissey, Brigitte Nielsen basically called Sylvester Stallone's accuser a liar. The jerk from Gossip Girl also called his accuser a liar, and William H Macy practically said when Harvey wasn't molesting women, he produced good movies! A few more and Hollywood will be ready to welcome Weinstein back! It happened to Polanski and Allen, why would he be any different.
 
Let us hope the world has changed since Polanski and Allen, we shall see ...

It's time to be done with generational excuses. Waiting for ignorance to die out simply doesn't work. No one gets a pass, everyone's consciousness needs to be raised. Speak truth to ignorance and privilege, and hold them accountable. Almost 60 is both way too young and way too old to be an idiot. Look at Charlottesville ... those were young people I saw carrying torches. Neither youth nor age guarantees anything.
 
A few more and Hollywood will be ready to welcome Weinstein back! It happened to Polanski and Allen, why would he be any different.

I agree with you that this will very likely happen. With Weinstein and the other sexual predators. Hollywood is just appalling.
 
Men’s magazines are surprisingly silent on Hollywood’s sexual misconduct

By Post Staff Report
November 27, 2017 | 1:04am

Talk about getting caught with your pants down. Exposés on predatory perv Harvey Weinstein have unleashed a tide of lurid allegations against some of the most powerful men in showbiz and politics, from Kevin Spacey and Charlie Rose to Al Franken and John Conyers. So what do the highest-profile men’s magazines have to say on the subject? Not so much, it turns out.

GQ likes to style itself as a beacon of liberal moral authority, so we had guessed that the December/January issue would suit up for a takedown of the famous predators among us. Instead, Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson churns out yet another of his pearl-clutching columns about President Trump.

Completely ignoring seamy sex allegations that have engulfed Democrats and Republicans alike, Nelson takes his Chicken Little routine with Trump to a new level. Every morning, “I run to my phone to see if the republic is still standing,” Nelson sweatily confides, “to see if [Trump] has summoned the nukes from North Korea out of their locust sleep.”

Esquire Editor-in-Chief Jay Fielden at least manages not to miss the fact that American males are caught in the middle of an historic reckoning over sexual misconduct. Nevertheless, he elects to dwell not on Weinstein, but on Hugh Hefner. Suffice it to say, a gentleman who reads Esquire might question the propriety of kicking a man in his grave, or even call it cowardly.

But after admitting he pawed and ogled Playboy centerfolds like a “Gollum” when he was 13, Fielden insists that he promptly “grew up,” and has, ever since, been woke to the tribulations of “friends, colleagues, girlfriends, wives, sisters, daughters and mothers” who have suffered at the hands of “adolescent narcissists” like Hefner.

“It’s imperative that open secrets don’t become another excuse for closing our eyes,” Fielden writes in a workmanlike conclusion, finally getting around to the subject of Weinstein. But after reading so many lines about Hefner, as well as deplorable “satyrs” like Wilt Chamberlain and Charlie Sheen who boasted about bedding women by the thousands, you get the impression Fielden is only lately waking up to the finer points of the issue.

Elsewhere, both magazines have pieces on John McCain — painting the US senator in a decidedly independent light. Nevertheless, both also seem to plead, “Look at us — we write about conservatives, too!”

GQ calls Colin Kaepernick “Citizen of the Year,” in an article that’s heavily sympathetic — unaccountably so, some might argue — to the former NFL quarterback who has been all-but-blackballed from the league after jump-starting the kneeling controversy.

We’re guessing one or both of these magazines will eventually get around to in-depth, 3,000-word features on predation in Hollywood and politics. But their current mumbling and stumbling just doesn’t look smart.

Source: NYpost.com
 
I thought Brit Marling and Salma's pieces were too good to not be posted here, the best I've read since all of this came out.. especially Brit's.

Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
By Salma Hayek
Dec 12, 2017

HARVEY WEINSTEIN WAS a passionate cinephile, a risk taker, a patron of talent in film, a loving father and a monster.

For years, he was my monster.

This fall, I was approached by reporters, through different sources, including my dear friend Ashley Judd, to speak about an episode in my life that, although painful, I thought I had made peace with.

I had brainwashed myself into thinking that it was over and that I had survived; I hid from the responsibility to speak out with the excuse that enough people were already involved in shining a light on my monster. I didn’t consider my voice important, nor did I think it would make a difference.

In reality, I was trying to save myself the challenge of explaining several things to my loved ones: Why, when I had casually mentioned that I had been bullied like many others by Harvey, I had excluded a couple of details. And why, for so many years, we have been cordial to a man who hurt me so deeply. I had been proud of my capacity for forgiveness, but the mere fact that I was ashamed to describe the details of what I had forgiven made me wonder if that chapter of my life had really been resolved.

When so many women came forward to describe what Harvey had done to them, I had to confront my cowardice and humbly accept that my story, as important as it was to me, was nothing but a drop in an ocean of sorrow and confusion. I felt that by now nobody would care about my pain — maybe this was an effect of the many times I was told, especially by Harvey, that I was nobody.

We are finally becoming conscious of a vice that has been socially accepted and has insulted and humiliated millions of girls like me, for in every woman there is a girl. I am inspired by those who had the courage to speak out, especially in a society that elected a president who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by more than a dozen women and whom we have all heard make a statement about how a man in power can do anything he wants to women.

Well, not anymore.

In the 14 years that I stumbled from schoolgirl to Mexican soap star to an extra in a few American films to catching a couple of lucky breaks in “Desperado” and “Fools Rush In,” Harvey Weinstein had become the wizard of a new wave of cinema that took original content into the mainstream. At the same time, it was unimaginable for a Mexican actress to aspire to a place in Hollywood. And even though I had proven them wrong, I was still a nobody.

One of the forces that gave me the determination to pursue my career was the story of Frida Kahlo, who in the golden age of the Mexican muralists would do small intimate paintings that everybody looked down on. She had the courage to express herself while disregarding skepticism. My greatest ambition was to tell her story. It became my mission to portray the life of this extraordinary artist and to show my native Mexico in a way that combated stereotypes.

The Weinstein empire, which was then Miramax, had become synonymous with quality, sophistication and risk taking — a haven for artists who were complex and defiant. It was everything that Frida was to me and everything I aspired to be.

I had started a journey to produce the film with a different company, but I fought to get it back to take it to Harvey.

I knew him a little bit through my relationship with the director Robert Rodriguez and the producer Elizabeth Avellan, who was then his wife, with whom I had done several films and who had taken me under their wing. All I knew of Harvey at the time was that he had a remarkable intellect, he was a loyal friend and a family man.

Knowing what I know now, I wonder if it wasn’t my friendship with them — and Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney — that saved me from being raped.

The deal we made initially was that Harvey would pay for the rights of work I had already developed. As an actress, I would be paid the minimum Screen Actors Guild scale plus 10 percent. As a producer, I would receive a credit that would not yet be defined, but no payment, which was not that rare for a female producer in the ’90s. He also demanded a signed deal for me to do several other films with Miramax, which I thought would cement my status as a leading lady.

I did not care about the money; I was so excited to work with him and that company. In my naïveté, I thought my dream had come true. He had validated the last 14 years of my life. He had taken a chance on me — a nobody. He had said yes.

Little did I know it would become my turn to say no.

No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with.

No to me taking a shower with him.

No to letting him watch me take a shower.

No to letting him give me a massage.

No to letting a naked friend of his give me a massage.

No to letting him give me oral sex.

No to my getting naked with another woman.

No, no, no, no, no …

And with every refusal came Harvey’s Machiavellian rage.

I don’t think he hated anything more than the word “no.” The absurdity of his demands went from getting a furious call in the middle of the night asking me to fire my agent for a fight he was having with him about a different movie with a different client to physically dragging me out of the opening gala of the Venice Film Festival, which was in honor of “Frida,” so I could hang out at his private party with him and some women I thought were models but I was told later were high-priced prostitutes.

The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.”

When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress.

In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.

At that point, I had to resort to using lawyers, not by pursuing a sexual harassment case, but by claiming “bad faith,” as I had worked so hard on a movie that he was not intending to make or sell back to me. I tried to get it out of his company.

He claimed that my name as an actress was not big enough and that I was incompetent as a producer, but to clear himself legally, as I understood it, he gave me a list of impossible tasks with a tight deadline:

1. Get a rewrite of the script, with no additional payment.

2. Raise $10 million to finance the film.

3. Attach an A-list director.

4. Cast four of the smaller roles with prominent actors.
 
continued..
Much to everyone’s amazement, not least my own, I delivered, thanks to a phalanx of angels who came to my rescue, including Edward Norton, who beautifully rewrote the script several times and appallingly never got credit, and my friend Margaret Perenchio, a first-time producer, who put up the money. The brilliant Julie Taymor agreed to direct, and from then on she became my rock. For the other roles, I recruited my friends Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton and my dear Ashley Judd. To this day, I don’t know how I convinced Geoffrey Rush, whom I barely knew at the time.

Now Harvey Weinstein was not only rejected but also about to do a movie he did not want to do.

Ironically, once we started filming, the sexual harassment stopped but the rage escalated. We paid the price for standing up to him nearly every day of shooting. Once, in an interview he said Julie and I were the biggest ball busters he had ever encountered, which we took as a compliment.

Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s “unibrow.” He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me. He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.

It was soul crushing because, I confess, lost in the fog of a sort of Stockholm syndrome, I wanted him to see me as an artist: not only as a capable actress but also as somebody who could identify a compelling story and had the vision to tell it in an original way.

I was hoping he would acknowledge me as a producer, who on top of delivering his list of demands shepherded the script and obtained the permits to use the paintings. I had negotiated with the Mexican government, and with whomever I had to, to get locations that had never been given to anyone in the past — including Frida Kahlo’s houses and the murals of Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, among others.

But all of this seemed to have no value. The only thing he noticed was that I was not sexy in the movie. He made me doubt if I was any good as an actress, but he never succeeded in making me think that the film was not worth making.

He offered me one option to continue. He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.

He had been constantly asking for more skin, for more sex. Once before, Julie Taymor got him to settle for a tango ending in a kiss instead of the lovemaking scene he wanted us to shoot between the character Tina Modotti, played by Ashley Judd, and Frida.

But this time, it was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another. There was no room for negotiation.

I had to say yes. By now so many years of my life had gone into this film. We were about five weeks into shooting, and I had convinced so many talented people to participate. How could I let their magnificent work go to waste?

I had asked for so many favors, I felt an immense pressure to deliver and a deep sense of gratitude for all those who did believe in me and followed me into this madness. So I agreed to do the senseless scene.

I arrived on the set the day we were to shoot the scene that I believed would save the movie. And for the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears.

Since those around me had no knowledge of my history of Harvey, they were very surprised by my struggle that morning. It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then.

My mind understood that I had to do it, but my body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing. At that point, I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot. I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse. As you can imagine, this was not sexy, but it was the only way I could get through the scene.

By the time the filming of the movie was over, I was so emotionally distraught that I had to distance myself during the postproduction.

When Harvey saw the cut film, he said it was not good enough for a theatrical release and that he would send it straight to video.

This time Julie had to fight him without me and got him to agree to release the film in one movie theater in New York if we tested it to an audience and we scored at least an 80.

Less than 10 percent of films achieve that score on a first screening.

I didn’t go to the test. I anxiously awaited to receive the news. The film scored 85.

And again, I heard Harvey raged. In the lobby of a theater after the screening, he screamed at Julie. He balled up one of the scorecards and threw it at her. It bounced off her nose. Her partner, the film’s composer Elliot Goldenthal, stepped in, and Harvey physically threatened him.

Once he calmed down, I found the strength to call Harvey to ask him also to open the movie in a theater in Los Angeles, which made a total of two theaters. And without much ado, he gave me that. I have to say sometimes he was kind, fun and witty — and that was part of the problem: You just never knew which Harvey you were going to get.

Months later, in October 2002, this film, about my hero and inspiration — this Mexican artist who never truly got acknowledged in her time with her limp and her unibrow, this film that Harvey never wanted to do, gave him a box office success that no one could have predicted, and despite his lack of support, added six Academy Award nominations to his collection, including best actress.

Even though “Frida” eventually won him two Oscars, I still didn’t see any joy. He never offered me a starring role in a movie again. The films that I was obliged to do under my original deal with Miramax were all minor supporting roles.

Years later, when I ran into him at an event, he pulled me aside and told me he had stopped smoking and he had had a heart attack. He said he’d fallen in love and married Georgina Chapman, and that he was a changed man. Finally, he said to me: “You did well with ‘Frida’; we did a beautiful movie.”

I believed him. Harvey would never know how much those words meant to me. He also would never know how much he hurt me. I never showed Harvey how terrified I was of him. When I saw him socially, I’d smile and try to remember the good things about him, telling myself that I went to war and I won.

But why do so many of us, as female artists, have to go to war to tell our stories when we have so much to offer? Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to maintain our dignity?

I think it is because we, as women, have been devalued artistically to an indecent state, to the point where the film industry stopped making an effort to find out what female audiences wanted to see and what stories we wanted to tell.

According to a recent study, between 2007 and 2016, only 4 percent of directors were female and 80 percent of those got the chance to make only one film. In 2016, another study found, only 27 percent of words spoken in the biggest movies were spoken by women. And people wonder why you didn’t hear our voices sooner. I think the statistics are self-explanatory — our voices are not welcome.

Until there is equality in our industry, with men and women having the same value in every aspect of it, our community will continue to be a fertile ground for predators.

I am grateful for everyone who is listening to our experiences. I hope that adding my voice to the chorus of those who are finally speaking out will shed light on why it is so difficult, and why so many of us have waited so long. Men sexually harassed because they could. Women are talking today because, in this new era, we finally can.
source: nytimes.com
 
Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent
The blunt power of the gatekeeper is the ability to enforce not just artistic, but also financial, exile.
Brit Marling Oct 23, 2017

When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I thought of something my mother told me when I was a little girl. She said: To be a free woman, you have to be a financially independent woman. She wasn’t wrong. I studied economics in college and went to New York to become an investment banker. To be blunt, I wanted the freedom money can buy.

I had a sudden change of heart while working at Goldman Sachs as a summer analyst. I decided that if the world required me to sell the hours of my life in exchange for access to what had long ago been free—food, water, shelter—I wanted to at least be doing something that stirred my soul. This is, granted, a privileged position. But as a young woman that was the conclusion I came to.

I had discovered acting and filmmaking in college, and the more time I spent immersed in it, the more I liked the person I became. I listened more acutely. I was more empathic and imaginative. These are qualities that seemed to me to be culturally on the decline; our culture likes forward-thinking talkers who can turn a profit without feeling too much about who may suffer the consequences—usually poor people, people of color, and women. Acting felt like a noble pursuit and maybe even a small act of resistance.

Hollywood was, of course, a rude awakening to that kind of idealism. I quickly realized that a large portion of the town functioned inside a soft and sometimes literal trafficking or prostitution of young women (a commodity with an endless supply and an endless demand). The storytellers—the people with economic and artistic power—are, by and large, straight, white men. As of 2017, women make up only 23 percent of the Directors Guild of America and only 11 percent are people of color.

Straight, white men tend to tell stories from their perspective, as one naturally does, which means the women are generally underwritten. They don’t necessarily even need names; “Bikini Babe 2” and “Blonde 4” are parts I auditioned for. If the female characters are lucky enough to have names, they are usually designed only to ask the questions that prompt the lead male monologue, or they are quickly killed in service to advancing the plot.

Once, when I was standing in line for some open-call audition for a horror film, I remember catching my reflection in the mirror and realizing that I was dressed like a sex object. Every woman in line to audition for “Nurse” was, it seemed. We had all internalized on some level the idea that if we were going to be cast we’d better sell what was desired—not our artistry, not our imaginations—but our bodies.

It was around this time that I remember sitting in a casual gathering where a straight, white male activist said, “Our gender and race has all the power. So when you want to have sex with a woman you have to ask and get her verbal consent.” He continued, “If that woman is a person of color, she is oppressed by both her gender and her race and then you should really ask twice.” The literalism of his ratio was ridiculously reductive, and his declarative tone off-putting, but I appreciated that he was trying to articulate how complicated it is to negotiate the invisible forces of privilege and power inside sexual encounters. He was trying to help other young men understand why it can sometimes be hard for any woman to find and voice “no” within a culture that has taught her to mistrust herself, or to value herself through male approval.

I emerged from this period thinking about the power dynamics inside Hollywood. If auditioning for parts was largely about seeking male approval, and the stories themselves were narratives I didn’t always politically or morally agree with, then the only way for me to navigate Hollywood with more agency was to become a storyteller myself. That is an easy thing to say and a very hard thing to do. I stopped auditioning. I worked a day job and spent nights and weekends at the public library downtown reading screenwriting books. I did this for years. Eventually, I co-wrote and starred in two films and was very fortunate when they were programmed at Sundance in 2011.

I’m taking you through this brief history because I think it’s important to understanding that when Harvey Weinstein requested a meeting with me in 2014—when the industry had deemed I was legitimate fresh meat—I was, in some ways, in a slightly different position from many who had walked this gauntlet before me.

I, too, went to the meeting thinking that perhaps my entire life was about to change for the better. I, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man. I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?

It was clear that there was only one direction he wanted this encounter to go in, and that was sex or some version of an erotic exchange. I was able to gather myself together—a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat—and leave the room.

I later sat in my hotel room alone and wept. I wept because I had gone up the elevator when I knew better. I wept because I had let him touch my shoulders. I wept because at other times in my life, under other circumstances, I had not been able to leave.

At this point many women have come forward to tell their stories about being harassed or abused by Weinstein. All of them are courageous, including the women who could not find a way out. I think for me, I was able to leave Weinstein’s hotel room that day because I had entered as an actor but also as a writer/creator. Of those dual personas in me—actor and writer—it was the writer who stood up and walked out. Because the writer knew that even if this very powerful man never gave her a job in any of his films, even if he blacklisted her from other films, she could make her own work on her own terms and thus keep a roof over her head.

I’m telling this story because in the heat surrounding these brave admissions, it’s important to think about the economics of consent. Weinstein was a gatekeeper who could give actresses a career that would sustain their lives and the livelihood of their families. He could also give them fame, which is one of few ways for women to gain some semblance of power and voice inside a patriarchal world. They knew it. He knew it. Weinstein could also ensure that these women would never work again if they humiliated him. That’s not just artistic or emotional exile—that’s also economic exile.

It’s important, too, to keep in mind where this power imbalance comes from. In the U.S., women were only allowed to have credit cards in their own names as of 43 years ago. Men had a two-decade head start (the credit card was invented in 1950). In the 1960s a woman needed to bring a man along to cosign any credit application. It’s stunning how recently women were afforded no financial autonomy. This is, of course, connected to the fact that women didn’t have bodily autonomy either. A woman’s husband could beat her or have sex with her without her consent in this country with no real legal recourse until the 1970s.

For me, this all distills down to the following: The things that happen in hotel rooms and board rooms all over the world (and in every industry) between women seeking employment or trying to keep employment and men holding the power to grant it or take it away exist in a gray zone where words like “consent” cannot fully capture the complexity of the encounter. Because consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it. In many cases women do not have that power because their livelihood is in jeopardy and because they are the gender that is oppressed by a daily, invisible war waged against all that is feminine—women and humans who behave or dress or think or feel or look feminine.

It’s a powerful moment when courageous people begin speaking about how they have been harmed, which is a deeply difficult thing to do because it means wading through a swamp of shame you’ve been made to feel. I am inspired by them all. We should let their strength guide our way forward, which means beginning a much larger conversation about the role economic inequality often plays in r*pe culture.

Men hold most of the world’s wealth. In fact, just eight men own the same wealth as 3.6 billion people who make up the poorer half of humanity, the majority of whom, according to Oxfam, are women. As a gender whole, women are poor. This means that, in part, stopping sexual harassment and abuse will involve fighting for wage parity. This also means women and men in power need to turn around and hire more women, especially women of color, especially women who have not grown up with economic privilege.

Another important step forward would be for all of us to start telling and consuming different stories. If you don’t want to be a part of a culture in which sexual abuse and harassment are rampant, don’t buy a ticket to a film that promotes it. I am as guilty of this as anybody else; sometimes it’s nice to zone out to a film that’s a distraction of epic spectacle. But maybe it’s time to imagine more films that don’t use exploitation of female bodies or violence against female bodies as their selling points. Films with a gender balance and racial balance that better reflect the world we all actually live in. These are challenges I myself am trying to meet, as a series creator, and I have by no means closed the gap between what I aspire to and what I have achieved.

Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you’ve read, in the films you’ve seen, in the stories you’ve been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends. The real danger inside the present moment, then, would be for us all to separate the alleged deeds of Cosby, Ailes, O’Reilly, or Weinstein from a culture that continues to allow for dramatic imbalances of power. It’s not these bad men. Or that dirty industry. It’s this inhumane economic system of which we are all a part. As producers and as consumers. As storytellers and as listeners. As human beings. That’s a very uncomfortable truth to sit inside. But perhaps discomfort is what’s required to move in the direction of a humane world to which we would all freely give our consent.

source: theatlantic.com
 
I'm not that familiar with Brit, only recall a stunning Interview shoot, but she comes across as very level-headed. Still can't rationalise how someone like her, so articulate, witty, educated, ended up in Hollywood. Classic case of 'when bad things happens to good people.' I'm very intrigued by her observations and anecdotes, which strikes more of a chord with me. She's not merely recounting a horrific ordeal here, I think she's painting a picture which expand beyond just her world.

As for Salma Hayek, no comment, don't think my views will align with those of others on here.
 
These are both very, very good (along with Lupita's account that stands out in my mind), and I agree, it's really helpful how Brit tied her experience to the larger picture of inequity. I think she makes a strong case (and there are other strong cases, including the preservation of democracy) for why the wealth gap is unacceptable and needs to be fought as a first priority.
 
I think she makes a strong case (and there are other strong cases, including the preservation of democracy) for why the wealth gap is unacceptable and needs to be fought as a first priority.

Spent half the day reading Gail Collins' kindle copy on the lack of agency women had over finance. The idea seemed too archaic, hard to think it only changed in the 70s??? It may seem trivial to some but this form of legislation ultimately served as some form of catalyst to trap a lot of women into marriages, and possibly started the stigma of single parenting!
 
What I think is interesting (disturbing) is that women who remember don't talk about it--at least not to me. So much is kept in the shadows ... which is what's so great about this speaking out.

Harvey Weinstein's name is forever going to be associated with this, and of course he's got some very bad karma going--no telling how that will play out. He can't regain the power he once had. But the irrevocable injustice done to the women whose careers he derailed ... it hardly seems enough. Really makes you understand the appeal of public flogging ...
 
Spent half the day reading Gail Collins' kindle copy on the lack of agency women had over finance. The idea seemed too archaic, hard to think it only changed in the 70s???

In the year when I was born, women couldn't have bank accounts in their own name. Financial autonomy has been a hard-won state of affairs for women.
 
Here is Uma Thurman's sort of response to being asked about inappropriate behavior; she seems deeply, deeply angry (at something that happened to her, I assume) but has made the decision to wait until she is ready to fully speak

Here we go ...

Uma Thurman Accuses Weinstein of Sexual Assault and Claims Tarantino Almost Killed Her in Stunt Gone Wrong

Uma Thurman has finally come forward to speak out about her alleged experience with disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, accusing him of trying to force himself on her and exposing himself in hotel rooms.

Months after going viral for a tense interview in which she carefully declined to speak about Weinstein until she was “ready,” the 47-year-old actress told her story in an interview with Maureen Dowd published on The New York Times on Saturday.

She alleged Weinstein first whipped out his now infamous bathrobe during a meeting in his Paris hotel room during the afterglow of 1994’s Pulp Fiction. There, she claimed he led her down a hallway to a steam room, where she asked him “This is ridiculous, what are you doing?” before he ran out.

“I didn’t feel threatened,” she recalled. “I thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle.”

The first alleged “attack” happened at London’s Savoy hotel. “It was such a bat to the head,” she said of the alleged encounter, the exact date of which she did not give. “He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me.”

“He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me.”

The next day, she claimed Weinstein sent her a bouquet of yellow roses as a way to apologize. She returned to the hotel to confront him, this time taking with her a male friend for protection who waited downstairs as she went up to his room with his assistants.

“If you do what you did to me to other people you will lose your career, your reputation and your family, I promise you,” she said she told him. In response, she reportedly told her friend afterwards that he had threatened to destroy her career.

A rep for Weinstein told The Times, “She very well could have said this” in response to her threats to expose him. But the rep denied ever delivering an ultimatum about her career.

“Mr. Weinstein acknowledges making a pass at Ms. Thurman in England after misreading her signals in Paris,” the rep said in a statement to The Times, claiming that up until the Paris steam room, they had had “a flirtatious and fun working relationship” and that “he immediately apologized.”

Elsewhere in her chat, Thurman alleged that Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino — who worked closely with her and Weinstein on both projects — forced her to do a stunt in Kill Bill that left her neck “permanently damaged” and her knees “screwed-up.”

She alleged no sexual misconduct against Tarantino, but said the two fought for years before he finally provided Thurman with the footage of the crash.

Thurman also told The Times she felt guilty for all of Weinstein’s alleged victims who followed suit.

“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone,” she said, explaining how Kill Bill became a symbol of female empowerment. “All these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do. … I stand as both a person who was subjected to it and a person who was then also part of the cloud cover.”

A spokesperson for Weinstein said in a statement to PEOPLE that while Weinstein made “an awkward pass” at Thurman in the past, the producer denied ever physically assaulting the actress.

“We have pulled a number of images that demonstrate the strong relationship Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Thurman had had over the years and we wish the New York Times would have published them, the spokesperson said in a statement. “Mr. Weinstein acknowledges making an awkward pass 25 years ago at Ms. Thurman in England after misreading her signals, after a flirtatious exchange in Paris, for which he immediately apologized and deeply regrets.

“However, her claims about being physically assaulted are untrue,” the rep continued. “And this is the first time we have heard those details. There was no physical contact during Mr. Weinstein’s awkward pass and Mr. Weinstein is saddened and puzzled as to ‘why’ Ms. Thurman, someone he considers a colleague and a friend, waited 25 years to make these allegations public, noting that he and Ms. Thurman have shared a very close and mutually beneficial working relationship where they have made several very successful film projects together.”

“This is the first time we are hearing that she considered Mr. Weinstein an enemy and the pictures of their history tell a completely different story,” the rep said.

A representative for Thurman told PEOPLE, “The article speaks for itself.” Reps for Tarantino did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

The actress collaborated with Weinstein on seven movies, including her Oscar-nominated role in Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill series. Late last year, she hinted at misconduct claims in an Instagram post on Thanksgiving Day where she promised she would be speaking further soon.

“I am grateful today, to be alive, for all those I love, and for all those who have the courage to stand up for others,” she wrote on Instagram alongside a picture of herself in Kill Bill. “I said I was angry recently, and I have a few reasons, #metoo, in case you couldn’t tell by the look on my face. I feel it’s important to take your time, be fair, be exact, so… Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators – I’m glad it’s going slowly – You don’t deserve a bullet) -stay tuned.”

When asked about her thoughts on the sexual harassment allegations against him in October, the star was visibly upset as she declined to speak in that moment.

“I don’t have a tidy soundbite for you, because I have learned — I am not a child and I have learned that… when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself,” Thurman told Access Hollywood, carefully choosing her words. “So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry… and when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”

Weinstein, 65, has been accused of sexual misconduct by over 60 women including Cara Delevingne, Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow since The New York Times and The New Yorker documented decades of alleged sexual misconduct and sexual assault involving a number of women in detailed articles last fall.

A spokesperson for Weinstein previously told PEOPLE in a statement that “any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.”
people.com
 
Thank you very much for posting. I read the piece you posted and then read the original piece in the New York Times and I think what People makes of the story doesn't quite do it justice. So here's the original one from the NYT, I hope it's okay to post.

The article also contains said footage of the crash: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/this-is-why-uma-thurman-is-angry.html

Yes, Uma Thurman is mad.

She has been raped. She has been sexually assaulted. She has been mangled in hot steel. She has been betrayed and gaslighted by those she trusted.

And we’re not talking about her role as the blood-spattered bride in “Kill Bill.” We’re talking about a world that is just as cutthroat, amoral, vindictive and misogynistic as any Quentin Tarantino hellscape.

We’re talking about Hollywood, where even an avenging angel has a hard time getting respect, much less bloody satisfaction.

Playing foxy Mia Wallace in 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” and ferocious Beatrix Kiddo in “Kill Bill,” Volumes 1 (2003) and 2 (2004), Thurman was the lissome goddess in the creation myth of Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino. The Miramax troika was the ultimate in indie cool. A spellbound Tarantino often described his auteur-muse relationship with Thurman — who helped him conceive the idea of the bloody bride — as an Alfred Hitchcock-Ingrid Bergman legend. (With a foot fetish thrown in.) But beneath the glistening Oscar gold, there was a dark undercurrent that twisted the triangle.

“Pulp Fiction” made Weinstein rich and respected, and Thurman says he introduced her to President Barack Obama at a fund-raiser as the reason he had his house.

“The complicated feeling I have about Harvey is how bad I feel about all the women that were attacked after I was,” she told me one recent night, looking anguished in her elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side, as she vaped tobacco, sipped white wine and fed empty pizza boxes into the fireplace.

“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”

Thurman stresses that Creative Artists Agency, her former agency, was connected to Weinstein’s predatory behavior. It has since issued a public apology. “I stand as both a person who was subjected to it and a person who was then also part of the cloud cover, so that’s a super weird split to have,” she says.

She talks mordantly about “the power from ‘Pulp,’” and reminds me that it’s in the Library of Congress, part of the American narrative.

When asked about the scandal on the red carpet at the October premiere for her Broadway play, “The Parisian Woman,” an intrigue about a glamorous woman in President Trump’s Washington written by “House of Cards” creator Beau Willimon, she looked steely and said she was waiting to feel less angry before she talked about it.

“I used the word ‘anger’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth,” she says now. “I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”

By Thanksgiving, Thurman had begun to unsheathe her Hattori Hanzo, Instagramming a screen shot of her “roaring rampage of revenge” monologue and wishing everyone a happy holiday, “(Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators — I’m glad it’s going slowly — you don’t deserve a bullet) — stay tuned.”

Stretching out her lanky frame on a brown velvet couch in front of the fire, Thurman tells her story, with occasional interruptions from her 5-year-old daughter with her ex, financier Arpad Busson. Luna is in her pj’s, munching on a raw cucumber. Her two older kids with Ethan Hawke, Maya, an actress, and Levon, a high school student, also drop by.

In interviews over the years, Thurman has offered a Zen outlook — even when talking about her painful breakup from Hawke. (She had a brief first marriage to Gary Oldman.) Her hall features a large golden Buddha from her parents in Woodstock; her father, Robert Thurman, is a Buddhist professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia who thinks Uma is a reincarnated goddess.

But beneath that reserve and golden aura, she has learned to be a street fighter.

She says when she was 16, living in a studio apartment in Manhattan and starting her movie career, she went to a club one winter night and met an actor, nearly 20 years older, who coerced her afterward when they went to his Greenwich Village brownstone for a nightcap.

“I was ultimately compliant,” she remembers. “I tried to say no, I cried, I did everything I could do. He told me the door was locked but I never ran over and tried the knob. When I got home, I remember I stood in front of the mirror and I looked at my hands and I was so mad at them for not being bloody or bruised. Something like that tunes the dial one way or another, right? You become more compliant or less compliant, and I think I became less compliant.”

Thurman got to know Weinstein and his first wife, Eve, in the afterglow of “Pulp Fiction.” “I knew him pretty well before he attacked me,” she said. “He used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me. It possibly made me overlook warning signs. This was my champion. I was never any kind of studio darling. He had a chokehold on the type of films and directors that were right for me.”

Things soon went off-kilter in a meeting in his Paris hotel room. “It went right over my head,” she says. They were arguing about a script when the bathrobe came out.

“I didn’t feel threatened,” she recalls. “I thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle.”

He told her to follow him down a hall — there were always, she says, “vestibules within corridors within chambers” — so they could keep talking. “Then I followed him through a door and it was a steam room. And I was standing there in my full black leather outfit — boots, pants, jacket. And it was so hot and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, what are you doing?’ And he was getting very flustered and mad and he jumped up and ran out.”

The first “attack,” she says, came not long after in Weinstein’s suite at the Savoy Hotel in London. “It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”

She was staying in Fulham with her friend, Ilona Herman, Robert De Niro’s longtime makeup artist, who later worked with Thurman on “Kill Bill.”

“The next day to her house arrived a 26-inch-wide vulgar bunch of roses,” Thurman says. “They were yellow. And I opened the note like it was a soiled diaper and it just said, ‘You have great instincts.’” Then, she says, Weinstein’s assistants started calling again to talk about projects.

She thought she could confront him and clear it up, but she took Herman with her and asked Weinstein to meet her in the Savoy bar. The assistants had their own special choreography to lure actresses into the spider’s web and they pressured Thurman, putting Weinstein on the phone to again say it was a misunderstanding and “we have so many projects together.” Finally she agreed to go upstairs, while Herman waited on a settee outside the elevators.

Once the assistants vanished, Thurman says, she warned Weinstein, “If you do what you did to me to other people you will lose your career, your reputation and your family, I promise you.” Her memory of the incident abruptly stops there.

Through a representative, Weinstein, who is in therapy in Arizona, agreed that “she very well could have said this.”

Downstairs, Herman was getting nervous. “It seemed to take forever,” the friend told me. Finally, the elevator doors opened and Thurman walked out. “She was very disheveled and so upset and had this blank look,” Herman recalled. “Her eyes were crazy and she was totally out of control. I shoveled her into the taxi and we went home to my house. She was really shaking.” Herman said that when the actress was able to talk again, she revealed that Weinstein had threatened to derail her career.

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Through a spokesperson, Weinstein denied ever threatening her prospects and said that he thought she was “a brilliant actress.” He acknowledged her account of the episodes but said that up until the Paris steam room, they had had “a flirtatious and fun working relationship.”

“Mr. Weinstein acknowledges making a pass at Ms. Thurman in England after misreading her signals in Paris,” the statement said. “He immediately apologized.”

Thurman says that, even though she was in the middle of a run of Miramax projects, she privately regarded Weinstein as an enemy after that. One top Hollywood executive who knew them both said the work relationship continued but that basically, “She didn’t give him the time of day.”

Thurman says that she could tolerate the mogul in supervised environments and that she assumed she had “aged out of the window of his assault range.”

She attended the party he had in SoHo in September for Tarantino’s engagement to Daniella Pick, an Israeli singer. In response to queries about Thurman’s revelations, Weinstein sent along six pictures of chummy photos of the two of them at premieres and parties over the years.

And that brings us to “the Quentin of it all,” as Thurman calls it. The animosity between Weinstein and Thurman infected her creative partnership with Tarantino.

Married to Hawke and with a baby daughter and a son on the way, Thurman went to the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. She says Tarantino noticed after a dinner that she was skittish around Weinstein, which was a problem, since they were all about to make “Kill Bill.” She says she reminded Tarantino that she had already told him about the Savoy incident, but “he probably dismissed it like ‘Oh, poor Harvey, trying to get girls he can’t have,’ whatever he told himself, who knows?” But she reminded him again and “the penny dropped for him. He confronted Harvey.”

Later, by the pool under the Cypress trees at the luxurious Hotel du Cap, Thurman recalls, Weinstein said he was hurt and surprised by her accusations. She then firmly reiterated what happened in London. “At some point, his eyes changed and he went from aggressive to ashamed,” she says, and he offered her an apology with many of the sentiments he would trot out about 16 years later when the walls caved in.

“I just walked away stunned, like ‘O.K., well there’s my half-***ed apology,’” Thurman says.

Weinstein confirmed Friday that he apologized, an unusual admission from him, which spurred Thurman to wryly note, “His therapy must be working.”
 
2nd part of the story

Since the revelations about Weinstein became public last fall, Thurman has been reliving her encounters with him — and a gruesome episode on location for “Kill Bill” in Mexico made her feel as blindsided as the bride and as determined to get her due, no matter how long it took.

With four days left, after nine months of shooting the sadistic saga, Thurman was asked to do something that made her draw the line.

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

But she had been led to believe by a teamster, she says, that the car, which had been reconfigured from a stick shift to an automatic, might not be working that well.

She says she insisted that she didn’t feel comfortable operating the car and would prefer a stunt person to do it. Producers say they do not recall her objecting.

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thurman then shows me the footage that she says has taken her 15 years to get. “Solving my own Nancy Drew mystery,” she says.

It’s from the point of view of a camera mounted to the back of the Karmann Ghia. It’s frightening to watch Thurman wrestle with the car, as it drifts off the road and smashes into a palm tree, her contorted torso heaving helplessly until crew members appear in the frame to pull her out of the wreckage. Tarantino leans in and Thurman flashes a relieved smile when she realizes that she can briefly stand.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Even though their marriage was spiraling apart, Hawke immediately left the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to fly to his wife’s side.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he told me. He said he told Tarantino, “Hey, man, she is a great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”

Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.

“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”

(Tarantino aficionados spy an echo of Thurman’s crash in his 2007 movie, “Death Proof,” produced by Weinstein and starring Thurman’s stunt double, Zoë Bell. Young women, including a blond Rose McGowan, die in myriad ways, including by slamming into a windshield.)

As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.

“When they turned on me after the accident,” she says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”

Thurman says that in “Kill Bill,” Tarantino had done the honors with some of the sadistic flourishes himself, spitting in her face in the scene where Michael Madsen is seen on screen doing it and choking her with a chain in the scene where a teenager named Gogo is on screen doing it.

“Harvey assaulted me but that didn’t kill me,” she says. “What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?” She says she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.

“Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you ‘in love’ with you. It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.”
 
Harvey Weinstein Exclusive – His Ex-Wife’s New Life – By Her Best Friend

by Amy Iggulden | 19 hours ago

The dresses are the stuff of fairy tale and fantasy: delicate peach tulle embroidered with sparkling flowers, matched by cloud-like silk sleeves hovering over a black velvet sheath. Yet the reality behind last week’s much-anticipated Marchesa collection at New York Fashion Week is nothing short of a nightmare. For every single dress in the 50-strong range, released digitally last Wednesday and modelled by Karen Elson, was designed and created by Harvey Weinstein’s recently divorced wife, Georgina Chapman, in the weeks after she learned that her husband had repeatedly abused and allegedly raped scores of women. The designer behind Marchesa, the fashion house that has dressed women from Michelle Obama to the Duchess of Cambridge, and from Nicole Kidman to Jennifer Lopez, sought solace in her sketches as her husband’s behaviour over 30 years emerged in story after devastating story. The result is a collection of strikingly bold gowns that carry the hopes of Marchesa’s red-carpet revival.

Everything that you see here today Georgina sketched while she was out of the office and going through a very, very tough time,’ says Keren Craig, Georgina’s best friend, business partner and godmother
to Georgina and Harvey’s daughter. The trauma is still fresh, but to mark the label’s first New York Fashion Week since the scandal broke last October, Keren is ready to explain to Grazia how the Marchesa autumn/winter ’18 collection was created in the eye of the storm.

Surrounded by 17 new occasion dresses, Keren gestures around the NY hotel room as she says, ‘George was just sending sketches through. It was unbelievable. This collection is the result of that time. I feel emotional about it because I actually couldn’t believe how incredibly strong she was.

‘She threw herself into her work, she threw herself into protecting her kids. Marchesa is her life, it is her passion. You see it here: even though she was going through all that, these beautiful things have somehow come out of such a hard time.’

Keren and Georgina, both 41, have been best friends since they met as 18-year-olds at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Keren is emotional as she describes how the unfolding scandal – which saw up to 90 women accuse Weinstein of sexual assault and r*pe – threatened to engulf the label that they have spent 14 years building.

Recalling the moment she learned, as the friends showed off their bridal collection on 5 October, that Weinstein was a serial abuser who nevertheless denies r*pe, Keren says, ‘I felt incredible sadness, I was just thinking about Georgina and my god-daughter and their son and helping however I could. [But] there was nothing I could do.’

In fact, as textile designer and co-founder, she helped by holding the fort at the Marchesa studio while designer Georgina battled headlines and lawyers and extricated herself from her marriage of 10 years, with a settlement reported at $20m.

‘It was about getting to the office and making sure that everyone there knew that it was business as usual.’

At the height of the crisis, a jewellery deal fell through, but others stood by them. ‘All our core retailers came out in support. Neiman Marcus is a big supporter, and Saks. It means everything to us. We’ve worked hard at it and our customers are sticking with us.’ Marchesa also has a strong presence in the Middle East with a store in Dubai.

But for a brand that built its name on the red carpet, there is no doubt that these are uncertain times. Not a single big-name star has been seen in Marchesa since Weinstein was exposed and [Desperate Housewives star] Felicity Huffman has come forward to say she was pressured by Weinstein into wearing a Marchesa gown to collect her Golden Globe for Transamerica in 2006.

Keren is visibly shaken as she tries to formulate a response. ‘That was very difficult to read, and shocking,’ she says. ‘It was the first I’d heard about it. I remember the dress and I remember working with Felicity, she was absolutely lovely. So I was shocked... and very sad.’

The design duo seem to have accepted that their Hollywood red-carpet reign is over, for now. ‘In the future, I am sure you will see our dresses on the red carpet,’ says Keren, ‘but right now it’s time to step back from that. That’s always been a great marketing tool for us, but it’s not our core business.’ Indeed, Georgina herself hinted to Grazia that they are looking forward 
to taking the brand in a new direction, ‘We are looking forward to expanding our cocktails and separates, giving more versatility to our collections for our customers,’ she said in a statement.

Georgina and Keren founded Marchesa in 2004, and soared to success after Renée Zellweger wore a strapless crimson gown to the premiere of Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, produced by Weinstein (who later admitted to ‘maybe’ helping her choose Marchesa). Immediately, they faced claims that Georgina’s then-boyfriend – the decidedly unfashionable Weinstein – had not only bankrolled the label but had given it an unfair advantage. Keren, however, is at pains to insist that he has no financial connection to the business. ‘Harvey was helpful in the beginning. He helped us with meeting people, arranging contacts, [but] in terms of the business, he has not been involved.’

Did he ever make a financial investment? ‘No’. Does he have any remaining financial involvement? ‘No.’ Really? No shares, no stake? ‘None, nothing.’

Business aside, Keren obviously feels the Weinstein betrayal keenly. She was maid of honour at Georgina’s 2007 wedding to the 65-year-old movie producer, but will not go beyond saying, ‘I just feel immense sadness for the victims, for the women who have spoken out so bravely. I’m very glad he’s getting some help.’

Within days of the scandal, Georgina announced her decision to divorce. Did Keren ever have any inkling that Weinstein was even unfaithful? ‘Absolutely not. No. It was a total shock.’ Again she looks close to tears. ‘It was upsetting and my heart was broken for George.’

There was also speculation that Weinstein’s notoriously tough management style spilled over into Marchesa. Did Keren ever experience any Weinstein bullying? ‘No. I have not. Harvey was my best friend’s husband, it was a social relationship.’ She is adamant, however, that Weinstein’s ex-wife must not be counted on the list of abused women.

‘Georgina doesn’t see herself as a victim. That’s very important. She’s just trying to get on with her life. You’ve got to realise George is such a strong woman. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very hard time, but she’s quite inspirational.’

The friends are considering what kind of gesture to make in response to the grassroots #MeToo movement, and
 the #Time’sUp campaign, which raises funds for women to fight harassment.

‘We want to support them. We want to make a gesture. We need to properly process how it can be the most beneficial.’

Now, in terms of their business, the focus is firmly on their customers and taking the brand in a new direction. ‘We want the clothes to speak for themselves,’ says Keren. Whether these customers can separate the dreamlike Marchesa autumn/winter ’18 collection from the sex-abuse storm in which they were created holds the key to the brand’s future. But what is clear is that Georgina and Keren’s remarkable friendship will survive. Says Keren: ‘I just want her to know that I’m there for her, no matter what.’

Source: Graziadaily.co.uk
 
Lol , calling Georgina inspirational is a stretch . She has benefitted greatly from her husbands power.
 
Anna Wintour’s June Editor’s Letter: Georgina Chapman Breaks Her Silence
Before Georgina Chapman chose to break her silence to Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter, she spent a lot of time soul-searching, wondering whether she should do so or not. Just after the very serious allegations of harassment, abuse, and assault against her husband, Harvey Weinstein, first became known last October, they separated. She disappeared from the public eye, retreating to look after their two young children, and trying to create some semblance of normality in her working life at Marchesa, the fashion label she founded with her business partner and lifelong friend Keren Craig. But how does one ever even begin to cope? When I went to see Georgina not long after the news broke, she was near mute with shock, trying to process the emotions—anger, guilt, revulsion, fear—as well as grappling with the terrible wider human cost in all of this.

I’ve known Georgina for a long time. We first met back in 2004, when she and Keren were launching their label, and she was giddy with anticipation and excitement about the future. She was warm, funny, and extremely self-deprecating. Georgina is essentially quite old-fashioned, and just as she was always the good daughter—she is still very close to her family—she also became the good wife. She adored Harvey, but in the blink of an eye, she went from being in a seemingly happy marriage to looking back on a relationship that had become both bewildering and terrifying.

I am firmly convinced that Georgina had no idea about her husband’s behavior; blaming her for any of it, as too many have in our gladiatorial digital age, is wrong. I believe that one should not hold a person responsible for the actions of his or her partner. What Georgina should be receiving is our compassion and understanding. Just before we finished this issue, I met with her again. While still in turmoil, she was intent on doing her best for the children she loves so much, and ready for life as an independent woman. She could begin to see a future.

On the day in late February when I arrive at Georgina Chapman’s town house in the West Village to interview her, it’s unseasonably hot, nearly 80 degrees. I am ushered to the parlor floor, where, even though it feels like August outside, a fire is roaring away. As I wait, it suddenly dawns on me that I am sitting in Harvey Weinstein’s living room. He purchased the six-story house in 2006, the year before he married Chapman, and she has since put her stamp all over it: black floors and white rugs, chinoiserie, lots of gilt and glass, hydrangeas in a vase, a Jo Malone candle burning. On a console table are silver-framed photographs from happier times, mostly of the couple’s children: India and Dashiell, seven and five. All evidence of the original occupant would appear to have been scrubbed away—except for a large piece of art hanging in the hallway. At the bottom, it is signed, “For Harvey Weinstein.” The drawing is dominated by a large empty circle, next to which it reads, “The moon was here.”

I had been introduced to Chapman, dressed in a floor-length dark print dress, a couple of weeks earlier at the West Twenty-sixth Street atelier of the fashion company, Marchesa, that she co-owns with Keren Craig. That day, she struck me as hyperalert: flitting around, wide-eyed and nervous, uncomfortable in her skin—or lack of thereof, as it were. She mentioned, almost in passing, that she hadn’t been out in public in five months—not since the news broke in October of so many unbearably similar accusations by so many women of harassment, abuse, and r*pe perpetrated by her husband. When she appears today, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, ballerina flats, and an armful of gold bracelets, she is more relaxed, though there’s a gallows humor—a morbidity—firmly in place. When I mention the disturbingly warm weather, she laughs and says, “Think of all the poor plants that are going to spring out and then die.”

We head downstairs to the ground floor, where most of the living takes place: a big, casual, open space with lots of color, modern furniture, and surprising art. There’s a huge, elegant kitchen that looks out onto a backyard, and a TV room where Dash, on spring break, is sitting on a sectional, ensorcelled by some kind of electronic device. At 42, Chapman looks younger. Or is it that she seems younger? In photographs, she has often reminded me of Victoria Beckham—chiseled and somewhat brittle-looking. But, today, dressed so California-casual, her hair now long and blonde, with wide-set blue eyes and fine features, she looks more like a younger Michelle Pfeiffer. Though she is English to her core, using whilst and learnt in a thick, posh accent, she is more goofy than I had imagined. As we sit down to lunch—a simple spread of veal Milanese and eggplant parmigiana—she seems a bit flustered, unable to maintain a hostess facade for too long, or even to decide where I should sit.

Our meeting, in her soon-to-be ex–town house that her soon-to-be ex-husband recently sold, was meant to be the moment when Chapman would finally, publicly address for the first time what happened. The night before, she had called me fairly late, and I thought she was going to back out. She sounded worried, apologizing profusely, talking fast. She was not ready to address anything too difficult, did not feel prepared. I reassured her that we could talk about her life before Harvey or about Marchesa—which is exactly what we did at first.

Not long after the news broke, common wisdom had it that no actress would ever wear a Marchesa dress again, and no bride would ever walk down the aisle in a gown designed by Chapman. In January, she canceled the runway show for Marchesa’s fall 2018 collection, which fueled rumors that the brand was in trouble. But Chapman says she herself made the decision not to offer any clothes for awards season. “We didn’t feel it was appropriate given the situation,” she says. “All the women who have been hurt deserve dignity and respect, so I want to give it the time it deserves. It’s a time for mourning, really.” But she also has loyal supporters. “A lot of people reached out and said, ‘Let me wear something,’ ” and Scarlett Johansson picked a Marchesa gown to wear to May’s Met ball.

Fashion now is such a social business—so many parties, so much self-presentation. Turns out, Chapman has felt insecure and awkward at social functions for much of her life. She does not enjoy being the focus of attention, which is one of reasons she has a tendency to redirect focus onto others. As the actor David Oyelowo, her friend of 25 years, tells me, “It’s something she’s had to cultivate: the ability to try to fade into the background. That’s why, when she’s at a party, she spends a lot of time and energy making other people feel comfortable, listened to, important.”

As our lunch is winding down, I ask, almost in passing, if Chapman really hadn’t been out in five months; she seems to shrink before my eyes as her mouth goes dry. “I was so humiliated and so broken . . . that . . . I, I, I . . . didn’t think it was respectful to go out,” she says. “I thought, Who am I to be parading around with all of this going on? It’s still so very, very raw. I was walking up the stairs the other day and I stopped; it was like all the air had been punched out of my lungs.”

I ask if she’s been seeing a therapist. “I have,” she says. “At first I couldn’t, because I was too shocked. And I somehow felt that I didn’t deserve it. And then I realized: This has happened. I have to own it. I have to move forward.” She takes a long, deep breath. “There was a part of me that was terribly naive—clearly, so naive. I have moments of rage, I have moments of confusion, I have moments of disbelief! And I have moments when I just cry for my children. What are their lives going to be?” She has been crying through most of this, and now she breaks down into sobs loud enough that her assistant appears with a box of tissues. “What are people going to say to them?” She is crying so hard she has to take a moment. “It’s like, they love their dad. They love him.” It is almost unbearable to witness, this broken person in front of me. “I just can’t bear it for them!”

Chapman grabs a tissue and wipes her tears away—“I wasn’t prepared to say any of that!”—and lets out a deep, guttural laugh.

Things are less fraught when, two weeks later, I meet her at her office at Marchesa and she is surrounded by her team, easily smiling and engaging the world—or at least her world. One of the few working ateliers left in Manhattan, Marchesa is a surprisingly big operation, with about 80 employees, and sewing machines whirring away. Chapman is wearing black leather pants—leggings, really—with zippers at the backs of the ankles, an untucked white tuxedo shirt, and a pair of bedroom slippers studded with fake pearls. Her hair is pulled off her face with a band, and she’s absentmindedly eating from the bag of popcorn that’s sitting on her desk next to an achingly beautiful arrangement of pale-pink and white roses.

Keren Craig is in her office, along with a couple of other women on the design team, as they look at fabrics and swatches and mood boards in search of inspiration for the resort collection they are just beginning to work on. Craig is dressed much like Chapman was the day I first met her: long black floral-print dress to the floor, but with creeper boots, also studded with fake pearls. When I ask if they bedazzled their footwear together, they shout “No!” in unison and crack up laughing. “They came bedazzled,” says Craig. Chapman rolls her eyes. “We don’t have time to bedazzle our shoes, unfortunately.”

The two women met when they were seventeen, during what the British call a foundation course at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. After stints at different art colleges, in the early 2000s they were both living in London. Chapman was getting work doing music videos and, in one particularly odd job, making costumes for a female wrestler. “Crazy getups!” she says.

In 2004 Chapman and Craig rented a studio together and came up with the name Marchesa because Craig was enthralled with the book Infinite Variety, about the eccentric fin de siècle glamour-puss Marchesa Luisa Casati. Their initial idea was to create a loungewear company. Just weeks into this new venture, the two women were invited to a Louis Vuitton party in the English countryside, and, as Craig puts it, “We were like, Now that we’ve got this fashion label, we really ought to make ourselves something to wear.” They wound up seated at a table with Isabella Blow, who was so taken with Chapman’s dress that she borrowed it to wear to the Paris couture. Once Blow took them under her wing, they started to make real connections and then caught a series of lucky breaks: a sponsorship from Swarov-ski; advice from Jimmy Choo cofounder Tamara Mellon to focus on red-carpet dressing; meetings with powerful publicists and stylists like Nanci Ryder and Rachel Zoe.

By now, Chapman was dating Weinstein as she went back and forth between London, Los Angeles, and New York, and it did not hurt that he came to every Marchesa show, usually with a celebrity in tow. Marchesa managed to get a dress on Renée Zellweger for the premiere of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in London. “The next morning,” says Craig, “she was on the cover of every single British newspaper with a picture of our dress.” One day they got a call from Neiman Marcus with an offer they couldn’t refuse: to put Marchesa in multiple stores and help with production to create a diffusion line, which became Marchesa Notte. “In order to make that happen, I had to move to New York,” says Chapman. “I only meant to come for a few weeks, and then never left.”

When you ask about her fashion inspirations, Chapman cites John Galliano and Alexander McQueen—two of the most theatrical, outré designers imaginable—but there is nothing even remotely edgy about what she does. She is unapologetically romantic, clinging to a decidedly unfeminist ideal that there is no happier moment in a woman’s life than when she finally finds that perfect dress. As one fashion insider puts it, “Georgina puts pretty girls in pretty dresses—and there’s value in that.” And Chapman has no illusions of being avant-garde. She describes Marchesa dresses as “keepsakes,” to be worn “lots of times” and then hopefully handed down to a daughter. “We’re not doing disposable fashion,” she says. “We treat each dress like a piece of jewelry, an entity unto itself, with its own journey. It’s not just one in a queue.”

That being said, they do have bestsellers and perennial favorites. I ask Chapman about price-point sweet spots. “It really depends,” she says. “One of the gowns we did last season was nearly $13,000, and we couldn’t stop selling it. And then there’s an evening gown we make a version of every year that sells for around $4,995.” Chapman runs down the hall, grabs one, and dangles it in front of me. “It’s quite sexy. You’ve got a corset, it’s off the shoulder, you get some drama around the neck with these feathers, it nips you at the waist, gives you a bosom, and you get a bit of leg! When you get it out, you know you’re going to feel good in that dress.”

The formula has worked for them. As recently as 2016, actresses wore Marchesa more often than any other designer on the red carpet. As Christy Rilling, who fitted Michelle Obama into nearly every dress she wore as First Lady, says, “Their atelier is really special. And they’ve gotten better over the years. I’ve seen what they do for the Oscars—they really make magic happen.”

One of the criticisms that has been leveled at Marchesa is that they’d have been nothing without Harvey Weinstein, who, people have claimed, bullied stars into wearing his wife’s dresses. “They absolutely had a push from Harvey,” says Chapman’s friend the writer Neil Gaiman. “But you cannot hype something from nothing and make it last. And Harvey’s hyping worked because George is actually an artist. I’ve watched her at work and been impressed and fascinated. She has a vision, and she’s really good at it.”
 

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