Nymphaea
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vogueOne morning in early April, Chapman texts me a photograph of a young girl in a very grown-up dress: It’s gray, with a wide skirt made of tulle and a silk corset, all of it covered with pink flowers. “Just found this picture of a dress I made when I was eleven! Things haven’t changed that much!!!”
Chapman was born and raised in Richmond, an affluent suburb on the Thames about eight miles from central London. Her father, Brian Chapman, was the founder of Percol, the first ground-coffee company on the shelves to bear the Fairtrade mark. Her mother, Caroline Wonfor, was a journalist who worked for Reader’s Digest for many years. She has a younger brother, Edward, who is the CEO of Marchesa, and even though their parents divorced when she was in her 20s, they are a very close-knit group. “My father is self-made,” says Chapman. “He came from a council estate, left school at sixteen, and he built his own company with an incredible work ethic. He’s a true entrepreneur, and he’s always been deeply involved with philanthropy, a forward-thinker that way.”
She admits she had a very awkward childhood. She was born with a hip defect, “which meant that I had terrible pigeon toes, so I couldn’t walk to the top of the street without falling over. I was incredibly clumsy, and it set me back at school socially. I was always that kid who was the last to be picked for any sport because I literally couldn’t do it.” She was also severely dyslexic, which went undiagnosed until she was eight. “I remember going to the library and everyone else could read and I couldn’t. I had terrible anxiety. In class when they would go around and everyone had to read . . . it was just torture.”
Some unholy combination of going to the Victoria and Albert Museum costume department at seven, seeing Princess Diana’s wedding on TV that same year, and being deeply envious of her Catholic cousins “going through all of their ceremonies in these beautiful white dresses” planted the seeds for her future. When Chapman was at boarding school—Saint David’s in Ashford, Surrey—she took up drawing and painting. Her roommate there was Andrea Remanda, now a songwriter living in Los Angeles. “Her side of the room looked like a bomb exploded,” Remanda says. “She had a Guns N’ Roses poster, and I was into Prince. When we were in prep—forced homework time after school—she would draw sketches of what we did during the day, and they were amazing. I still have them.”
Remanda spent a lot of time at Chapman’s parents’ house on weekends. “When we were sixteen we went clubbing one night, and she had bought a secondhand man’s blazer from Oxfam for 25 pence. She got out her sewing machine—I don’t even know how she found it in her crazy messy bedroom—and she did a few stitches and put it on, and I just couldn’t believe it! It’s my favorite outfit she’s ever worn. Everyone was like, Where did you get your dress? It looked like a Vivienne Westwood.”
Chapman was scouted by an agent when she was seventeen and modeled for a few years, but as she puts it, “It was very much to make ends meet. I had three jobs: I worked in a bar, I was working in a ski shop on Saturdays—a job I took because I could drink coffee and smoke cigarettes—and I was also waitressing. And I was a terrible waitress. I was so forgetful, I was clumsy, just the worst waitress ever.” Remanda tells me that Chapman did not love modeling. “Being scrutinized as you are in that industry—‘Too short for the catwalk!’ ‘You’ve got to lose weight!’—I don’t think she really wanted to be a part of all that.”
She was interested in acting, though, and when Chapman was eighteen, she took a train to Hull in northern England to check out the drama-studies department at a college there. The train broke down for three hours, and while she waited she got talking to another young, aspiring actor who was heading the same way for the same reason. It turned out to be Oyelowo, who would go on to play Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. “Well, anyone who has seen Georgina, the first thing that hits you like a ton of bricks is how beautiful she is, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice that,” he recalls. “But as we talked, I found her to be an interesting and deeply friendly person. She had none of that frostiness that could be associated with a model.”
Neither one of them wound up going to the drama school in Hull, but they’ve stayed friends. “I was part of a youth theater group at the National Theatre in London,” Oyelowo recalls, “and I invited George along to be part of it. She’s a wonderful actress. I remember clearly thinking that she had a very real career ahead of her had she wanted it.” A couple of years later, Chapman invited Oyelowo to an art exhibition at her college. “A lot of the drawings were of fashion, and her work really stood out,” he says. “I was blown away.” So much so that Oyelowo asked Chapman to make the costumes for The Love of the Nightingale, a play he was performing at the Edinburgh Festival. “And these costumes arrived, made from transparent material into which she’d sewn pieces of mirror to reflect the light. They were extraordinary. They upstaged everything else.”
One Friday afternoon in late March, I head back to Chapman’s town house for another interview over lunch, this one served by her daughter, India, playing waitress. Chapman’s mother, an elegant woman with silver hair in a shag cut, is visiting from London: She comes often these days and spends long stretches, helping out with India and Dash. “She’s such a happy-go-lucky person,” says Chapman, “so she always lifts the mood and the spirits.”
When the one-two punch of all of the allegations against Weinstein landed in early October—first the New York Times investigation, followed by the much more damning piece in The New Yorker a few days later—Chapman was in a kind of stupor. “I lost ten pounds in five days. I couldn’t keep food down.” I ask her how long it took for her to absorb the information. “About two days,” she says. “My head was spinning. And it was difficult because the first article was about a time long before I’d ever met him, so there was a minute where I couldn’t make an informed decision. And then the stories expanded and I realized that this wasn’t an isolated incident. And I knew that I needed to step away and take the kids out of here.”
She fled to Los Angeles with the children, while her partner, Craig, did her best to steady the ship. “Our friendship always comes first, so foremost, I was worried for Georgina,” Craig says. “Secondly, we have so many talented, loyal people who work for us, some who’ve been here for twelve, thirteen years, so my concern was to get to the office and get the collections out, so that people could be paid and pay their rents.”
Chapman eventually went to London to be with her parents, but first she took refuge with an old friend. “I kind of found myself in a first-responder capacity,” says Oyelowo. “My wife and I were right there with her two kids, and this catastrophe was unfolding in real time across the globe, literally your worst nightmare in terms of a marriage, in terms of the future of your kids and your business. And none of this was your own doing and yet you are entirely lumped into it. The thing that was the most difficult to witness was that she quite rightly took the stance of not going out there and defending herself, because there was just too much white noise and too much bile headed in her general direction. She felt, How dare I raise my head and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m suffering too?’ ”
Because of the scale of Weinstein’s abuse and manipulations—and the lengths he allegedly went to to cover them up—there is a widely held assumption of complicity on Chapman’s part. “She must have known” is what so many people say at dinner parties. “The thing that pains me,” says her friend the model and singer Karen Elson, “is that when anyone finds out that I know George, that’s the first thing they say. Like she is somehow responsible for his hideous behavior. When I say, ‘Well, actually she didn’t know,’ it becomes this other judgment: ‘How could she not have known?’ Or: ‘Well, that’s on her if she didn’t.’ It’s so complicated.”
It’s complicated, but it is also the oldest story in the book. Even Chapman points out that—putting aside the enormity of her situation—women are betrayed by their husbands every day because they turn out to be not the men their wives thought they were. “I don’t want to be viewed as a victim,” she says, “because I don’t think I am. I am a woman in a **** situation, but it’s not unique.”
Chapman first met Weinstein socially, at a party, and they began dating on and off. “I was living in England, and I had just come out of a relationship, so it was very slow.” Was it a good marriage? “That’s what makes this so incredibly painful: I had what I thought was a very happy marriage. I loved my life.” Asked if she was ever suspicious about his behavior, she says, “Absolutely not. Never.” For one thing, he traveled constantly. “And I’ve never been one of those people who obsesses about where someone is.”
It’s very difficult now for people to imagine that there was ever anything good about Harvey Weinstein. But the fact remains that before all of the horrifying revelations, most people thought Weinstein could be an ******* and a bully, but they didn’t think he was a monster. There is always that beauty-and-the-beast mystery: What does she see in him? When I ask Chapman what the initial attraction was, she says, “Well, he’s a wonderful father to my kids. But initially? He’s charismatic. He’s an incredibly bright, very learned man. And very charitable. He paid for a friend of mine’s mother, who had breast cancer, to go to a top doctor. He was amazing like that. He is amazing like that. That is the tough part of this . . . this black-and-white thing . . . life isn’t like that.” When I tell her that a friend of the couple’s told me that Weinstein gave Chapman confidence, she says, “Yes. Absolutely. He was a wonderful partner to me. He was a friend and a confidant and a supporter. Yes, he’s a big personality. . . . And . . . but . . . I don’t know. I wish I had the answers. But I don’t.”
When I ask the people who have known Chapman the longest what they thought of her marriage, the common thread is how surprised they were by it—but for very different reasons. “I first met him at a polo match,” says Remanda, “and I had no idea who he was. I know George very well, and she’d had, like, two boyfriends before Harvey. So my initial reaction was, Whoa. He’s older, he’s brash, he’s American. Who is he? We sat down and I think we laughed, belly-laughed, falling off our chairs, for two hours. I thought, She’s going to marry this guy.”
Oyelowo also vividly remembers the day he met Harvey. “I was in my car on Mulholland Drive, and I got a call from George. She said, ‘Come to Shutters on the Beach; I want you to meet my new boyfriend.’ George was there, and the very famous producer Harvey Weinstein was there, and I was still waiting for the boyfriend to emerge until it sort of became evident: Oh, this is who she meant! And I will be 100 percent honest with you: I was very skeptical. But as time went on, as they got married, had children, there was no way of denying that this was a genuine couple.’”
Last summer Chapman got to know Huma Abedin, a few months before the news of the allegations about Weinstein broke, during play dates between their sons. Now they are supertight. “We just . . . bonded,” Abedin says and lets out a dark laugh. “In allll kinds of ways. This particular club, ironically, it’s not such a small one: women who have had to endure it in such a public way, women like Georgina and me. People don’t feel sorry for us; you don’t get that empathy. People think you’re beautiful, you’re thin, you’re rich, you’re photographed on the red carpet, and you get stuck in this category. There’s so much more depth beyond all that with Georgina.”
Over the summer, Abedin came to see that depth. “You look at her from the outside, if you don’t know her, and you think, She’s perfect,” says Abedin. “She could be a model for the clothes she designs. But when you go to the house, she opens the door without any makeup on, and she’s stunning, and she’s funny and goofy with her children—who are clearly the most important people in her life. She’s at the stove making chicken fingers and French fries, and she’s one of the realest people I know. There’s nothing entitled about her. You believe she is someone who works really hard at being a good and present mom, and doing her job really well.”
A friend of Chapman’s told me that, because of the divorce, money, the kids, Georgina is in regular contact with Harvey. I ask her, “Is there anything you can say about his state of mind?” “Well,” she replies with a roll of the eyes, “not really. Clearly when I was married to him I didn’t know anything about his state of mind, so I’m probably not the best person to ask.”
Chapman’s close circle is rallying around her and hoping she will have a fresh start. “What I want for Georgina,” says Elson, “and it’s going to take time, and it’s impossible to come out unscathed, but let this be a moment in her life where she realizes that this is what made her. This is what made her a woman.” When I ask Chapman if there’s anything she can say about her finances, now much changed, and her future, she replies, “I’m just living moment to moment. Is it difficult? Of course. But one adjusts. Is it going to be for the worse? Maybe not.”
, their understanding and interpretation of nationalism is so mid 20th century.. she would definitely not have bothered to publish something if this woman happened to be of some other random nationality. 
