Ronan Farrow has come out with a second laundry list of sexual assault horrors allegedly inflicted by Harvey Weinstein. The initial accusations of masturbation and baths have officially swung over the past month from nausea to point-blank violence.
Annabella Sciorra of “The Sopranos” tells Farrow that she is still so traumatized by her rape twenty years ago that she was afraid to come forward when he interviewed her for his initial piece. She claims that in the nineties, Weinstein forced his way into her apartment, undressed, clamped her arms down on her bed and raped her. Years later, at the Cannes Film Festival, she said that Weinstein again walked into her hotel room in his underwear, and she had to call room service to save her. She tells Farrow to this day, she sleeps with a baseball bat near her bed.
Daryl Hannah also told Farrow that Weinstein literally chased her down, once to the point where she escaped out the back door and the second when she “barricaded herself in her room using furniture.” In one case, he simply barged into her hotel room.
“He had a key,” Hannah recalled. “He came through the living room and into the bedroom. He just burst in like a raging bull. And I know with every fibre of my being that if my male makeup artist was not in that room, things would not have gone well. It was scary.”
Both Sciorra and Hannah believe that their rejections had negatively impacted their careers. Sciorra says she couldn’t find work because, she says, executives told her “we heard you were difficult.”
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Even more overtly, Hannah said that after she told Harvey to “fuck off” when he asked to touch her breasts, she was immediately punished; hotel rooms and flights were cancelled. And she told “all the powers that be” about her incidents–including Quentin Tarantino, as she was promoting Kill Bill 2 at the time–and nobody did anything.
Not only do the two face career consequences, they say, but they are haunted by the fact that they’ll forever be publicly associated with sexual assault and Weinstein.
Tarantino has admitted to the New York Times that he was at least partially aware of what was going on but continued to make movies with Miramax and the Weinstein Company. That’s consistent with screenwriter Scott Rosenberg’s Facebook post earlier this month describing the glory days in the Miramax club in the nineties. He repeats throughout the post that “everybody fucking knew”–not maybe the full extent, but of Harvey’s “voracious rapacity...All couched in vague promises of potential movie roles”–yet chose the parties and golden career tickets instead. He wrote at the time that there would have been no one to tell:
But…
And this is as pathetic as it is true:
What would you have had us do?
Who were we to tell?
The authorities?
What authorities?
The press?
Harvey owned the press.
The Internet?
There was no Internet or reasonable facsimile thereof.
Should we have called the police?
And said what?
Should we have reached out to some fantasy Attorney General Of Movieland?
That didn’t exist.
Farrow writes that there are many more who still won’t go on the record, out of fear or desire not to be forever associated with harrowing deeply personal stories. Weinstein, they allege, highly influenced the tabloid press and would threaten smear campaigns.
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Or offer hush money. Rose McGowan received a $100,000 settlement after Weinstein assaulted her in 1997, but the agreement did not include a confidentiality clause, though she believes, like so many other accusers, that the settlement had gotten her blacklisted from Miramax. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Weinstein offered her another $1 million in late September–just before the floodgates opened–to sign an NDA. She refused, but Weinstein employees, past and present, are still bound by them.
