Three days after the New York Times released a bombshell report detailing decades of his alleged sexual abuse, Harvey Weinstein has been fired from the eponymous production company that he helped found.
“In light of new information about misconduct by Harvey Weinstein that has emerged in the past few days, the directors of the Weinstein Company—Robert Weinstein, Lance Maerov, Richard Koenigsberg and Tarak Ben Ammar—have determined, and have informed Harvey Weinstein, that his employment with the Weinstein Company is terminated, effective immediately,” the company’s board said in a statement.
According to the Times:
In an interview on Sunday, Lance Maerov, one of the four remaining board members, said it has been brought to their attention that Mr. Weinstein violated the company’s code of conduct at some point in the past week. But he would not specify what the violation was. The statement announcing the firing said that the decision had been made “in light of new information about misconduct by Harvey Weinstein that has emerged in the past few days.”
There’s also been talk of changing the company’s name to something less toxic, sources told NBC News, though it seems that Harvey’s brother, Bob, is resistant to that idea.
The board was nearly double its current size when news of the alleged abuse broke on Thursday. On Friday, three of the board’s other members quit as the story gained traction, and Weinstein himself took an indefinite leave of absence.
Yesterday, his “advisor” Lisa Bloom resigned her position, a fourth board member quit, and several clients of the Weinstein Company threatened to pull their business if Weinstein remained involved, CNN reports.
Weinstein himself has released a series of statements vacillating wildly in tone and message, seemingly unable to determine whether he’s contrite or enraged. On the one hand, he said, he’s “trying to do better,” acknowledging that he “realized some time ago that I needed to be a better person.” On the other, he secured the services of the attorney Charles Harder and vowed to sue the Times, saying that the story was “saturated with false and defamatory evidence” based “mostly on hearsay accounts.”
Those accounts include those of eight women who say that Weinstein has behaved inappropriately toward them over the course of several decades, with his alleged antics including bathing in front of them, pressuring them into giving him massages or, in a particularly vivid case, forcing one woman to watch while he ejaculated into a potted plant.
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.