that went live at The New Yorker around 7:30 this morning.
The piece is titled Harvey Weinstein's Secret Settlements, and has the subheading of “The mogul used money from his brother and elaborate legal agreements to hide allegations of predation for decades.”
It is a long and very thorough article.
You will learns that Weinstein had one settlement paid from his brother Bob’s bank account to hide it from Mirimax and its parent company Disney.
You will learn that Weinstein had to make a settlement some 20 years ago that should have meant he would have had strictures that would have prevented him from continuing his gross behavior.
Let me address the last of these by quoting this long paragraph:
Zelda Perkins, a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, was one of the women involved in the sexual-harassment and assault settlement that was underwritten by Bob Weinstein. Even twenty years ago, when the settlement was signed, Perkins recognized that Weinstein was engaging in a pattern of behavior. She fought for—and obtained—requirements specifically intended to prevent Weinstein from continuing to victimize women. The settlement mandated that Weinstein receive treatment from a psychiatrist of Perkins’s choice and that Disney be notified of future harassment settlements made by him. Nonetheless, Weinstein’s misconduct continued, in secret, for decades. “What I want to talk about at this point is not what Harvey did,” Perkins told me. “It’s more about the system that protected him and that enabled him, because that’s the only thing that we can change. Money and power enabled, and the legal system has enabled. Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture,that’s our fault.”
As I read this story, I had on in the background MS-NBC,all of whose shows have been filled with the various tales of sexual misconduct dominating the news, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I am home recovering from (successful) elective surgery, an thus am listening and reading a lot online. I may be male, but I am having some very strong reactions to all this.
Farrow spends some time exploring the use of non-disclosure agreements in settlements for sexual issues, reminding us
The comedian Bill Cosby and the television personality Bill O’Reilly both repeatedly used secret settlements to resolve allegations of sexual misconduct. Last week, Congresswoman Jackie Speier disclosed that the House of Representatives had paid more than seventeen million dollars to settle two hundred and sixty claims of harassment over the past twenty years (a figure that includes sexual offenses as well as harassment based on race, age, or other factors).
Gloria Allred, who among others has represented accusers of Roy Moore (who is NOT entitled to be called Judge or Justice) and Donald Trump, is among those legal authorities who
stress that victims may actually prefer such agreements. Allred told me that her firm had represented “thousands” of people who have entered into confidential settlements and said, “some people don’t want their parents, their friends, members of their community to know.”
And yet, it is precisely such non-disclosure agreements that to my ind perpetuate the imbalance favoring the powerful men who thereby continue their patterns of sexual harassment and worse.
Let me back up to the beginning of the piece. It starts like this
On April 20, 2015, the Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez sat in an office in midtown Manhattan with an eighteen-page legal agreement in front of her. She had been advised by her attorney that signing the agreement was the best thing for her and her family. In exchange for a million-dollar payment from Harvey Weinstein, Gutierrez would agree never to talk publicly about an incident during which Weinstein groped her breasts and tried to stick his hand up her skirt.
Now consider these two paragraphs from when Farrow returns to this incident:
Gutierrez told me that she had grown up watching her Italian father,whom she described as a “Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde person,” beat her Filipina mother. When Gutierrez tried to intervene, she was beaten aswell. (Gutierrez’s father could not be reached for comment.) As an adolescent, Gutierrez became the caretaker of her family, supporting her mother and distracting her younger brother from the violence. “Because of trauma in my past, being touched for me was something that was very big,” she said. Her first concern, she said, was protecting other womenfrom violence. She only signed her secret settlement after her optionsfor criminal justice were shut down.
After Gutierrez contacted the police, Weinstein drew upon a network of high-powered defense lawyers, former law-enforcement officials, and private investigators who help the wealthy try to thwart criminali nvestigations. Unbeknownst to her, Weinstein’s attorneys hired the private intelligence firm K2, founded by the corporate-intelligence magnate Jules Kroll, and tasked its agents with insuring that the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, did not press charges against Weinstein. One of Weinstein’s defense lawyers, Elkan Abramowitz,whose clients include New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and who is a partner at the firm that formerly employed Vance, oversaw K2’s work. The intelligence firm hired Italian private investigators to dig up information on Gutierrez’s sexual history,according to three individuals with knowledge of its work. (A spokesperson for K2 said that the firm’s work in the Gutierrez case involved only online and public-records searches regarding her past.)
The use of a rape defendant’s prior sexual history in a criminal defense is now specifically banned by law in a number of jurisdiction. That this was a potential civil case makes that approach no less noxious. As it turns out, the so-called “dirt” was probably inaccurate, but imagine being in the position of Gutierrez when confront with the alternative of accepting the payout that could help support her family but which required her to sign the non-disclosure agreement versus the alternative of attempting to go to court against the massive forces that Weinstein would deploy.
People from New York County DA Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office questioned her as if they were attorneys representing Weinstein.
And then it gets worse. Please note the name of the prominent attorney in the second of the next two paragraphs, which will be my final selection from tbis powerful piece:
Before and after the D.A.’s decision not to press charges, several of Weinstein’s attorneys made donations to Cyrus Vance’s campaigns. Alltold, Abramowitz, who presented the K2 dossier to the D.A.’s office, has contributed $26,450 to Vance since 2008. In an interview, Abramowitz said that the donations were appropriate. “Cy and I were friends and partners long before Harvey Weinstein came into my life,” Abramowitz told me. “My contributions to his campaign were based on my belief that he is a solid choice for District Attorney.”
David Boies, another member of Weinstein’s legal team, donated ten thousand dollars to Vance’s reëlection campaign in the months following Vance’s decision not to press charges. “The idea that my contributionst o Cy Vance’s campaign had any relationship to that investigation, I think, is absurd,” Boies told me, adding that he had a close relationship with Vance but never called him about the Gutierrez case. Boies argued that Vance’s office had made a reasonable decision and accused Gutierrez of engaging in prostitution in Italy. “There were transcripts of Italian proceedings where it was described how for years she had performed various sexual acts for various specified amounts of money,” Boies told me.
It now looks like Weinstein may face criminal charges in NYC for his sexual shenanigans there. To which I say simply, “GOOD!” Although I might add that in his case it is long overdue, considering a now documented history of over 2 decades of being a sexual predator from a position power.
Read the Farrow piece. But read it as not just about Weinstein, because it is not. The problem exists in politics, in restaurants, in business (particularly on Wall Street as Stephanie Ruhle recounted some of the experiences of her 15 years at Deutches Bank and Mika Brzezinski said today she has a lifetime of such experiences that she may share.
Non-disclosure agreements, even with massive settlements, do not address the problem: some men are so wealthy, or in a position to use corporate (or in the case of Congress public) resources that they feel no financial pain, and like the bankers who almost destroyed the world-wide financial system a decade back are thus in a situation of moral hazard with no real consequences for them and thus no deterrence to them or to others who see them get away with horrid behavior.
Again, read the Farrow piece. It should be an essential part of our further discussions.