Washington: The list of accusers in producer Harvey Weinstein’s case runs long and one of his firm Miramax’s former assistant Rowena Chiu opened up about all that happened and why it took her about two decades to report about the former.
In a new op-ed published in the New York Times, Chiu revealed that the disgraced producer tried to rape her at the Venice Film Festival.
She with a colleague Zelda Perkins, reported Weinstein, and Chiu signed a restrictive nondisclosure agreement, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The victim first came into light as one of Weinstein’s accusers last month.
Chiu explained that she got a job of assisting the producer after she graduated from Oxford in 1998 and it was in this year that Weinstein attempted rape during the festival, according to her op-ed.
“After hours of fending off his chitchat, flattery, requests for massages and a bath, ultimately I found myself pushed back against the bed,” she wrote.
“I’d worn two pairs of tights for protection, and tried to appease him by taking one of them off and letting him massage me, but it hadn’t worked.
He’d taken off the other pair and I was terrified my underwear would be next. Harvey moved in: Please, he told me, just one thrust, and it will all be over,” she continued.
Chiu detailed that Perkins immediately confronted Weinstein after she got to know what happened.
“When we began attempts to report Harvey to his superiors or the police, multiple senior individuals acted to shut us down,” Chiu added.
“Some outright laughed in our faces. The message was always the same: Who would ever believe us over the most powerful man in Hollywood?” Chiu narrated as she went on to describe the difficulties.
After hiring lawyers, Chiu wrote that she and Perkins were forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement, which “prevented us from speaking to family and friends and made it extremely difficult to work with a therapist or a lawyer, or to aid a criminal investigation. Chillingly, it also required us to identify anyone we had already spoken to.”
She also accepted a settlement of more than USD 200,000.
“I lived in constant fear of Harvey’s abuse, control and power; that the story would come back to haunt me; that I would inadvertently slip up on my promise to never speak of this,” she added.
Describing the time around the #MeToo movement, Chiu wrote, “I was still unresolved about going public. But meeting others who’d had similar experiences created a seismic shift within me.”
Weinstein is also accused of forcing production assistant Mimi Haleyi for oral sex in 2006 and also raping a longtime lover in a Manhattan hotel in 2013.
He is set to go to trial in January 2020 for the charges, according to The Washington Post, cited People. Recently, his bid to move sex-trial out of Manhattan has been denied by the court.