Farrow writes: "Annabella Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed."
Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein
By Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker
29 October 17
Annabella Sciorra, Daryl Hannah, and other women explain their struggles with going public.
n March, Annabella Sciorra, who received an Emmy nomination for her role in “The Sopranos,” agreed to talk with me for a story I was reporting about Harvey Weinstein. Speaking by phone, I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding the producer. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she said, with an air of what seemed to be studied nonchalance. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, in which thirteen women accused Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly.
“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life. . . .’ ” she said. “I really, really panicked,” she added. “I was shaking. And I just wanted to get off the phone.”
All told, more than fifty women have now levelled accusations against Weinstein, in accounts published by the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other outlets. But many other victims have continued to be reluctant to talk to me about their experiences, declining interview requests or initially agreeing to talk and then wavering. As more women have come forward, the costs of doing so have certainly shifted. But many still say that they face overwhelming pressures to stay silent, ranging from the spectre of career damage to fears about the life-altering consequences of being marked as sexual-assault victims. “Now when I go to a restaurant or to an event, people are going to know that this happened to me,” Sciorra said. “They’re gonna look at me and they’re gonna know. I’m an intensely private person, and this is the most unprivate thing you can do.”
The actress Daryl Hannah told me this week about two incidents that occurred, during the early aughts, in which Weinstein pounded on her hotel-room door until she, in one case, escaped out a back entrance. When it happened again the following day, she barricaded herself in her room using furniture. Another time, Weinstein asked her if he could touch her breasts. She believes that, after she refused, Weinstein retaliated against her professionally. “I am a private person, with a rule of speaking to the press only for professional reasons,” she told me. Hannah said that she had decided to speak publicly about her experiences for the first time, more than a decade after they occurred, because “I feel a moral obligation to support the women who have suffered much more egregious transgressions.” She, like many women who have come forward, still had doubts about the trade-offs she would have to make for speaking openly. “It’s one of those things your body has to adjust to. You get dragged into the gutter of nastiness and pettiness and shame and all of these things, and it sometimes seems healthier and wiser to just move on with your life and not allow yourself to be re-victimized.”
A woman who appeared anonymously in my previous article, alleging that Weinstein raped her while she worked for him, and who has chosen to remain nameless, told me that she has yet to tell even people close to her about the full extent of her allegation. “I want to be braver. I really do,” she told me. “I want to be able to put my name to this and talk through what happened, but I am surrounded by people who, the first thing they’ll do is read this article, and I’ll be working three desks from them, and they’ll know details of my life I haven’t even told my family.” For many women, this was the most difficult decision of their lives. Sciorra, too, still has doubts. “Even now, as I tell you, and have had all these women around saying it’s O.K.,” Sciorra told me, “I'm petrified again.”
Sallie Hofmeister, a spokesperson for Weinstein, issued a statement in response to the allegations by Sciorra and Hannah. “Mr. Weinstein unequivocally denies any allegations of non-consensual sex,” she said.
***
Sciorra first met Weinstein in the early nineties, when she was an emerging star after appearing in films such as “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” Her agent introduced them at an industry party in Los Angeles. Weinstein was friendly, she said, and gave her a ride home; they talked about their shared love of film. Several months later, when her friend Warren Leight was trying to get a romantic-comedy screenplay he’d written made, Sciorra called Weinstein about it. Weinstein said that he wanted to make the film, which was called “The Night We Never Met,” and to start filming with Sciorra in a leading role. He wanted her to start work immediately after she finished two back-to-back shoots she already had planned for that summer. “I said, ‘Harvey, I cannot do this right now. I need some time,’ ” she recalled. “That’s the first time he threatened to sue me.” (Sources close to Weinstein deny that he threatened to sue Sciorra.)
After Sciorra finished making “The Night We Never Met,” she said that she became ensconced in “this circle of Miramax,” referring to Weinstein’s studio, which was then gaining an increasingly dominant role in the industry. There were so many screenings and events and dinners, Sciorra said, that it was hard to imagine life outside of the Weinstein ecosystem. At one dinner, in New York, she recalled, “Harvey was there, and I got up to leave. And Harvey said, ‘Oh, I'll drop you off.’ Harvey had dropped me off before, so I didn’t really expect anything out of the ordinary—I expected just to be dropped off.” In the car, Weinstein said goodbye to Sciorra, and she went upstairs to her apartment. She was alone and getting ready for bed a few minutes later when she heard a knock on the door. “It wasn’t that late,” she said. “Like, it wasn’t the middle of the night, so I opened the door a crack to see who it was. And he pushed the door open.” She paused to collect herself. Weinstein, she continued, “walked in like it was his apartment, like he owned the place, and started unbuttoning his shirt. So it was very clear where he thought this was going to go. And I was in a nightgown. I didn’t have much on.” He circled the apartment; to Sciorra, it appeared that he was checking whether anyone else was there.
Sciorra told me that listening to a recording from 2015 that The New Yorker released earlier this month, in which Weinstein is heard demanding that a model enter his hotel room, “really triggered me.” Sciorra remembered Weinstein employing the same tactics as he cornered her, backing her into her bedroom. “Come here, come on, cut it out, what are you doing, come here,” she remembered him saying. She tried to be assertive. “This is not happening,” she told him. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”
Then Weinstein grabbed her, she said. “He shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me.” Sciorra struggled. “I kicked and I yelled,” she said, but Weinstein locked her arms over her head with one hand and forced sexual intercourse on her. “When he was done, he ejaculated on my leg, and on my nightgown.” It was a family heirloom, handed down from relatives in Italy and embroidered in white cotton. “He said, ‘I have impeccable timing,’ and then he said, ‘This is for you.’ ” Sciorra paused. “And then he attempted to perform oral sex on me. And I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me.” Sciorra said that her body started to shake violently. “I think, in a way, that’s what made him leave, because it looked like I was having a seizure or something.”
In the weeks and months that followed the alleged attack, Sciorra didn’t tell anyone about it. “Like most of these women, I was so ashamed of what happened,” she said. “And I fought. I fought. But still I was like, Why did I open that door? Who opens the door at that time of night? I was definitely embarrassed by it. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had fucked up.” She grew depressed and lost weight. Her father, unaware of the attack but concerned for her well-being, urged her to seek help, and she did see a therapist, but, she said, “I don’t even think I told the therapist. It’s pathetic.”
Sciorra never spoke to the police. Neither did the anonymous woman who alleged rape in the earlier New Yorker article, although two others did. The anonymous woman said that, although “I regret not being maybe stronger in the moment,” her fears that charging Weinstein publicly might change her life permanently were too great. “It’s hard to know. . . . It’s like choosing a different life path.”
Some of the obstacles that Sciorra and other women believed they faced were related to Weinstein’s power in the film industry. Sciorra said that she felt the impact on her livelihood almost immediately. “From 1992, I didn’t work again until 1995,” she said. “I just kept getting this pushback of ‘We heard you were difficult; we heard this or that.’ I think that that was the Harvey machine.” The actress Rosie Perez, a friend who was among the first to discuss Sciorra’s allegations with her, told me, “She was riding high, and then she started acting weird and getting reclusive. It made no sense. Why did this woman, who was so talented, and riding so high, doing hit after hit, then all of a sudden fall off the map? It hurts me as a fellow-actress to see her career not flourish the way it should have.”
Several years later, Sciorra did begin working again. Weinstein again pursued her with unwanted sexual advances, she said. In 1995, she was in London shooting “The Innocent Sleep,” which Weinstein did not produce. According to Sciorra, Weinstein began leaving her messages, demanding that she call him or that they meet at his hotel. “I don’t know how he found me,” she said. “I’d come home from work and there’d be a message that Harvey Weinstein had called. This went on and on.” He sent cars to her hotel to bring her to him, which she ignored. One night, he showed up at her room and began pounding on the door, she said. “For nights after, I couldn't sleep. I piled furniture in front of the door, like in the movies.” Finally, she pleaded with Matthew Vaughn, then a twenty-two-year-old producer on the film, and more recently a prominent director, to move her secretly to a different hotel. (Vaughn said that he recalled booking her a room elsewhere.)
Two years later, Sciorra appeared in the crime drama “Cop Land” as Liz Randone, the wife of a corrupt police officer. She said that she auditioned for the part without realizing at first that it was a Miramax film, and she learned that Weinstein’s company was involved only when she began contract negotiations. (A person close to Weinstein contested this, saying that the script had the studio’s name on it.) In May, 1997, shortly before the film’s release, she went to the Cannes Film Festival. When she checked into the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, in Antibes, France, a Miramax associate told her that Weinstein’s room would be next to hers. “My heart just sank,” Sciorra recalled. Early one morning, while she was still asleep, there was a knock on the door. Groggy, and thinking she must have forgotten about an early hair-and-makeup call, she opened the door. “There’s Harvey in his underwear, holding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape, a movie, in the other,” she recalled. “And it was horrific, because I'd been there before.” Sciorra said that she ran from Weinstein. “He was closing in really quickly, and I pressed all the call buttons for valet service and room service. I kept pressing all of them until someone showed up.” Weinstein retreated, she said, when hotel staff arrived.
Over time, Sciorra opened up to a small number of people. Perez said that she heard from an acquaintance about Weinstein’s behavior at the hotel in London and questioned Sciorra about what happened. Sciorra told Perez about the attack in her apartment, and Perez, who was sexually assaulted by a relative during her childhood, began crying. “I said, ‘Oh, Annabella, you’ve gotta go to the police.’ She said, ‘I can’t go to the police. He’s destroying my career.’ ”
***
Unlike Sciorra, Daryl Hannah, who is known for her roles in “Splash,” “Wall Street,” and many other films, told colleagues about what had happened to her. “I did tell people about it,” she told me. “And it didn’t matter.” Hannah first met Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival, in the early aughts, before she appeared in “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” which Weinstein produced. She was returning to her room at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the same hotel where Sciorra said Weinstein harassed her. She saw Weinstein, who was at a reception in the hotel bar nearby. He called her over, and told her that he loved her work. Then he asked for her room number so that he could call her to schedule a meeting.
“That seemed pretty normal to me, you know, how people talk in business, and I didn’t know his reputation or anything,” Hannah said. She was in her room, already in her pajamas and getting ready for bed, when the phone calls started. “It felt like it was too late to have a meeting. I didn’t want to answer.” Though she didn’t pick up, she guessed that it was Weinstein. “And then, shortly thereafter, the knocking on the door began,” she told me. “It was sort of incessant, and then it started turning into pounding on my door,” she said. She was certain that it was Weinstein—as she recalls, she saw him through the peephole in the door. The pounding became so frightening that Hannah, who was staying on the ground floor, left her room via an exterior door. She spent the night in her makeup artist’s room. The following evening, Hannah was in her room with the makeup artist, packing her things ahead of their departure the next morning, when the pounding on the door began again. “The knocking started again and again. And I was like, ‘Oh, shit,’ ” Hannah recalled. “We actually pushed a dresser in front of the door and just kind of huddled in the room.” The next morning, as they left, Weinstein was standing outside the hotel, and appeared, she felt, to be waiting for her. She left quickly and went to the airport.
Several years later, while she was promoting “Kill Bill: Volume 2,” Hannah was in Rome for the film’s Italian premičre. She and the rest of the cast were scheduled to depart the following morning on a private plane belonging to Miramax. The premičre was followed by a reception, after which Hannah was in her suite at the Hassler Roma hotel with another hair-and-makeup artist, Steeve Daviault. The two had changed into their pajamas and were sitting on Hannah’s bed with an order of room-service spaghetti, watching a Sophia Loren movie, when Weinstein entered the bedroom. “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.” Daviault remembered the incident vividly. “I was there to keep her safe,” he told me.
When Hannah asked Weinstein what he was doing, he became flustered and angry, she said. Weinstein demanded that she get dressed and attend a party downstairs. Hannah pointed out that no one had ever mentioned a party. Weinstein stormed out, and she quickly took off her glasses and pajamas, donned a dress, and headed downstairs. When she arrived at the reception room Weinstein had mentioned, it was “completely empty,” Hannah recalled. “And it wasn’t even like there had been a party there. I didn’t see drinks around.” As she turned to leave, Weinstein was standing by the elevator. Hannah asked him what was happening and Weinstein replied, “Are your tits real?” Then he asked if he could feel them. “I said, ‘No, you can’t!’ And then he said, ‘At least flash me, then.’ And I said, ‘Fuck off, Harvey.’ ” She took the elevator back to her room and went to sleep.
“I experienced instant repercussions,” she told me. The next morning, the Miramax private plane left without Hannah on it. Her flights for a trip to Cannes for the film’s French premičre were cancelled, as were her hotel room in Cannes and her hair-and-makeup artist for the festival. “I called everybody,” she recalled, including her manager, a producer on the film, and its director, Quentin Tarantino, who has since told the Times that he knew enough, from his years collaborating with Weinstein, to have done more to stop him, and regrets his failure to do so. “I called all the powers that be and told them what had happened,” Hannah said. “And that I thought that was the repercussion, you know, the backlash from my experience.”
“And it didn’t matter,” Hannah said. “I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”
Other women told me that Hannah’s fear of retaliation was well-founded. The actress Ellen Barkin told me that, though she was never a victim of Weinstein’s sexual advances, he frequently verbally abused her, calling her a “cunt” and “cunt bitch” during the filming of “Into the West,” which he produced. “The repercussions are real,” she said. “I was terrified Harvey was going to make it impossible to go back to work, with those tentacles of his.” She continued, “This fear of losing your career is not losing your ticket to a borrowed dress and earrings someone paid you to wear. It’s losing your ability to support yourself, to support your family, and this is fucking real whether you are the biggest movie star or the lowest-pay-grade assistant.”
***
Many of the women with allegations about Weinstein told me that the forces that kept them quiet continue to this day. Beginning in the early months of this year, Weinstein and his associates began calling women to determine who had spoken to the press. Three women who received those calls said that they were pressed for details about their communications with reporters. The calls nearly silenced them. In addition, Sciorra and several other individuals connected to the story received calls from a man they believed was working for Weinstein and posing as a journalist, who offered few details about himself and did not name any publication he was working for. “He said he was doing a piece about how movies have changed in the last thirty years, and I was like, ‘You fucker.’ ”
Sciorra and others said that Weinstein has a reputation for using the press to smear and intimidate people he sees as threats. “I’ve known now for a long time how powerful Harvey became, and how he owned a lot of journalists and gossip columnists,” Sciorra told me. Three sources with knowledge of the activities of Miramax Books corroborated some of Sciorra’s suspicions, saying that Weinstein would offer book deals to gossip columnists. The implication, the sources felt, was that he was trying to influence them. Weinstein’s reputation for manipulating the media created an atmosphere of paranoia. During one of our conversations, Sciorra said to me, “As I was talking to you, I got scared that it wasn’t really you.”
The power of the tabloid press to help silence women has been underscored in recent weeks. While there has been an enormous outpouring of support for those who have spoken out against Weinstein, there has also been a backlash. Asia Argento, an Italian actress who alleged, in the earlier >New Yorker story, that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her, and also described, in all its nuance, their ensuing relationship, which included consensual sex, told me that, when she decided to speak, she was knowingly sacrificing her reputation. “This will completely destroy me,” she predicted.
Since her story was made public, she has fled her native Italy, following public shaming there. The journalist Renato Farina wrote an article about her in the conservative daily Libero, titled “First they give it away, then they whine and pretend to repent.” In a radio interview, the paper’s editor, Vittorio Feltri, said that Argento should be thankful that Weinstein had forced oral sex on her. Some women joined the chorus, including the commentator Selvaggia Lucarelli. She suggested that it was not “legitimate” to raise an allegation twenty years after the fact.
“I knew, when I spoke up, that things would be difficult. That there would be some who would doubt me, mock me, even malign me. I knew this,” Argento told me this week. “But I was unprepared for the naked contempt, the unapologetically hateful public shaming and vilification I received in my own country. Much of it from women. Women! . . . It hurt me. Badly.”
Sciorra said that the attacks on Argento and other accusers reinforced her fears about speaking out, but they also finally made her believe that she had no choice but to do so. “The way they’re treating Asia, and the way they’re treating a lot of women, is so infuriating,” she said. The attempts to downplay the significance of Argento’s allegations made her realize the importance of her own story. “O.K., you want rape?” she said, addressing those commentators who questioned whether Argento’s experience qualified. “Here’s fucking rape.”
Virtually all the women I talked to who were struggling with whether to speak publicly said that advice from friends, loved ones, and colleagues was a deciding factor. Sciorra was one of several who told me that those they had consulted urged them to stay quiet. “I spoke with two people in the business who I’ve known for a while, and they were very clearly against me saying anything,” she told me. “And they were people I always really trusted and I respect. And they felt that no good could come out of it. Immediately, the response was ‘Stay as far away from this as possible.’ ”
Rosie Perez said that she urged Sciorra to speak by describing her own experience of going public about her assault. “I told her, ‘I used to tread water for years. It’s fucking exhausting, and maybe speaking out, that’s your lifeboat. Grab on and get out,’ ” Perez recalled. “I said, ‘Honey, the water never goes away. But, after I went public, it became a puddle and I built a bridge over it, and one day you’re gonna get there, too.’ ”
ne. Jeff Sessions 
en months. It took Richard Nixon four years to get himself tangled up with serious felonies. It took Ronald Reagan five years to sign off on arming the Contras in contravention of federal law. Hell, it was almost three years—and two special prosecutors—into Bill Clinton’s term before anybody was indicted with the remotest connection to whatever the Whitewater affair really was all about.
crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands has gathered outside the office of Robert Mueller in eager anticipation of the special counsel’s first arrest in the Russia probe.
