Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades

- . A longtime Democratic donor, he hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last year. He employed Malia Obama, the oldest daughter of former President Barack Obama, as an intern this year

- At Fox News, where the conservative icons Roger E. Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were accused of harassment, women have received payouts well into the millions of dollars. But most of the women involved in the Weinstein agreements collected between roughly $80,000 and $150,000, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

- It’s likely that women have recently felt increasingly emboldened to talk about their experiences because of the way the world has changed regarding issues of sex and power. These disclosures follow in the wake of stories alleging sexual misconduct by public figures, including Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, and Donald Trump. In October, 2016, a month before the election, a tape emerged of Trump telling a celebrity-news reporter, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” This past April, O’Reilly, a host at Fox News, was forced to resign after Fox was discovered to have paid five women millions of dollars in exchange for silence about their accusations of sexual harassment. Ailes, the former head of Fox News, resigned last July, after he was accused of sexual harassment. Cosby went on trial this summer, charged with drugging and sexually assaulting a woman. The trial ended with a hung jury....

- Many expressed guilt and regret about not having said or done more. They spoke about what they believed to be a culture of silence about sexual assault inside Miramax and the Weinstein Company and across the entertainment industry more broadly.

- Top Actresses Who Have Accused Harvey Weinstein of Sexual Harassment

Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades
By JODI KANTOR and MEGAN TWOHEY OCT. 5, 2017

Update: The Weinstein Company’s board has fired Harvey Weinstein after reports of sexual harassment complaints against him....

“There is a toxic environment for women at this company,” Ms. O’Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr. Weinstein.

An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company.

During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements.

In a statement to The Times on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Weinstein said: “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I’m trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.”

He added that he was working with therapists and planning to take a leave of absence to “deal with this issue head on.”....

Though Ms. O’Connor had been writing only about a two-year period, her memo echoed other women’s complaints. Mr. Weinstein required her to have casting discussions with aspiring actresses after they had private appointments in his hotel room, she said, her description matching those of other former employees. She suspected that she and other female Weinstein employees, she wrote, were being used to facilitate liaisons with “vulnerable women who hope he will get them work.”

The allegations piled up even as Mr. Weinstein helped define popular culture. He has collected six best-picture Oscars and turned out a number of touchstones, from the films “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Good Will Hunting” to the television show “Project Runway.” In public, he presents himself as a liberal lion, a champion of women and a winner of not just artistic but humanitarian awards....

In 2015, the year Ms. O’Connor wrote her memo, his company distributed “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about campus sexual assault. A longtime Democratic donor, he hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last year. He employed Malia Obama, the oldest daughter of former President Barack Obama, as an intern this year, and recently helped endow a faculty chair at Rutgers University in Gloria Steinem’s name. During the Sundance Film Festival in January, when Park City, Utah, held its version of nationwide women’s marches, Mr. Weinstein joined the parade....

Dozens of Mr. Weinstein’s former and current employees, from assistants to top executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while they worked for him. Only a handful said they ever confronted him.

Mr. Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employees of the Weinstein Company have contracts saying they will not criticize it or its leaders in a way that could harm its “business reputation” or “any employee’s personal reputation,” a recent document shows. And most of the women accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them.

Charles Harder, a lawyer representing Mr. Weinstein, said it was not unusual to enter into settlements to avoid lengthy and costly litigation. He added, “It’s not evidence of anything.”....

    I am a professional and have tried to be professional. I am not treated that way however. I am sexualized and diminished.
    — From Lauren O’Connor‘s memo

At Fox News, where the conservative icons Roger E. Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were accused of harassment, women have received payouts well into the millions of dollars. But most of the women involved in the Weinstein agreements collected between roughly $80,000 and $150,000, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

In the wake of Ms. O’Connor’s 2015 memo, some Weinstein Company board members and executives, including Mr. Weinstein’s brother and longtime partner, Bob, 62, were alarmed about the allegations, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the end, though, board members were assured there was no need to investigate. After reaching a settlement with Mr. Weinstein, Ms. O’Connor withdrew her complaint and thanked him for the career opportunity he had given her....

In interviews, eight women described varying behavior by Mr. Weinstein: appearing nearly or fully naked in front of them, requiring them to be present while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or initiating one himself. The women, typically in their early or middle 20s and hoping to get a toehold in the film industry, said he could switch course quickly — meetings and clipboards one moment, intimate comments the next....

Most women who told The Times that they experienced misconduct by Mr. Weinstein had never met one another. They range in age from early 20s to late 40s and live in different cities. Some said they did not report the behavior because there were no witnesses and they feared retaliation by Mr. Weinstein. Others said they felt embarrassed. But most confided in co-workers....
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html

From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories
Multiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.
By Ronan Farrow  October 10, 2017

In the course of a ten-month investigation, thirteen women interviewed said that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them....

Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The English Patient,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God.

For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would “crush” her. “I know he has crushed a lot of people before,” Argento said. “That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old; some of them are older—has never come out.”

Last week, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, a story that led to the resignation of four members of his company’s all-male board, and to Weinstein’s firing from the company....

Three women—among them Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans—told me that Weinstein raped them, allegations that include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex. Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015 and made public here for the first time, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.” Four of the women I interviewed cited encounters in which Weinstein exposed himself or masturbated in front of them....

Other employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout the companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way. Some employees said that they were enlisted in subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. A female executive with the company described how Weinstein assistants and others served as a “honeypot”—they would initially join a meeting, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman....

It’s likely that women have recently felt increasingly emboldened to talk about their experiences because of the way the world has changed regarding issues of sex and power. These disclosures follow in the wake of stories alleging sexual misconduct by public figures, including Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, and Donald Trump. In October, 2016, a month before the election, a tape emerged of Trump telling a celebrity-news reporter, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” This past April, O’Reilly, a host at Fox News, was forced to resign after Fox was discovered to have paid five women millions of dollars in exchange for silence about their accusations of sexual harassment. Ailes, the former head of Fox News, resigned last July, after he was accused of sexual harassment. Cosby went on trial this summer, charged with drugging and sexually assaulting a woman. The trial ended with a hung jury....

None of the former executives or assistants I spoke to quit because of the misconduct, but many expressed guilt and regret about not having said or done more. They spoke about what they believed to be a culture of silence about sexual assault inside Miramax and the Weinstein Company and across the entertainment industry more broadly.....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories 


Top Actresses Who Have Accused Harvey Weinstein of Sexual Harassment
By JACEY FORTIN OCT. 10, 2017

Days after a series of sexual harassment allegations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein were made public in a report in The New York Times on Thursday, women are still coming forward to tell their stories.

Many of the allegations are remarkably similar. Actresses and other employees in Mr. Weinstein’s orbit described being invited to a hotel room, finding the producer in a bathrobe and being urged to exchange massages, have sex or watch him masturbate.

The New Yorker published a report on Tuesday detailing allegations of sexual assault, including rape. In total, more than 20 women have now reportedly accused Mr. Weinstein of assault or harassment. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Weinstein has denied engaging in nonconsensual sex.

Many of the reported encounters occurred in the 1990s and involved women in their 20s who were just beginning to make names for themselves. Their stories share a common thread: fear that reporting the inappropriate behavior of a titan of the film industry could backfire and destroy their career and reputation....
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/us/harvey-weinstein-accusations.html


Child and Ritual Abuse Articles
https://ritualabuse.us

Articles by Neil Brick
http://neilbrick.com 

Child Abuse Wiki
http://childabusewiki.org

Horrific hazing ritual ended his life, Hazing - An Outside the Lines Investigation

A horrific hazing ritual ended his life, and his family's
By Joshua Rhett Miller September 16, 2016
Jordan Preavy had it all as a junior in high school after making the football team. But that dream quickly became a nightmare for the 16-year-old when he was sodomized during a hazing ritual.

Witnesses told police Preavy's head "snapped back and he looked pained," yelling "No!" and "Get off," as he was assaulted through his clothes with a broomstick by at least two older teammates in 2011.

Nearly a year later, just weeks after his 17th birthday, Preavy killed himself....

Preavy's parents are convinced the incident at Milton High School in Vermont contributed to his decision to take his own life. They're now suing the school district, alleging it failed to protect their son.

"It's the only thing that makes sense. Having that sexual abuse in front of his team devastated him. Devastated," Preavy's mother, Tracy Stopford, told the network.

ESPN reports that the school district has denied culpability in a court response to the lawsuit, claiming the broom handle did not break Preavy's clothing.

"It is not likely that Preavy killed himself because on one occasion an object was pressed against his clothing in the buttocks," the district argued....

Five men ranging in age from 18 to 20 were ultimately charged in connection with incidents at homes and at Milton High School in 2011 and 2012. They have pleaded guilty to various charges, the Associated Press reports.

Preavy's story was one of three investigated by ESPN, which identified 40 hazing incidents at US schools involving sodomy since 2011, including seven this year. The network also detailed the hazing of former Oak Hills, Calif., football player Josh Villegas and former McGill University football player D'Arcy McKeown....
http://nypost.com/2016/09/16/football-hazing-incident-caused-downward-spiral-felt-5-years-later/ 


Hazing - An Outside the Lines Investigation

A troubling trend is plaguing school athletic programs across the country: hazing incidents involving sodomy. Outside the Lines has found more than 40 such incidents since 2011, including seven so far this year.

The majority of these type of incidents likely never get reported, experts say, and no state or federal agency tracks them. A code of silence often prevents witnesses and victims from speaking out -- though some do.

These are the stories of three victims....

In these three cases, school administrators often minimized the events or were ill-equipped to investigate what happened. The results were long-lasting and traumatic: "I'm always looking over my shoulder," Josh Villegas says. "I'm always on edge."....

"It's become much more violent, sexually, since the internet," says psychologist Susan Lipkins, who focuses her work on hazing. She believes that kids have become desensitized to sexuality and see this form of hazing as a way to humiliate others. "And I think with each year it gets worse and worse." ....

What has to change? Lipkins says there needs to be greater awareness and accountability, so that victims feel more comfortable coming forward and going to the courts. "If we can't break the code of silence, we're not going to change things."....
http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/17507010/otl-investigation-trend-sodomy-hazing 


How to Avoid Being Mind Controlled at a Conference by Neil Brick – Presentation at the 2016 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference – August 2016
The information in this article was written with the help and research of several survivors and well-known, well-published therapists in the child abuse, ritual abuse and mind control fields over almost a twenty year period.  Participants of several ritual abuse conferences helped research the information in this article. 
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2016-conference/how-to-avoid-being-mind-controlled-at-a-conference/ 

The Urban Legends of Those Attacking Ritual Abuse Theories and the False Logic of False Memory Proponents and Their Occultist Supporters by Neil Brick – Presentation at the 2016 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2016-conference/the-urban-legends-of-those-attacking-ritual-abuse-theories/


Self-Esteem Loosens Mind Control by Wendy Hoffman – Survivorship Conference 2016
https://survivorship.org/self-esteem-loosens-mind-control-by-wendy-hoffman-survivorship-conference-2016/ 

Internal Keys to Safety by Alison Miller – Survivorship Conference 2016
https://survivorship.org/internal-keys-to-safety-by-alison-miller-survivorship-conference-2016/ 

Seeing and Breaking the Chains: Steps for Recognizing On-Going Abuse and How to Break Free by Arauna Morgan – Survivorship Conference 2013  https://survivorship.org/seeing-and-breaking-the-chains-steps-for-recognizing-on-going-abuse-and-how-to-break-free-by-arauna-morgan-survivorship-conference-2013/

Other Survivorship conference presentations are at:
https://survivorship.org/survivorship-ritual-abuse-and-child-abuse-conference-online-presentations/
 
Victims of sexual abuse find comfort at conference 18th annual sexual and ritual abuse conference was held Sunday  WINDSOR LOCKS, Connecticut (WWLP)

18th Annual Sexual and Ritual abuse conference was held Sunday. Severe sexual abuse and torture victims from all over the world gathered in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, to learn how to deal with their trauma. Survivor and organizer Neil Brick  told 22News, "This is a conference to educate people."

The conference is a safe haven for victims. "It validates their experience and unifies survivors," said Brick. He went on to tell  "A lot of people suffer child abuse, that's unfortunate that people do. So people can talk to others and realize they're not alone. They can learn about resources on the internet and books that can help them." http://wwlp.com/2016/08/14/victims-of-sexual-abuse-find-comfort-at-conference/