‘Weinstein: The Inside Story’ aired on Thursday night in the U.K. and featured interviews with numerous women who have made allegations against the disgraced producer.
Four days before the biggest film event on the planet, the BBC aired the second of two documentaries from the U.K. about the Oscars’ former all-conquering king, Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein: The Inside Story, which will be broadcast Friday on PBS, landed a week after Channel 4’s similar doc, Working With Weinstein, and tracked the disgraced mogul’s rise from music promoter to movie mogul, interviewing a selection of the women he encountered along the way who have now made allegations of sexual assault or harassment against him.
Katherine Kendall, Paulo Wachowiak, Sean Young, Jessica Barth, Zelda Perkins, Zoe Brock and Kardian Noble — all of whom have made accusations — were interviewed in front of the camera, detailing their individual experiences, while Ronan Farrow, Megan Twohey and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters, journalists who have all been involved in investigating the producer, added their experiences and thoughts.
Kendall described how Weinstein had exposed himself to the actress in his apartment in 1993. When she rejected his requests for a massage, she claimed he told her, “If you won’t let me touch you, will you at least lift up your shirt and show me your tits?” Kendall managed to leave, but said she didn’t tell anyone about what had happened because she was “scared” of the producer’s powers.
Young, who starred in 1982’s Blade Runner, also claimed that Weinstein exposed himself to her, this time while making the film Love Crimes in 1992. The actress claimed that she told him, “You know, Harvey, I really don’t think you should be pulling that thing out, it’s not very pretty,” a response she said led to her being maligned by the filmmaker on future projects.
“The reason I didn’t get another movie with Harvey Weinstein was that I made him feel foolish,” said Young.
Model Zoe Brock claimed that she met Weinstein at a dinner in Cannes in 1998, and was enticed back to his room in the Hotel Du Cap under false pretenses that her friends would join them.
“And then Harvey walked in naked, and that’s sight!” said Brock, adding that he began trying to aggressively negotiate a massage. She described how she ran to the bathroom, alleging that Weinstein chased after her and began banging on the door. But when she screamed at him to “put your fucking clothes on, you naughty fucking boy!,” she said it stopped.
“He started to cry. He said, ‘You don’t like me because I’m fat,'” Brock claimed.
The most upsetting accusations came from British actress Kadian Noble, who said that she had first met a very complimentary Weinstein at a BAFTA party in London in 2014, and then later in Cannes, where he expressed further interest in working with her and asked her to show him her reel in his hotel room. It was here where she said things got violent.
“He gripped my arm in a really forceful way, led me into the bathroom and pulled my dress down, rubbing my breasts,” she claimed, alleging that he then began touching her genitals with his leg and later masturbated in front of her.
Weinstein: The Inside Story also spoke with Tina Brown, who edited Talk, Weinstein’s foray into magazine publishing, and claimed that she believed the publication was simply a way for him to surround himself with press protection. Brown described how he would commission articles from journalists who had information about him, and that she found out he was giving book deals to people who had never been published before.
“One was a stewardess on a Miramax plane, with no due date,” she said.
Later in the documentary, the focus switched to the extreme methods Weinstein used to suppress allegations as the net around him began to tighten.
Speaking under anonymity, an employee of intelligence firm K2 said that the company only took on Weinstein because of his status, and that its brief was to find information to undermine Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who had accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2015. The doc also alleged that a female employee of Israeli company Black Cube had forged a fake friendship with actress Rose McGowan and fed hours of taped recordings back to Weinstein.
Brit producer Paul Webster, who was head of production for Miramax between 1995 and 1997, admitted that he felt “complicit” in what had gone on during his time at the company.
“I think I did know, but chose to suppress it,” he said, adding that he had known enough to stop his assistant from going to the meet Weinstein in his hotel late at night. “I didn’t have the guts to do anything about it. The deal I made with the devil was to my advantage.”
Weinstein’s reps refuted all the claims — barring those of Brock’s — made in the documentary.
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