Ed Pilkington on Weinstein’s aggressive lawyer from earlier this month:

Last week, Rotunno reduced one of the two main accusers in the trial, who alleges she was raped by Weinstein in a New York hotel in 2013, to uncontrollable sobbing during a total of nine hours of relentless grilling over two days. On the first of those days, the presiding judge had to halt proceedings after the witness suffered a panic attack.

Rotunno had been firing questions at her like bullets, ending each query with a shotgun “Correct?” “You were manipulating Mr Weinstein so you’d get invited to fancy parties, correct?” “You wanted to benefit from the power, correct?” “You wanted to use his power, correct?”

The lawyer self-identifies as

More on Harvey Weinstein from the Guardian Live:

His lawyer decided it was a good time to troll everyone:

Donna Rotunno, Weinstein’s lead lawyer, has also been talking to reporters outside court, promising an appeal and saying of her client, in a remark which may prove controversial: “He took it like a man.”

Oh yes? Meaning what? He jumped on the prosecutors and raped them? He used his superior strength to overpower women and then terrorized them into staying silent? He tried to threaten reporters and publishers into staying silent?

Saying “the fight is not over”, the Chicago-based lawyer said: “It is absolutely horrible for me to watch my client be taken into custody. We don’t feel good

Harvey Weinstein found guilty.

The jury of seven men and five women at the New York supreme court took five days to reach their verdict. They found the defendant guilty of a criminal sex act in the first degree for forcing oral sex on the former Project Runway production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006.

The count carries a minimum prison sentence of five years and a maximum of up to 25 years.

The jury also convicted Weinstein of rape in the third degree. This relates to him raping a woman the Guardian is not naming, as her wishes for identification are not clear, in a New York hotel in 2013.

Weinstein was acquitted of three further charges, including the

Speaking of horrible dudes who should not be allowed out –

A woman comedian was booed and two attendees kicked out after they protested the appearance of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein at an event for young performers in lower Manhattan on Wednesday night.

Weinstein turned up with an entourage to watch Actor’s Hour, a monthly event “dedicated to artists” at the Downtime bar in the Lower East Side.

Weinstein was welcome, it was the people who objected to his presence who were not. Power and money always come out on top, it seems.

One comedian, Kelly Bachman, called him out in her act onstage, referring to him as “the elephant in the room” and “Freddy Krueger.”

“I didn’t know

As if in preparation for the new Brett Kavanaugh allegations, last week Terry Gross interviewed Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in the Times. Weinstein fought even more dirty than we knew. Men rape or assault women; women report it; men circle the wagons to punish women for reporting it; rinse and repeat.

Terry Gross: Harvey Weinstein created many obstacles to prevent women from revealing his alleged sexual misconduct and prevent reporters from investigating it. My guests, New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, were the first reporters to manage to get enough sources and documents to break the story. They tell how they did it in their new book “She Said.”

Harvey Weinstein turned himself in this morning.

Harvey Weinstein turned himself in to New York City detectives and appeared in court on Friday on charges that he raped one woman and forced another to perform oral sex, a watershed in a monthslong sex crimes investigation and in the #MeToo movement.

Around 7:30 a.m., Mr. Weinstein walked into a police station house in Lower Manhattan, flanked by several sex crimes detectives. Toting three large books under his right arm, he looked up without saying a word as a crush of reporters and onlookers yelled, “Harvey!”

…

He was fingerprinted and formally booked. Then about an hour later, he was led from the First Police Precinct in TriBeCa and taken to

The sale is off for now, boys.

The fire sale of the Weinstein Company hit a last-minute snag on Sunday, when Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, filed a lawsuit against the studio and its fraternal founders alleging that they repeatedly violated state and city laws barring gender discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual abuse and coercion.

Harvey and Bob were hoping to avoid bankruptcy.

But the final-stage talks came to a screeching halt on Sunday afternoon, according to the two people briefed on the process, as the investor group received word that Mr. Schneiderman was about to file a lawsuit based on an ongoing four-month investigation into the Weinstein Company’s internal dealings.

The lawsuit, which refers to Harvey Weinstein

So that’s pretty stunning:

Film director Peter Jackson has admitted to blacklisting actors Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino in response to a “smear campaign” orchestrated by accused sexual predator Harvey Weinstein.

“I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs,” Jackson said, referencing the production company Weinstein ran with his brother Bob. As a direct result, he said, both women fell out of the running for parts in his Lord of the Rings series.

“At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us. But in hindsight, I realize that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing. I now

The Times ran an immense piece Tuesday (really immense, it goes on for pages in the hard copy) on Harvey Weinstein’s complicity machine. Jaw-droppers abound. He had an elaborate web of people who threatened harm to any woman who dared try to report what he did to her. He befriended people high up in the Sleaze Media, who would pour sleaze on Weinstein’s victims. It’s bottomlessly disgusting.

Executives at Mr. Weinstein’s film companies who learned of allegations rarely took a stand, cowed by their volatile boss or worried about their careers. His brother and partner, Bob, participated in payoffs to women as far back as 1990. Some low-level assistants were pulled in: They compiled “bibles” that included hints on

Harvey Weinstein knew they were coming for him. He drew up a list of people to try to silence.

The Observer has gained access to a secret hitlist of almost 100 prominent individuals targeted by Harvey Weinstein in an extraordinary attempt to discover what they knew about sexual misconduct claims against him and whether they were intending to go public.

The previously undisclosed list contains a total of 91 actors, publicists, producers, financiers and others working in the film industry, all of whom Weinstein allegedly identified as part of a strategy to prevent accusers from going public with sexual misconduct claims against him.

The names, apparently drawn up by Weinstein himself, were distributed to a team hired by the

Here’s another jaw-dropper from Ronan Farrow.

In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in

Harvey Weinstein could have more problems than just the disappearance of his career.

The police in New York on Friday said that they have developed a strong criminal case against Harvey Weinstein after an actress’s claim that he raped her seven years ago.

Speaking at a news conference at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan, officials in the Police Department said they were gathering evidence with an eye toward preparing a warrant to arrest Mr. Weinstein, whose representatives have said is undergoing therapy outside of New York.

Undergoing therapy, forsooth, as if it were a medical problem as opposed to a moral one. He treated women with contempt, which is all too normal; “therapy” seems like an easy escape.

The claims

Mimi Kramer on Harvey Weinstein and all that.

I spend a lot of time reading about the Weinstein scandal. Like most women, I imagine, I’m fascinated by it and by everything that seems to be happening — and not happening — as a result of it. My interest probably derives from the two years I spent being sexually harassed by a married writer at The New Yorker. There’ve been some wonderful things written on the subject, not only the original exposés by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in The New York Times, and by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker, but also “think” pieces, mostly by women, that have made my heart soar: Rebecca Traister in The Cut, Lena

Emma Thompson talked to the BBC about Harvey Weinstein.

“One of the big problems in the system we have is that there are so many blind eyes and we can’t keep making the women to whom this happens responsible. They are the ones we have got to speak. Why?” she told Emily Maitlis.

She railed against the “conspiracy of silence” and described Weinstein as “the top of a very particular iceberg” in “a system of harassment and belittling and bullying and interference” and warned that there were many more like him in Hollywood.

Asked if she was a friend of Weinstein, who was credited with transforming the British film industry in the 1990s, she replied emphatically: “No, and that

Alicen Grey points out that Harvey Weinstein is no anomaly, he is the norm.

There seems to be this unspoken rule that if you want to be a successful man, you must use women—and if you want to be a successful woman, you must be used by men. Wait, no. Scratch that. It’s not unspoken. It’s actually pretty well-known and widely accepted. It’s a culture-wide joke that women get career promotions in exchange for sexual favors. There’s even a porn genre called the “casting couch” where women are given fake job offers as a bribe for sex. When this sexual coercion is framed as consensual–funny, even—we spit in the face of every woman who has ever known the terror

Harvey Weinstein wasn’t just a groper or rapist. He had a system.

A storyline stretching over 20 years with a rotating cast of actors, multiple locations across the US and Europe, a disciplined crew of assistants, producers and fixers, savvy dealmaking, and a publicity machine like no other.

But this was not The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, The King’s Speech or any other of his films that earned more than 300 Oscar nominations.

It was a shadow production, an inverted version of Hollywood that leveraged entertainment industry might into an alleged spree of sexual harassment and assaults, including rape, and into a methodical way of hushing it all up with payments, threats and non-disclosure agreements.

Facilitators

Here we foolishly thought Harvey Weinstein was at fault for three decades of (allegedly) sexually harassing and assaulting women, but it turns out it was Emma Thompson’s fault for not stopping him.

https://twitter.com/montie/status/918597392227880961… Read the rest

And this is interesting. Apparently Ronan Farrow took his story first to NBC and they said no thanks. Why? Pressure.

Video: Smart of @Maddow to press @RonanFarrow about why NBC didn't greenlight/support him pushing his Weinstein investigation #TTT pic.twitter.com/JApEs07xoL

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) October 11, 2017

… Read the rest

Harvey Weinstein as symbol of Hollywood sexism and misogyny.

It is the perverse, insistent, matter-of-factness of male sexual predation and assault — of men’s power over women — that haunts the revelations about Mr. Weinstein. This banality of abuse also haunts the American movie industry. Women helped build the industry, but it has long been a male-dominated enterprise that systematically treats women — as a class — as inferior to men. It is an industry with a history of sexually exploiting younger female performers and stamping expiration dates on older ones. It is an industry that consistently denies female directors employment and contemptuously treats the female audience as a niche, a problem, an afterthought.

Still. After all this time. Feminism … Read the rest