Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes (2021) s01e03 Episode Script
The Assistants
How did you feel when I first called
you and started texting you?
Complete terror.
I remember hiding in my bathroom
in complete blind terror.
For 20 years, Rowena Chiu lived
in fear of talking
about her allegation that Harvey
Weinstein tried to rape her
at the Venice Film Festival,
when she was his assistant
in the late nineties.
He pushed me against the bed
and said he had never had
a Chinese girl before.
There are legal and cultural pressures
that keep people silent.
Part of my job as a journalist
is to identify those cases
where someone isn't ready to speak
and give them the space to make
that decision.
And it's a hard because I wanna
break the story desperately.
What is your advice for journalists
who are in that situation?
That's a really hard question
to answer.
I'm often asked why did it take you
such a long time to come forward
with your story?
It's just not something that I ever
spoke about to another human being.
I was born in the UK,
so I'm British-born Chinese.
I grew up in Berkshire.
My parents came to the UK
when they were university students,
and they met and married in London.
And so, my sister and I are
first-generation in the UK.
We're a small family,
we're pretty close,
but you know, we don't talk
about a lot of stuff openly.
Chinese families typically
don't complain,
we sort of get on and we work hard.
And Rowena did work hard,
and succeeded right off the bat.
She got her start as a theater kid.
I was President of Oxford University
Drama Society
and I produced and directed plays.
So theater was my first love.
When I left Oxford,
I fairly quickly transitioned over
to film and television.
Rowena was 24 years old when she
applied for a job as a junior assistant
at Miramax,
Weinstein's production company.
It was 1998 and Miramax was one
of the hottest studios in the world.
And the Oscar goes
to The English Patient.
Miramax was absolutely
a dream company for me.
It was a small
and feisty film company
that everybody wanted to join
because it was kinda arthouse
and commercial,
that kind of beautiful formula
that everyone was trying to crack.
So one day in July Rowena
headed to Soho
in central London, and walked
into the Miramax offices.
I climbed up three flights of stairs
and I met Zelda Perkins,
who was in the middle of a tiny room
crammed with towers of movie scripts.
Zelda Perkins was a senior assistant
at Miramax in London,
senior relatively speaking.
She was also only 24 years old.
She told me about the exhaustion,
and she told me about the travel.
That you get calls from New York
at three in the morning
to say Harvey's coming
over by Concorde.
Did she warn you at any point
about Harvey
and the potential for harassment?
She was very clear in her interview
that Harvey was very difficult
to deal with.
You didn't know when
he was gonna lose his temper,
there would be requests
for massages and inappropriate talk.
So she said that explicitly,
that there was gonna be some kind of
a sexual component to this difficulty?
Right.
It's another step to believing that
the boss that you work for
is a serial rapist
who holds dozens of women against
their will to beds and walls.
That's a very different scenario.
And obviously if you are going into
a situation where you believe
you're going to be raped,
nobody takes that job on.
So did you accept the job immediately
or did it require some contemplation?
Not at all, I accepted
the job immediately.
- In the room or later?
- In the room.
When I started with the job,
a courier by bike arrived
with a mobile phone.
Then I knew that I'd made it.
Back in those days, in '98,
a mobile phone was like a brick.
And so I took the thing out
with some reverence.
Thinking this is a powerful office.
Do you remember your first day
on the job?
I remember clearly
the first day meeting Harvey.
He had flown to London
for a screening of the latest cut
for Shakespeare in Love.
I know something of a woman
in a man's profession.
Harvey sat in the middle
of the second row
and he asked me
to sit directly in front of him.
There were other seats in the room,
it seemed ridiculous
that I was sitting right in front
of him, blocking his view,
so I got up to move,
and I immediately was yelled at.
In a pretty brutal and violent way.
It's only way later, 20 years later
that I saw that episode as a test.
Harvey enjoys people who push back,
just enough to stand up
for themselves,
but not so much so that they have
enough self-respect not to do the job.
It's complicated but a lot of people
who worked with Weinstein will say it.
Despite his aggression, he could
make people feel valued, special.
He definitely had a certain charm,
and the problem is that it's not
fashionable to talk about a predator
in the same sentence as charm.
But I think it's important
to understand that
because people don't understand
why we were there.
There was a lure and a charm
to working for Harvey.
He made you feel like anything
was possible.
You're super bright.
What do you want to be?
Do you want to be a writer,
a producer?
That is very compelling,
and I think the points at which
this was the most powerful
is when he's on his own with you.
One of the first times
Rowena was alone with Weinstein
was about two months
after she started the job.
She and Perkins had flown to Italy
to meet Weinstein
for the Venice Film Festival.
It was September 1998.
Rowena's days began around 10 AM,
dealing with the logistics around
Weinstein's meetings,
responding to his various requests
at any given moment.
It's interesting looking back.
I remember there was one conversation
about the stereotype
that Chinese people don't complain,
and Chinese people were discreet
and how he liked that.
Perkins, as the first,
more senior assistant,
would go to the fancy evening events
with Weinstein.
I, as the second assistant,
stayed back in the hotel room,
reading scripts
and preparing for Harvey and Zelda
to come back at around ten.
And I would being that sort
of second late night shift.
A shift that lasted until around 2 AM.
The first day went according
to schedule,
with Weinstein returning
to the suite around 10 PM.
The evening started with a speech
about how he's completely exhausted,
and that is an excuse to kinda disrobe
and take off his clothes
and, for him, get in a position
where he is more comfortable.
To anyone on the outside
this might seem crazy,
but within the tight circle around
Weinstein, it was so routine
it had become normalized.
Harvey was naked when Zelda
was in the room with him.
Harvey had Zelda take dictation
when he was in the nude,
he wandered around without
trousers with everybody.
Because you see it happening
with other assistants,
and you're new to the job,
and you're young,
you think, that's okay, he's far
too important to wear trousers.
After a while, he asked me what kind
of family I came from
and who I was dating
in a way that was personal.
It felt like a game
that I was being forced to play.
He talked about how,
because I was discreet,
he could tell me things
that I wouldn't share with others.
Rowena says Weinstein did make
advances on her that first day,
but she deflected them
and they got the work done.
She went back to her room to sleep
when her shift ended around 2 AM.
Tell me, to whatever extent
you're comfortable,
what happened
that subsequent night.
Similar to the first night,
he said how he was exhausted
by the event of that evening.
He started taking his clothes off,
he started asking me about
the scripts that I'd read.
I'm eager to explain which ones
I think are good
and which ones I think
are not good and why.
He says, you have a real feel
for story and character,
I can see you're gonna
be an amazing film producer.
I can give you anything you want
in this industry.
At that point he was already naked
and he said I had too many clothes on.
There were jokes among the assistants
about wearing extra clothes
when in a hotel room with Harvey
and I'm now infamous for wearing
two pairs of tights.
So he asked me could
he take off a pair of tights.
I must be hot in the two pairs
of tights.
What's going through your mind
as he's saying those things?
He's a big man
and he could get extremely angry,
so I felt it would be physically
dangerous for me
if I made him angry.
We're alone in a hotel room
pretty late at night.
So it could be that nobody
would hear the screams.
So I felt for me it was safer
to make excuses to leave,
and I say, I really think
it's getting late
and I think you're really tired and
you've gotta get up really early.
So I wasn't outrightly screaming
I'm gonna get the heck out of here,
but I was very clearly saying,
that I'm uncomfortable.
It sounds like any rational observer,
hearing you make those excuses,
would pick up on the fact that you were
saying no in the way that you could
under those circumstances.
It wasn't that I wasn't clear
about saying no.
I think if you look terrified
and you're trying to leave,
that's loud enough.
What happened next was, he talked
about how I was so young
and I was so new at this.
He was alluding to the fact that I had
little sexual experience
or little romantic experience
for that matter.
And that was a turn-on for him.
And then, he said he had never
had a Chinese girl before.
And my at that stage thinking,
he's so much bigger than me,
holy crap, I'm really in trouble,
I've gotta get out of here.
That's when he pushed me against
the bed and said,
just one thrust and it'll all be over.
At that point he had taken off
both pairs of tights.
I remember thinking, I only have my,
in British-English, knickers left on,
or only my underwear left and thinking,
there's only one barrier
to him getting what he wants.
He attempted to part my legs
and I tried to keep my knees together
and tried to roll off the bed
and talked again about how it was
getting really late and I had to go.
Eventually, Harvey grew tired
of the game
and I was able to leave the room.
As I was leaving the room he said
rather chillingly,
we'll pick this up tomorrow night.
What was going through your mind
as you left that room?
What am I gonna do to make sure
this doesn't happen tomorrow night?
The next day I showed up for my shift
in the middle of the morning.
Harvey was in Venice,
and Zelda and I are back in the hotel
room straightening things up,
sorting things out for the office.
That's when I start telling Zelda
about the events of the night before
and the weight of what I'm saying
means that we both end up
on the floor crying.
I was shattered because,
as far as I was concerned,
Rowena was my responsibility.
She was working directly for me.
I had put her in that room.
Rowena didn't know what to do.
They were in a foreign country,
on a relatively isolated island.
They decided they'd get back
to London then look for help.
In the meantime, Perkins worked
to protect Rowena.
Zelda was incredibly sacrificial
in the sense that she worked both
the early shift and the night shift
and made sure that I was never in
a hotel room alone with Harvey again.
What do you think would
have happened if there hadn't been
a Zelda Perkins there
working with you?
I don't like to think about that.
Once their duties at the Festival
concluded,
Rowena and Perkins
returned to London
and immediately started looking
for a lawyer.
There was no Google,
so you don't type into Google
sexual assault lawyer.
So Zelda did things like walk around
Soho and walk into offices
and ask for representation.
Eventually they found a law firm
willing to represent them,
then resigned, sending notice
of pending legal action to Weinstein.
The night Rowena
and Perkins resigned,
another young assistant was working
in the Miramax offices in New York.
Her name is Katrina Wolfe.
Harvey just came walking out,
kind of wandering around,
kinda looking a little lost
and sort of said out loud to nobody
in particular:
"Where's Steve Hutensky's office?"
Steve Hutensky was Wolfe's boss
and a lawyer at Miramax.
Hutensky was responsible for a lot
at Miramax,
people even called him
the cleaner-upper.
One of his duties was dealing
with employment agreements.
That included keeping records on
the employees in the London office.
Wolfe remembers Hutensky huddling
with Weinstein for about 45 minutes,
then calling out
to give her an assignment.
Steve asked me to pull the files, the
employment files for Zelda Perkins
and Rowena Chiu.
And shortly thereafter I remember
him saying,
I need to know who the best criminal
defense attorney in the UK is.
Not long after the resignation,
Rowena and Perkins' lawyer
suggested they enter into discussions
with Weinstein's lawyers.
We thought that the wheels
of justice would turn,
we thought there'd be a court case,
we thought there'd be jurors
saying this is a terrible thing
that happened.
I very naively presumed that we
would seek justice and find justice.
They headed to the UK law firm
representing Weinstein.
Everything felt shrouded in secrecy.
We weren't allowed to come to the
offices under normal business hours,
we were asked to come after 5 PM.
We weren't allowed a pen and paper
to write anything down
we weren't allowed to make
any phone calls,
we were not even given food,
and kept here for quite a long time.
We put a request out to say
we've been here a number of hours
and we're pretty hungry and they
sort of sent up one sandwich
which we split between us,
as a real indication of lack of care.
We were insignificant.
And of course what's even more telling
is that Zelda and I were kept
separately in a conference room,
and our lawyers
would come back and report to us
what Harvey's lawyers
had said to them.
The lawyers were landing
on one solution,
a financial settlement tied
to a nondisclosure agreement, an NDA.
We were horrified, and I still remember
Zelda's expression.
She was adamant that
we wouldn't take blood money.
Her revulsion was almost physical.
Our only motivation was to try
and stop Harvey's behavior,
that was all that we cared about,
so that this didn't happen
to somebody else again.
At the end of the day, both sets
of lawyers pushed us very hard
towards signing the settlement,
not only pushed us very hard,
they told us explicitly
that we had no other choice
but to sign the settlement agreement.
In some ways you can vilify
Harvey Weinstein.
He's the evil rapist, but he wasn't
the only monster in the room.
Rowena and Perkins
did fight for provisions
that they hoped would rein in
Weinstein's behavior.
Under the terms of the agreement
he was required to go to counseling.
Miramax had to hire
corporate handlers
that would address
harassment claims.
And if Weinstein brokered another
large harassment settlement,
he'd be fired.
It felt like the best they could do
in a situation where it seemed
increasingly clear
he was escaping
any real accountability.
I found it staggering that at no point
in the negotiations,
where there were at least
a dozen lawyers in the room,
nobody stuck up their hand
and said excuse me,
what are we doing here, guys?
Stop the clocks,
this shouldn't be happening.
What is happening here is wrong.
It's unethical, it's immoral.
Even our lawyers that we hired,
it felt to us as though everybody
acted to protect Harvey.
But very few people acted
to protect us
as young assistants, and also
as victims of a sexual assault.
They got 125 000 pounds each
and agreed never to speak about
the incident again,
not to friends, not to family,
not even to a therapist.
They weren't allowed to keep a full
copy of the contracts themselves.
Soon after the settlement,
Katrina Wolfe remembers being asked
to print new nondisclosure agreements,
and get all the assistants
and interns to sign them.
And she remembers people who knew
about the incident falling silent,
like one of Perkins' and Rowena's
bosses who'd heard the whole story.
It wasn't long after that that I was
sent over to the accounting office
to pick up a check.
I don't recall the amount.
But it was definitely six figures,
and it was to that person.
Meanwhile, Rowena
was coming to understand
yet another factor that keeps people
quiet, the professional consequences.
From about autumn 1998
to spring 1999,
I went and interviewed for every film
and television company in London,
and I didn't imagine that I would
have any difficulty
getting another entry-level position.
But, they would say, I see that you
worked for Harvey for a month or so
and that you've left his employment,
can you tell me more about that?
And I would say, I really can't talk
about that time of my employment.
By spring of the following year,
I was getting pretty desperate.
There was a clause in the contract
that said if she or Perkins ran
into this problem,
they could call up Steve Hutensky
and ask for help.
So I called Steve Hutensky
and it was painful.
It was painful and harrowing
and it brought up memories
that I didn't want it to.
Because there was an insistence that
I come back to work at Miramax
in some shape or form.
I was getting pulled back in.
She demanded a job that would never
put her in the same room as Weinstein,
all the way in Hong Kong, acquiring
Asian content for the US market.
Zelda told me, after you took that job,
he shouted at her when they crossed
paths at Cannes
at the Majestic Hotel,
that he had won.
That must have felt devastating.
It was horrifying and suffocating,
and they didn't give me
any other choice.
Much like with the NDA,
we didn't get another choice.
In Hong Kong, Rowena felt isolated.
It was a very surreal
and dark time.
She struggled with depression.
Working in Hong Kong was a tightening
noose on many different levels.
Having to work at Miramax,
knowing that the CEO is someone
who attempted to rape you
is a very difficult experience
in itself.
And then, there's almost a double
violation in being asked to keep silent
about something
that's incredibly traumatic,
and not being able to go to a therapist
or a doctor
or talk to one's own boyfriend
or one's own family.
I tried hard to make a new life
in Hong Kong,
but in the end the house of cards
comes tumbling down.
In Hong Kong, Rowena attempted
suicide twice.
After two years,
she left the film industry for good.
I had actually lost not only a career,
but also a passion,
that was really strangled in its cradle.
A few years later she moved
to the United States, got married,
and settled with her family
near San Francisco.
I went on to work for big corporations
that had HR departments
and glass offices and seemingly
transparent processes for complaint.
They weren't the wild west in the way
that the film industry was.
But no matter how much distance
Rowena put between herself
and her time at Miramax,
she lived in constant fear
that the story would resurface
and upend her life all over again.
I don't think there's a person who's
signed a settlement agreement
with Harvey Weinstein that doesn't
spend the rest of their lives
looking over their shoulder.
For 20 years I felt terrified that
somebody would find me
at my residence and they would ask
the question that I had been dreading,
which is, didn't you used to work
for Harvey Weinstein?
In October 2017, The New York Times
and The New Yorker broke
the first stories about Weinstein's
history of predation.
After the story broke, I felt terrified
about what had been set in motion.
I hadn't told my family, my husband,
my children, my parents,
and I wasn't ready.
And when Zelda Perkins agreed to talk
to me for a story for The New Yorker,
that's when Rowena found herself
wondering what to do
about calls from me
and other reporters.
I remember hiding in my bathroom
with my very young baby,
who was only six months old,
and speaking to Zelda
in hushed whispers on the phone
as though my house were bugged.
What were you afraid of?
When you take a leap
into the unknown
you have no idea what the
repercussions really are going to be.
No one can actually reassure you,
no journalist, no publicist,
no former colleague can really
reassure you
what is actually going to happen.
Once your story's out there,
you can't take it back.
For Rowena it took
two years of thinking,
but she finally concluded she couldn't
and shouldn't stay silent.
We thought that we had signed
a watertight agreement,
meaning that Harvey would not be able
to assault other women,
and it really wasn't anything
like that at all.
Imagine finding out then that there
had been other women
who had been subject to these types
of settlement agreements,
not only around our time,
before our time,
and most harrowingly, after our time.
What happened to me
shouldn't happen to other women.
What do you think the next step
should be?
There's still so many people
who have almost no power,
they either are not
in this country legally,
they work in an industry
where they're barely paid.
And if the MeToo movement
can become more inclusive,
that's where
I think we could really create
some kind of social change
that is worth applauding ourselves for.
Weinstein's attempt to suppress
disclosures about him
were sometimes enabled by the media.
That's something I got to see myself,
alongside my producer,
Rich McHugh
It was a couple of days before
we were gonna go to LA
to interview a woman with a credible
allegation of rape against Harvey.
And then the decision was handed
down to me, you are to stand down.
Done, we're done here.
In that moment I realized
the story was dead at NBC.
you and started texting you?
Complete terror.
I remember hiding in my bathroom
in complete blind terror.
For 20 years, Rowena Chiu lived
in fear of talking
about her allegation that Harvey
Weinstein tried to rape her
at the Venice Film Festival,
when she was his assistant
in the late nineties.
He pushed me against the bed
and said he had never had
a Chinese girl before.
There are legal and cultural pressures
that keep people silent.
Part of my job as a journalist
is to identify those cases
where someone isn't ready to speak
and give them the space to make
that decision.
And it's a hard because I wanna
break the story desperately.
What is your advice for journalists
who are in that situation?
That's a really hard question
to answer.
I'm often asked why did it take you
such a long time to come forward
with your story?
It's just not something that I ever
spoke about to another human being.
I was born in the UK,
so I'm British-born Chinese.
I grew up in Berkshire.
My parents came to the UK
when they were university students,
and they met and married in London.
And so, my sister and I are
first-generation in the UK.
We're a small family,
we're pretty close,
but you know, we don't talk
about a lot of stuff openly.
Chinese families typically
don't complain,
we sort of get on and we work hard.
And Rowena did work hard,
and succeeded right off the bat.
She got her start as a theater kid.
I was President of Oxford University
Drama Society
and I produced and directed plays.
So theater was my first love.
When I left Oxford,
I fairly quickly transitioned over
to film and television.
Rowena was 24 years old when she
applied for a job as a junior assistant
at Miramax,
Weinstein's production company.
It was 1998 and Miramax was one
of the hottest studios in the world.
And the Oscar goes
to The English Patient.
Miramax was absolutely
a dream company for me.
It was a small
and feisty film company
that everybody wanted to join
because it was kinda arthouse
and commercial,
that kind of beautiful formula
that everyone was trying to crack.
So one day in July Rowena
headed to Soho
in central London, and walked
into the Miramax offices.
I climbed up three flights of stairs
and I met Zelda Perkins,
who was in the middle of a tiny room
crammed with towers of movie scripts.
Zelda Perkins was a senior assistant
at Miramax in London,
senior relatively speaking.
She was also only 24 years old.
She told me about the exhaustion,
and she told me about the travel.
That you get calls from New York
at three in the morning
to say Harvey's coming
over by Concorde.
Did she warn you at any point
about Harvey
and the potential for harassment?
She was very clear in her interview
that Harvey was very difficult
to deal with.
You didn't know when
he was gonna lose his temper,
there would be requests
for massages and inappropriate talk.
So she said that explicitly,
that there was gonna be some kind of
a sexual component to this difficulty?
Right.
It's another step to believing that
the boss that you work for
is a serial rapist
who holds dozens of women against
their will to beds and walls.
That's a very different scenario.
And obviously if you are going into
a situation where you believe
you're going to be raped,
nobody takes that job on.
So did you accept the job immediately
or did it require some contemplation?
Not at all, I accepted
the job immediately.
- In the room or later?
- In the room.
When I started with the job,
a courier by bike arrived
with a mobile phone.
Then I knew that I'd made it.
Back in those days, in '98,
a mobile phone was like a brick.
And so I took the thing out
with some reverence.
Thinking this is a powerful office.
Do you remember your first day
on the job?
I remember clearly
the first day meeting Harvey.
He had flown to London
for a screening of the latest cut
for Shakespeare in Love.
I know something of a woman
in a man's profession.
Harvey sat in the middle
of the second row
and he asked me
to sit directly in front of him.
There were other seats in the room,
it seemed ridiculous
that I was sitting right in front
of him, blocking his view,
so I got up to move,
and I immediately was yelled at.
In a pretty brutal and violent way.
It's only way later, 20 years later
that I saw that episode as a test.
Harvey enjoys people who push back,
just enough to stand up
for themselves,
but not so much so that they have
enough self-respect not to do the job.
It's complicated but a lot of people
who worked with Weinstein will say it.
Despite his aggression, he could
make people feel valued, special.
He definitely had a certain charm,
and the problem is that it's not
fashionable to talk about a predator
in the same sentence as charm.
But I think it's important
to understand that
because people don't understand
why we were there.
There was a lure and a charm
to working for Harvey.
He made you feel like anything
was possible.
You're super bright.
What do you want to be?
Do you want to be a writer,
a producer?
That is very compelling,
and I think the points at which
this was the most powerful
is when he's on his own with you.
One of the first times
Rowena was alone with Weinstein
was about two months
after she started the job.
She and Perkins had flown to Italy
to meet Weinstein
for the Venice Film Festival.
It was September 1998.
Rowena's days began around 10 AM,
dealing with the logistics around
Weinstein's meetings,
responding to his various requests
at any given moment.
It's interesting looking back.
I remember there was one conversation
about the stereotype
that Chinese people don't complain,
and Chinese people were discreet
and how he liked that.
Perkins, as the first,
more senior assistant,
would go to the fancy evening events
with Weinstein.
I, as the second assistant,
stayed back in the hotel room,
reading scripts
and preparing for Harvey and Zelda
to come back at around ten.
And I would being that sort
of second late night shift.
A shift that lasted until around 2 AM.
The first day went according
to schedule,
with Weinstein returning
to the suite around 10 PM.
The evening started with a speech
about how he's completely exhausted,
and that is an excuse to kinda disrobe
and take off his clothes
and, for him, get in a position
where he is more comfortable.
To anyone on the outside
this might seem crazy,
but within the tight circle around
Weinstein, it was so routine
it had become normalized.
Harvey was naked when Zelda
was in the room with him.
Harvey had Zelda take dictation
when he was in the nude,
he wandered around without
trousers with everybody.
Because you see it happening
with other assistants,
and you're new to the job,
and you're young,
you think, that's okay, he's far
too important to wear trousers.
After a while, he asked me what kind
of family I came from
and who I was dating
in a way that was personal.
It felt like a game
that I was being forced to play.
He talked about how,
because I was discreet,
he could tell me things
that I wouldn't share with others.
Rowena says Weinstein did make
advances on her that first day,
but she deflected them
and they got the work done.
She went back to her room to sleep
when her shift ended around 2 AM.
Tell me, to whatever extent
you're comfortable,
what happened
that subsequent night.
Similar to the first night,
he said how he was exhausted
by the event of that evening.
He started taking his clothes off,
he started asking me about
the scripts that I'd read.
I'm eager to explain which ones
I think are good
and which ones I think
are not good and why.
He says, you have a real feel
for story and character,
I can see you're gonna
be an amazing film producer.
I can give you anything you want
in this industry.
At that point he was already naked
and he said I had too many clothes on.
There were jokes among the assistants
about wearing extra clothes
when in a hotel room with Harvey
and I'm now infamous for wearing
two pairs of tights.
So he asked me could
he take off a pair of tights.
I must be hot in the two pairs
of tights.
What's going through your mind
as he's saying those things?
He's a big man
and he could get extremely angry,
so I felt it would be physically
dangerous for me
if I made him angry.
We're alone in a hotel room
pretty late at night.
So it could be that nobody
would hear the screams.
So I felt for me it was safer
to make excuses to leave,
and I say, I really think
it's getting late
and I think you're really tired and
you've gotta get up really early.
So I wasn't outrightly screaming
I'm gonna get the heck out of here,
but I was very clearly saying,
that I'm uncomfortable.
It sounds like any rational observer,
hearing you make those excuses,
would pick up on the fact that you were
saying no in the way that you could
under those circumstances.
It wasn't that I wasn't clear
about saying no.
I think if you look terrified
and you're trying to leave,
that's loud enough.
What happened next was, he talked
about how I was so young
and I was so new at this.
He was alluding to the fact that I had
little sexual experience
or little romantic experience
for that matter.
And that was a turn-on for him.
And then, he said he had never
had a Chinese girl before.
And my at that stage thinking,
he's so much bigger than me,
holy crap, I'm really in trouble,
I've gotta get out of here.
That's when he pushed me against
the bed and said,
just one thrust and it'll all be over.
At that point he had taken off
both pairs of tights.
I remember thinking, I only have my,
in British-English, knickers left on,
or only my underwear left and thinking,
there's only one barrier
to him getting what he wants.
He attempted to part my legs
and I tried to keep my knees together
and tried to roll off the bed
and talked again about how it was
getting really late and I had to go.
Eventually, Harvey grew tired
of the game
and I was able to leave the room.
As I was leaving the room he said
rather chillingly,
we'll pick this up tomorrow night.
What was going through your mind
as you left that room?
What am I gonna do to make sure
this doesn't happen tomorrow night?
The next day I showed up for my shift
in the middle of the morning.
Harvey was in Venice,
and Zelda and I are back in the hotel
room straightening things up,
sorting things out for the office.
That's when I start telling Zelda
about the events of the night before
and the weight of what I'm saying
means that we both end up
on the floor crying.
I was shattered because,
as far as I was concerned,
Rowena was my responsibility.
She was working directly for me.
I had put her in that room.
Rowena didn't know what to do.
They were in a foreign country,
on a relatively isolated island.
They decided they'd get back
to London then look for help.
In the meantime, Perkins worked
to protect Rowena.
Zelda was incredibly sacrificial
in the sense that she worked both
the early shift and the night shift
and made sure that I was never in
a hotel room alone with Harvey again.
What do you think would
have happened if there hadn't been
a Zelda Perkins there
working with you?
I don't like to think about that.
Once their duties at the Festival
concluded,
Rowena and Perkins
returned to London
and immediately started looking
for a lawyer.
There was no Google,
so you don't type into Google
sexual assault lawyer.
So Zelda did things like walk around
Soho and walk into offices
and ask for representation.
Eventually they found a law firm
willing to represent them,
then resigned, sending notice
of pending legal action to Weinstein.
The night Rowena
and Perkins resigned,
another young assistant was working
in the Miramax offices in New York.
Her name is Katrina Wolfe.
Harvey just came walking out,
kind of wandering around,
kinda looking a little lost
and sort of said out loud to nobody
in particular:
"Where's Steve Hutensky's office?"
Steve Hutensky was Wolfe's boss
and a lawyer at Miramax.
Hutensky was responsible for a lot
at Miramax,
people even called him
the cleaner-upper.
One of his duties was dealing
with employment agreements.
That included keeping records on
the employees in the London office.
Wolfe remembers Hutensky huddling
with Weinstein for about 45 minutes,
then calling out
to give her an assignment.
Steve asked me to pull the files, the
employment files for Zelda Perkins
and Rowena Chiu.
And shortly thereafter I remember
him saying,
I need to know who the best criminal
defense attorney in the UK is.
Not long after the resignation,
Rowena and Perkins' lawyer
suggested they enter into discussions
with Weinstein's lawyers.
We thought that the wheels
of justice would turn,
we thought there'd be a court case,
we thought there'd be jurors
saying this is a terrible thing
that happened.
I very naively presumed that we
would seek justice and find justice.
They headed to the UK law firm
representing Weinstein.
Everything felt shrouded in secrecy.
We weren't allowed to come to the
offices under normal business hours,
we were asked to come after 5 PM.
We weren't allowed a pen and paper
to write anything down
we weren't allowed to make
any phone calls,
we were not even given food,
and kept here for quite a long time.
We put a request out to say
we've been here a number of hours
and we're pretty hungry and they
sort of sent up one sandwich
which we split between us,
as a real indication of lack of care.
We were insignificant.
And of course what's even more telling
is that Zelda and I were kept
separately in a conference room,
and our lawyers
would come back and report to us
what Harvey's lawyers
had said to them.
The lawyers were landing
on one solution,
a financial settlement tied
to a nondisclosure agreement, an NDA.
We were horrified, and I still remember
Zelda's expression.
She was adamant that
we wouldn't take blood money.
Her revulsion was almost physical.
Our only motivation was to try
and stop Harvey's behavior,
that was all that we cared about,
so that this didn't happen
to somebody else again.
At the end of the day, both sets
of lawyers pushed us very hard
towards signing the settlement,
not only pushed us very hard,
they told us explicitly
that we had no other choice
but to sign the settlement agreement.
In some ways you can vilify
Harvey Weinstein.
He's the evil rapist, but he wasn't
the only monster in the room.
Rowena and Perkins
did fight for provisions
that they hoped would rein in
Weinstein's behavior.
Under the terms of the agreement
he was required to go to counseling.
Miramax had to hire
corporate handlers
that would address
harassment claims.
And if Weinstein brokered another
large harassment settlement,
he'd be fired.
It felt like the best they could do
in a situation where it seemed
increasingly clear
he was escaping
any real accountability.
I found it staggering that at no point
in the negotiations,
where there were at least
a dozen lawyers in the room,
nobody stuck up their hand
and said excuse me,
what are we doing here, guys?
Stop the clocks,
this shouldn't be happening.
What is happening here is wrong.
It's unethical, it's immoral.
Even our lawyers that we hired,
it felt to us as though everybody
acted to protect Harvey.
But very few people acted
to protect us
as young assistants, and also
as victims of a sexual assault.
They got 125 000 pounds each
and agreed never to speak about
the incident again,
not to friends, not to family,
not even to a therapist.
They weren't allowed to keep a full
copy of the contracts themselves.
Soon after the settlement,
Katrina Wolfe remembers being asked
to print new nondisclosure agreements,
and get all the assistants
and interns to sign them.
And she remembers people who knew
about the incident falling silent,
like one of Perkins' and Rowena's
bosses who'd heard the whole story.
It wasn't long after that that I was
sent over to the accounting office
to pick up a check.
I don't recall the amount.
But it was definitely six figures,
and it was to that person.
Meanwhile, Rowena
was coming to understand
yet another factor that keeps people
quiet, the professional consequences.
From about autumn 1998
to spring 1999,
I went and interviewed for every film
and television company in London,
and I didn't imagine that I would
have any difficulty
getting another entry-level position.
But, they would say, I see that you
worked for Harvey for a month or so
and that you've left his employment,
can you tell me more about that?
And I would say, I really can't talk
about that time of my employment.
By spring of the following year,
I was getting pretty desperate.
There was a clause in the contract
that said if she or Perkins ran
into this problem,
they could call up Steve Hutensky
and ask for help.
So I called Steve Hutensky
and it was painful.
It was painful and harrowing
and it brought up memories
that I didn't want it to.
Because there was an insistence that
I come back to work at Miramax
in some shape or form.
I was getting pulled back in.
She demanded a job that would never
put her in the same room as Weinstein,
all the way in Hong Kong, acquiring
Asian content for the US market.
Zelda told me, after you took that job,
he shouted at her when they crossed
paths at Cannes
at the Majestic Hotel,
that he had won.
That must have felt devastating.
It was horrifying and suffocating,
and they didn't give me
any other choice.
Much like with the NDA,
we didn't get another choice.
In Hong Kong, Rowena felt isolated.
It was a very surreal
and dark time.
She struggled with depression.
Working in Hong Kong was a tightening
noose on many different levels.
Having to work at Miramax,
knowing that the CEO is someone
who attempted to rape you
is a very difficult experience
in itself.
And then, there's almost a double
violation in being asked to keep silent
about something
that's incredibly traumatic,
and not being able to go to a therapist
or a doctor
or talk to one's own boyfriend
or one's own family.
I tried hard to make a new life
in Hong Kong,
but in the end the house of cards
comes tumbling down.
In Hong Kong, Rowena attempted
suicide twice.
After two years,
she left the film industry for good.
I had actually lost not only a career,
but also a passion,
that was really strangled in its cradle.
A few years later she moved
to the United States, got married,
and settled with her family
near San Francisco.
I went on to work for big corporations
that had HR departments
and glass offices and seemingly
transparent processes for complaint.
They weren't the wild west in the way
that the film industry was.
But no matter how much distance
Rowena put between herself
and her time at Miramax,
she lived in constant fear
that the story would resurface
and upend her life all over again.
I don't think there's a person who's
signed a settlement agreement
with Harvey Weinstein that doesn't
spend the rest of their lives
looking over their shoulder.
For 20 years I felt terrified that
somebody would find me
at my residence and they would ask
the question that I had been dreading,
which is, didn't you used to work
for Harvey Weinstein?
In October 2017, The New York Times
and The New Yorker broke
the first stories about Weinstein's
history of predation.
After the story broke, I felt terrified
about what had been set in motion.
I hadn't told my family, my husband,
my children, my parents,
and I wasn't ready.
And when Zelda Perkins agreed to talk
to me for a story for The New Yorker,
that's when Rowena found herself
wondering what to do
about calls from me
and other reporters.
I remember hiding in my bathroom
with my very young baby,
who was only six months old,
and speaking to Zelda
in hushed whispers on the phone
as though my house were bugged.
What were you afraid of?
When you take a leap
into the unknown
you have no idea what the
repercussions really are going to be.
No one can actually reassure you,
no journalist, no publicist,
no former colleague can really
reassure you
what is actually going to happen.
Once your story's out there,
you can't take it back.
For Rowena it took
two years of thinking,
but she finally concluded she couldn't
and shouldn't stay silent.
We thought that we had signed
a watertight agreement,
meaning that Harvey would not be able
to assault other women,
and it really wasn't anything
like that at all.
Imagine finding out then that there
had been other women
who had been subject to these types
of settlement agreements,
not only around our time,
before our time,
and most harrowingly, after our time.
What happened to me
shouldn't happen to other women.
What do you think the next step
should be?
There's still so many people
who have almost no power,
they either are not
in this country legally,
they work in an industry
where they're barely paid.
And if the MeToo movement
can become more inclusive,
that's where
I think we could really create
some kind of social change
that is worth applauding ourselves for.
Weinstein's attempt to suppress
disclosures about him
were sometimes enabled by the media.
That's something I got to see myself,
alongside my producer,
Rich McHugh
It was a couple of days before
we were gonna go to LA
to interview a woman with a credible
allegation of rape against Harvey.
And then the decision was handed
down to me, you are to stand down.
Done, we're done here.
In that moment I realized
the story was dead at NBC.