According to The New Yorker, three women, including Asia Argento, a royal member of independent cinema, allege that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein raped them:
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.
To lay that all out, on top of the eight sexual harassment settlements reported by the far-left New York Times last week, add four allegations that Weinstein exposed and/or masturbated in front of them, Weinstain apparently admitting on tape that he groped a woman, and three women claiming they were flat-out raped by Weinstein. The District Attorney will have to explain why an alleged admission like that did not result in criminal charges.
Now try to reconcile all of that over 20 years next to these denials from various people in Hollywood and in the media that they knew nothing about this.
If these charges are true, and Weinstein has not denied all of them, he was a full-blown serial predator allowed to go about his business of racking up victims thanks to a culture of enablers, a Hollywood culture of enablers.
Are we supposed to believe the Disney Company knew nothing. Disney owned Miramax for more than ten years while Weinstein and his brother ran it. Disney did not know about the payoffs? The rumors?
Are we supposed to believe Brother Bob knew nothing? That the Weinstein Company board knew nothing?
What about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck? Weinstein made them. So far they have been silent.
The specific details of the assault allegations are almost too horrific to detail. In the case of Argento, though, we get a preview of Weinstein’s alleged modus operandi when it came to his now infamous requests for a massage. Warning. Explicit content follows:
When the producer led her upstairs that evening, she said, there was no party—only a hotel room, empty but for Weinstein: “I’m, like, ‘Where is the fucking party?’ ” She recalled the producer telling her, “Oh, we got here too early,” before he left her alone with Weinstein. (The producer denies bringing Argento to the room that night.) At first, Weinstein was solicitous, praising her work. Then he left the room. When he returned, he was wearing a bathrobe and holding a bottle of lotion. “He asks me to give a massage. I was, like, ‘Look man, I am no fucking fool,’ ” Argento said. “But, looking back, I am a fucking fool. And I am still trying to come to grips with what happened.”
Argento said that, after she reluctantly agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. Weinstein “terrified me, and he was so big,” she said. “It wouldn’t stop. It was a nightmare.”
At some point, Argento said, she stopped saying no and feigned enjoyment, because she thought it was the only way the assault would end. “I was not willing,” she told me. “I said, ‘No, no, no.’ . . . It’s twisted. A big fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale.” Argento, who insisted that she wanted to tell her story in all its complexity, said that she didn’t physically fight him off, something that has prompted years of guilt.
Argento describes this as a rape and claims it happened in 1997, just when her career was taking off. She was just 22 years old. She also says that she did not come forward out of the fear no one would believe her, primarily because she later had a consensual relationship with Weinstein.
Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino claim Weinstein harassed her but again reveals that the mogul’s alleged sexual misconduct was not a secret:
Sorvino said that she struggled for years with whether to come forward with her story, partly because she was aware that it was mild compared to the experiences of other women, including another actress she spoke to at the time. (That actress told me that she locked herself in a hotel bathroom to escape Weinstein, and that he masturbated in front of her. She said it was “a classic case” of “someone not understanding the word ‘no’. . . I must have said no a thousand times.”)
The specifics involving Weinstein being caught on a recording (per the New Yorker) admitting to groping an Italian model read like a classic case of how power manipulates our legal system AND the mainstream media. Despite the fact that there was audio admitting to what amounts to a crime, the wagons all circled to protect Weinstein: [emphasis added]
She asks him directly why he groped her breasts the day before.
“Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in,” Weinstein says. “I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”
“You’re used to that?” Gutierrez asks, sounding incredulous.
“Yes,” Weinstein says. He later adds, “I won’t do it again.”
After almost two minutes of back-and-forth in the hallway, Weinstein finally agrees to let her leave.
According to a law-enforcement source, Weinstein, if charged, would have most likely faced a count of sexual abuse in the third degree, a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of three months in jail. But, as the police investigation proceeded and the allegation was widely reported, details about Gutierrez’s past began to appear in the tabloids.
…
Two sources close to the police investigation said that they had no reason to doubt Gutierrez’s account of the incident.
***This piece is being updated as more facts come in.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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