Harvey Weinstein's lawyers should face reckoning, says his former PA

The lawyers who drew up the non-disclosure agreements that enabled ‘s sexual abuse of women to continue should now also face a ‘reckoning’, according to his former PA, who claims the disgraced Hollywood producer attempted to rape her — before silencing her with a legal document.

Weinstein is serving a 23-year sentence in a medical ward at ‘ Twin Towers Correctional Facility after being convicted in New York in 2020 of two charges of committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree and third-degree rape. 

He was yesterday found .

Rowena Chiu, 48, who is British-born to Chinese parents and now lives in , says the second wave of the #metoo movement needs to focus on the ‘enablers’ and a system that allowed his abuse to continue for so long.

Speaking to MailOnline alongside Angela Yeoh, the actor who plays her in She Said, the film about how New York Times’ journalists Meghan Twohey and Jodi Kantor (played by Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan), uncovered Weinstein’s abuse, Chiu says: ‘There’s a marked difference between what the #metoo movement has been able to do in terms of bringing Weinstein down, and what the movement has been able to do in terms of bringing his enablers down, which is not a lot.’

Chiu, who grew up in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, had graduated from reading English at Oxford when she landed her first job aged 23 working as a personal assistant at Miramax, Weinstein’s hugely successful film company, in 1998.

Weeks later, at the Venice Film Festival, she claims Weinstein tried to rape her in his suite at the Hotel Excelsior. Stripping off her tights, and parting her legs she says he told her ‘you could have a great career if you give me just five minutes’, asking the young woman for ‘just one thrust’. 

She managed to escape the suite, and a traumatised Chiu recounted what had happened to her co-worker Zelda Perkins. The two young women agreed to try and stop Weinstein from abusing other women, with Perkins confronting him directly — before, Chiu claims, they were both pressured into signing an NDA in a series of secretive meetings with the Miramax legal machine. 

They agreed to do so only if Weinstein adhered to a raft of conditions they’d created to try and prevent future abuse — including that he would seek therapy for his behaviour and Perkins would be present at the first session so he couldn’t create his own narrative on the incident. 

The ensuing 30-page NDA prohibited them both from speaking about the case. Chiu, who struggled to find a role elsewhere and briefly returned to a post in Hong Kong with Miramax, would attempt to take her own life twice in the coming years.

Since Twohey and Kantor’s , which led on actress Ashley Judd’s allegations about sexual advances Weinstein made to her in the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel and also featured accounts by former employees at Miramax, Chiu, despite the NDA still technically being in place, has spoken out frequently and passionately about what happened to her, including facing UK MPs and testifying against Weinstein in his 2020 trial.   

Now, she says, men like Weinstein’s long-term legal advisors David Boies, Lanny Davis and zaujimavosti Steve Hutensky, are due ‘a reckoning’.

‘These are names of people that protected Harvey for many years; they were his lawyers.  

‘The world has been quick to point fingers at how horrific Harvey’s behavior is, and it is indeed horrific. If you take the thought that okay, Harvey is a psychopath and a monster, which indeed he is, where were the rest of you in terms of trying to stop him?’   

Boies, 81, told the New York Times in 2018, that once a lawyer knows the facts ‘you have a duty of loyalty. You can’t represent them halfway.

‘If, as a lawyer, you start to value how you are going to look to the media, as opposed to how your client will look, then you should find a new profession,’ he added.

Former Miramax entertainment lawyer turned TV and film producer Steve Hutensky has seen his career blossom since leaving Miramax — he’s currently the COO of Australian production company Made Up Stories, which made Gone Girl and Big Little Lies. 

He was in the room in London when Weinstein signed Chiu’s NDA in 1998, she says, after Harvey Weinstein admitted that ‘he did not understand consent’.

It wasn’t just him, Chiu says: ‘There were lawyers who, I’m sure, all thought of themselves as good guys just doing their jobs, and going home to their wives and children. They sat there while Harvey Weinstein said that he didn’t quite understand consent.

One scene in She Said sees Lanny Davis, played by Peter Friedman, smiling as he says: ‘I’m a good guy’. 

Chiu says: ‘If we don’t dismantle the system that surrounded Harvey and enabled him to get away with preying on so many women over decades, then we won’t really have made any real change.’

‘Human nature’ she adds, suggests ‘another Harvey will come along at some point’ and there needs to be a message to the lawyers that ‘they can’t get away with protecting powerful white men in this way going forward.’

Film and streaming giants’ current penchant for releasing stories while they’re still evolving — Dropout, Netflix’s take on Elizabeth Holmes’ fraudulent medical company Theranos, was released ahead of her trial date — also applies here.

She Said, based on a book of the same name by Twohey and Kantor, hasn’t set box offices alight but has been generally well received by critics — Carey Mulligan has a Golden Globe nomination for her role. 

It was released in the US on November 18th, and a week later in the UK. Weinstein’s latest trial began on October 24th in Los Angeles. His defence team argued the film’s release might influence the 12-person jury, which was given short shrift by the judge, Lisa Lench.

Is it too soon to see his downfall on the big screen? Chiu is undecided: ‘While there is human nature, there is going to be power abuse. From that point of view, a movie like this is timeless; it’s less important exactly when it’s released. 

‘But I agree that Hollywood is rushing to make films as stories are evolving. There’s a risk in that because we may require some reflection to see where we’re really at. We won’t really know what we’ve achieved until our daughters are in the workplace.’

The film was plotted before Meghan Twohey and Jodie Kantor’s book had even been released and Chiu says she was explicit from the outset about wanting a British-born Chinese (BBC) person to play her, aware, she says, of how ethnic characters have been routinely ‘whitewashed’ for a Hollywood audience.

‘I knew that there would be a temptation to cast me with an Asian American actress. Being represented authentically in a cultural way was really important, not just to myself as an individual, but also in particular to my story, because obviously there were racist undertones to my assaults.’ 

To use an actor who she felt didn’t represent her heritage accurately might have seen her walk away from the film, she says. ‘It’s a really important part of my story and I wouldn’t have felt like me’.

Chiu says Asian actors in the film industry are still discriminated against, often not given even a character name, simply referred to by their job title, for example, she says, ‘Take away girl number 3’.

‘The idea of having well-rounded Asian characters with a name, with a backstory, shown on screen as people in a major Hollywood production is a really big deal for Asian representation.’

The actor who plays her in the film, Angela Yeoh, who worked as a journalist before becoming an actor, says it’s a scenario she can relate to — and that she has played an anonymous ‘girl number 3’ character.

Growing up in Adelaide, she says she would get down to the final ‘two or three’ in auditions, but would know that a part ‘would end up going to the blonde girl’.

When she first started out as a professional actor, Yeoh says she was offered parts playing doctors, something she describes as ‘very frustrating’ and praises her agent for striving to land her ‘really diverse, interesting roles’.

The two women have bonded; often facing the red carpet press pack be each other’s side. Yeoh, soon to be seen in Apple TV’s Wool, admits she was nervous about taking on the role of Rowena.’

She tells MailOnline: ‘I just felt so much responsibility in playing a real life living survivor. Part of me was terrified and part of me was honored to be to be given the opportunity to help tell this story.’

With multiple survivor stories featured, she worried her brief but key scene might not be enough. ‘In those few minutes, have we chosen the best ways to reflect Rowena’s experience?’

Chiu is frank about the Hollywood process. The film majors on the drama and ensuing triumph of Twohey and Kantor’s tenacious reporting — but, she says, sees the vital nuances of the survivor’s stories, including her own, lost.

‘The movie actually doesn’t particularly make me feel like me. Sorry if that’s really disappointing to Angela. A fictionalized motion picture will take elements of your story and elements of your personality and represent them, but they’re never going to be a total counterfeit.’

She adds: ‘That’s not to say the film still isn’t incredibly powerful, and the survivors have been used to great effect in the limited space that is allowed for them.’

Rowena is currently working on her own memoir and has endured two, clearly frustrating, rejections from publishers in recent days. 

While one told her the #Metoo movement is ‘over-saturated’, another politely fed back that her story is ‘too niche’.

There’s a greater appetite for survivor stories when ‘filtered through a journalistic lens’, she thinks, theorising that women want to see themselves ‘as a Jodi or a Megan, combatting the elements to bring the story to the fore’ and that a ‘very raw and confronting’ first person survivor story is harder to digest.

‘If you’re sitting there with your bucket of popcorn, you may not want to think that you were that young woman sent up to that hotel room, or your daughter could have been.’

The ‘over-saturation of the #metoo movement’ leaves Yeoh frustrated on her friend’s behalf. 

‘How many decades or centuries have women not been able to speak about this? Really? To just have a few more books on the shelves when we’ve spent years not talking about this…’