• Sex criminal and former film producer, who is serving 23 years, now isolated from other prisoners and shows no symptoms

Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was today sentenced to 23 years in prison after he was found guilty of committing a criminal sex act in the first degree involving one woman victim, and rape in the third degree involving another. Read the rest

Recently unsealed court papers are not likely to help Harvey Weinstein when he gets sentenced tomorrow for two rape convictions. The New York Times reports the court papers contain emails from Weinstein to Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos begging for their help, and email to him from his brother Bob telling him he belongs in "hell."

The following paragraph in the Times story is the most alarming, and I'm surprised it didn't make it into the headline:

In one email, Mr. Weinstein suggested that the actress Jennifer Aniston — who he believed had complained about him — should be killed. And even as he endeavored to repair his reputation and excuse his behavior, his communications on the matter were often self-centered, unapologetic, and at times, patronizing.

Read the rest

Writer William Mersey was sent to prison for tax fraud, and spent time at New York City's Rikers Island a few months ago. In this Daily Beast article, he describes what life at Rikers will be like for rapist Harvey Weinstein.

I suspect the shock of being found guilty of rape in the third degree and sexual assault in the first degree Monday and immediately cuffed and taken into custody by court officers is what led to the heart palpitations that caused the ambulance transporting him to Rikers to be diverted to the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital. Weinstein, who’d avoided any time behind bars until now, should steel himself; there are more shocks to come once he recovers from his post-conviction fit of the vapors.

When I left the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) for Rikers, I was handcuffed, shackled at the ankles, and placed in a tiny, claustrophobic plastic cubicle in the back of a Ford van to bump and bruise my way to the inmate island. He should hope he’s tied to his seat and not given a rough ride like I was.

Photo of Rikers Island by U.S. Geological Survey, conversion to PNG by uploader (Herr Satz). - The National Map Seamless Server, layer New York City (Mar 2006), latitude 40.79930093 to 40.78455349, longitude -73.89361276 to -73.86990631.Converted from GeoTIFF to PNG using GIMP., Public Domain, Link | Photo of Harvey Weinstein by Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63418391 Read the rest

The incredible Julia Garner stars in the upcoming horror movie, The Assistant, which Vanity Fair says, "tracks a day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner), a recent college graduate working as a junior assistant to a powerful, abusive (and unnamed) movie mogul in Manhattan." Vanity Fair has a brief exclusive clip from the movie. Above, the trailer. Read the rest

BREAKING: Harvey Weinstein has been charged in Los Angeles with NEW rape and sexual assault charges.

Disgraced movie mogul and accused serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein is having an extremely bad day. Read the rest

Why is it that people like Lee Baca, Paul Manafort, Bill Cosby, and Harvey Weinstein suddenly develop debilitating health issues when it's time to prosecute them? Variety reports that accused sex criminal Harvey Weinstein "hobbled into the downtown courthouse limping and relying, at times, on a cane or the help of an assistant. He was dressed in an ill-fitting light grey suit, his hair was thinning, and he looked pale and enfeebled." One of Weinstein's team of high-paid lawyers overflowed with sympathy for her client: " “This is tough on anybody going through this and dealing with the scrutiny not only in the courtroom, but in the court of public opinion.”

Here is #HarveyWeinstein hobbling out of the courthouse with his defense. He walked in with a cane, but didn’t use the crutch on the way out. pic.twitter.com/HyJNYPFtLn

— Elizabeth Wagmeister (@EWagmeister) December 6, 2019

NEW: Harvey Weinstein left a New York courtroom as prosecutors sought to raise Weinstein's bail to $5 million cash over allegations he violated his ankle monitor conditions; A judge postponed the decision until next week. https://t.co/yRoNBOrZXT pic.twitter.com/f9jLtJIEO9

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) December 6, 2019

Harvey Weinstein appears in New York court for bail hearing where prosecutors asked a judge to increase his bail to $5 million for sometimes failing to wear the required tracking device https://t.co/6RUPNVGcPH pic.twitter.com/geRfjXi5fu

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 6, 2019

Image: Twitter/ABC News Read the rest

A former Miramax employee, Rowena Chiu, accused Harvey Weinstein on The Today Show this morning of trying to rape her in 1998. She had waited until now because of an NDA, which she says she was finally ready to break.

Although this is the first time she's spoken out about it publicly, journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor talk about her experiences in their upcoming book, "She Said."

Via HuffPost:

Chiu’s story first appeared in journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s upcoming book, “She Said,” which tracks the reporting that led up to the Me Too reckoning in the fall of 2017. “She Said” hits stores this week.

In the book, Chiu describes struggling with depression and a suicide attempt in the 20 years since the assault. She told “Today” that she decided to break the non-disclosure agreement now because she simply hadn’t been ready to speak up about her experience earlier.

“The NDA asked us to keep a secret about something that happened to me while I was working for 20 years, and that in itself was a very difficult thing to do,” she said. ”...When this story broke in the press about two years ago, I wasn’t ready. ... I felt intimidated. I felt terrified. I didn’t know what the repercussions would be both legally and personally, and so it really has taken all of two years to square some of those things away both in terms of my own personal life, in terms of coming forward and speaking to my parents, speaking to my husband, speaking to my closest friends.”

Read the rest

In a characteristically brilliant essay, historian, activist and writer Rebecca Solnit connects the dots between the sexual abuses of Jeffrey Epstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the unnamed 16-year-old boy whose admitted rape was excused because the judge said that This young man comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well: in each case, there was an elaborate scheme to silence and discredit the survivors of sexual violence, abetted by networks of (mostly) men who treat the disclosure of sexual assaults as a worse offense than committing the assaults themselves. Read the rest

Promised royalties from the movie ‘Wind River’ never made it to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

Hollywood mogul and widely-accused rapist, bully and blackmailer Harvey Weinstein was charged today with predatory sexual assault on a third victim. Read the rest

In an effort to save its members from being exploited, sexually assaulted or be otherwise forced to spend time with human turds in a private setting, the Screen Actors Guild has put the kibosh on holding meetings in "high-risk" locations.

According to The Guardian, the Screen Actor's Guild, which functions as a labor union for actors who appear on TV and in movies, has laid down the law, declaring that it's no longer cool for movie executives to set up meetings with actors in private locales such as hotel rooms or at someone's home address. Moving forward, if you want to yap with a member of SAG, it's gotta be in a workplace setting. The new measure comes as a result of handsy pricks like Harvey Weinstein and other high-powered executives in the entertainment business taking advantage of their position and the protection that Hollywood's elite formerly afforded them when it came to their sexual transgressions.

According to The Guardian, since accusations were first leveled against Weinstein this past October, SAG representatives have been hearing an average of five reports of sexual misconduct from its members, per day.

As a tech journalist, I'm sometimes brought to a hotel room by PR types from small to mid-sized firms to see a new product that they're representing. It usually happens during a trade show as the larger meeting rooms at convention centers and hotels are typically spoken for by large companies. I can't recall a single time that I've ever entered a hotel room, for work, where there weren't at least three or four people in the room with me. Read the rest

Harvey Weinstein was at a restaurant in Arizona with his sober coach when a customer from another table walked up to him and quickly slapped him twice with the back of his hand. He then proceeded to tell Weinstein that he was "a piece of shit" for what he did to those women, referring, of course, to the dozens of women who have recently accused him of sexual misconduct and rape.

The sober coach tries to block the camera with his hand, while the customer has more choice words to say to Weinstein, such as "You're a fuckin' piece of shit, Weinstein." The coach and Weinstein skedaddle, heading straight for the exit.

The video, obtained and released by TMZ, was taken by the customer's friend.

Via ABC Read the rest

The crackdown on "influencers" engaging in undisclosed paid endorsement roiled Instagram last year, but now the crackdown on sexual misconduct on influencers is affecting readership at Mic, Upworthy, GOOD, and Slate, who quietly paid influencers like George Takei to promote their articles on their personal accounts. Read the rest

If you thought Harvey Weinstein couldn't possibly be any more hideously sickening than you already knew, Ronan Farrow's new piece in the New Yorker reveals he's even worse than you could imagine. Weinstein hired spies to get dirt on actresses he allegedely sexuallty assaulted and on journalists looking into the allegations. In other words, Weinstein had setup an entire shadow organization of lawyers, spies and "former employees from his film enterprises" working for him to suppress the avalanche of sexually abuse allegations against him.

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.

The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories.

Read the rest

The spreadsheet contains 36 names: 2 Cabinet ministers identified as engaging in inappropriate behaviour towards women; 18 ministers who are said to have engaged in sexual misconduct; 12 MPs accused of sexually harassing female researchers and 4 MPs accused of harassing male researchers. Read the rest

South Park yucks it up with some Harvey-poop potty humor this week. When Catman and his pals, dressed as "superheroes," are accused by an ex-Instagram follower that that they "victimize innocent people and poop in little girls’ mouths," Catman responds, "That's not true. We're 'Coon and Friends, not Harvey Weinstein." Read the rest