In the upcoming book “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence” by Ken Auletta, former friends, employees, family members, and accusers of the jailed ex-producer don’t hold back when talking about their interactions with him.
The admissions range from how Weinstein saw himself to how he made his victims feel when they saw him in person. Others talked about how they thought people didn’t take care of themselves.
Auletta recently told Fox News, “He really thought he was a gift from God, a Don Juan.” In his book, the author and New Yorker media critic talk about how Weinstein’s accuser Jessica Mann said he smelled like “poop” when she said he raped her in 2013. She said this in a Manhattan courtroom in 2020.
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“When I saw him naked for the first time, I thought he was deformed and a cross-dresser,” Mann said in court. “He has so many scars that I thought maybe he had been burned, but that didn’t make sense. He doesn’t have testicles, and it looks like he has a vagina.”
“Harvey thought his body was attractive,” Auletta said, even though people had said bad things about how he looked.
Weinstein, who is 70 years old, is currently serving 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault. He was found guilty of these crimes after a flood of news stories about his bad and illegal behavior surfaced in 2017. Because of this, the man who made “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love” became the early face of the #MeToo movement.
In her book, Auletta wants to find out how he got to be so powerful and how he was able to get away with his crimes for so long. In particular, he talks about how many of his victims were afraid of getting hurt if they spoke out against him in public.
“They didn’t want to argue with him because they didn’t want to be called liars,” Auletta said. “They knew he was going to attack them or criticize them. The press gave him a lot of power… He was also ready to give these women money to keep them quiet. And as long as they signed a promise not to tell anyone, they couldn’t.”
