Given that Harvey Weinstein’s reputation as a serial mistreater of women was apparently an “open secret” in Hollywood, people are rightfully wondering why it took so long for a major media outlet to break the story.
As it turns out, the producer was apparently an adept media manipulator who pressured outlets and journalists out of exposing his reprehensible behavior and planted negative stories about his accusers in the press.
In her column on Wednesday, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post revealed someone brought “negative information” about one of the women accusing Weinstein of misconduct to the paper in a timeframe that coincided with the New York Times’ initial report about his alleged decades of harassment. “Just last week, as a blockbuster New York Times story on Weinstein moved toward publication,” she wrote, “negative information about one of Weinstein’s accusers was offered to a Washington Post reporter. The timing could, of course, be coincidental, but seems suspicious and tracks with Weinstein’s well-known practices.”
More journalists are casting doubt on the possibility that tip’s arrival last week was merely coincidental.
On Tuesday night, Ronan Farrow, who earlier in the day published a thorough and disturbing report about Weinstein in the New Yorker, heavily implied that NBC News spiked his story. Journalist Sharon Waxman is accusing the New York Times of killing a report on Weinstein she produced in 2004.
Writing in The Daily Beast on Wednesday, Lloyd Grove shared his own account:
More than a decade ago, when this reporter was doing a gossip column at the New York Daily News and politely declined Weinstein’s request to kill an item about his recent divorce, he wheedled that he was my most loyal fan and had advised the paper’s owner to give me a raise; when that didn’t work, he angrily threatened to ban me from his screenings and premieres, and finally erupted: “I’m the scariest motherfucker you’ll ever have as an enemy in this town!”
Writing in The Cut, Rebecca Traister said Weinstein could “spin — or suppress — anything.”
“There were so many journalists on [Weinstein’s] payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine,” she wrote.
Farrow’s reporting is probably the most instructive. According to his New Yorker story, “[m]ultiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted.” Farrow, who says he was personally threatened with a lawsuit by Weinstein, had reportedly already obtained an NYPD audio recording of the producer coercing a model into his hotel room in 2015 when NBC declined to run his story. It’s difficult to see the recording, published in Farrow’s New Yorker story, as anything other than damning evidence of Weinstein’s abhorrent behavior.
As the public works to deduce how Weinstein managed to skate for so long, it’s becoming increasingly clear he couldn’t have done it without some help from the press.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.