Uma Thurman: Harvey Weinstein ‘assaulted me’

Thurman’s story, relayed by Maureen Dowd in her weekend column for the New York Times, goes back roughly two decades, painting yet another unflattering portrait of her industry as one filled with predators and enablers.

In the time after they collaborated on “Pulp Fiction,” Thurman said Weinstein attacked her in a London hotel room. “It was such a bat to the head,” she told Dowd. “He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”

The next day, according to Thurman, Weinstein — who would have been married to his first wife at the time — sent her a bouquet of roses.

The actress recalled asking Weinstein to meet her in the hotel bar where she would be waiting with a friend, hoping to confront him, but said she was persuaded by assistants to return to his suite instead. Thurman remembers telling Weinstein, “If you do what you did to me to other people you will lose your career, your reputation and your family, I promise you.”

“She very well could have said this,” Weinstein admitted to Dowd through a representative, though the producer chalked their encounter in London up to “making a pass,” and claimed to have “immediately apologized.”

Thurman said he threatened to destroy her career.

“Mr. Weinstein acknowledges making an awkward pass 25 years ago at Ms. Thurman in England after misreading her signals, after a flirtatious exchange in Paris, for which he immediately apologized and deeply regrets,” a Weinstein representative told CNN. “However, her claims about being physically assaulted are untrue.”

The two collaborated on additional projects over the years. “Thurman says that she could tolerate the mogul in supervised environments and that she assumed she had ‘aged out of the window of his assault range,'” Dowd wrote.

Director Quentin Tarantino, a friend of Weinstein, was also implicated in Thurman’s story. She claimed in her conversations with Dowd to have shared with Tarantino on more than one occasion of her experience in London, even reminding him of the account when he wondered why she seemed to act differently around Weinstein in the early 2000s.

“He probably dismissed it like ‘Oh, poor Harvey, trying to get girls he can’t have,’ whatever he told himself, who knows?” she said.

Tarantino, for his part, expressed regret in October for not taking more steps to stop Weinstein’s abuse earlier, telling the New York Times, “I knew enough to do more than I did. … There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”

Reflecting on her relationship with Weinstein, Thurman explained that her feelings about the disgraced mogul are “complicated” because of “how bad I feel about all the women that were attacked after I was.”

“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did,” she said. “Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”

Dowd’s opinion column is an unusual place to break such serious allegations — whether due to her stylistic choices or what Thurman was willing to reveal in their conversations, the timeline and details of the actual alleged assault are left a little unclear. That being said, Thurman’s account certainly fits the pattern of behavior so many other women have credibly attributed to Weinstein.

Her story also provides yet another infuriating look at the whispers about Weinstein that had drifted quietly around Hollywood for years, never making it into the press until last fall, giving him decades to get rich and famous off the work of his victims.