In the wake of the escalating allegations against now-fired Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein, there’s been one question circulating more than any other: why hasn’t this come out before?
Indeed, it’s increasingly clear that these rumours were ricocheting around the backchannels of the Hollywood press since time immemorial. Why hadn’t Weinstein been called out in a major publication until the New York Times exposé last week?
It seems it goes a little further than just the usual haze of casual protection that surrounds any powerful man accused of abuse or sexual misconduct. There’s a big piece in The Wrap today from Sharon Waxman, who was a reporter at the New York Times.
Waxman alleges that she got the green light from her editors at the Times back in 2004 to look into rumours of Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, including allegations that he had paid a woman off over an unwanted sexual encounter.
She says that her search took her to Rome, where she sought to speak to Fabrizio Lombardo, the head of Miramax Italy. Sources indicated that Lombardo actually knew nothing about film or the movie business, and was on the payroll mostly to service Weinstein’s “women needs”.
Waxman says her story never ran, due to pressure from some unusual sources:
The story I reported never ran.
After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.
I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.
Apparently, the story eventually did run – stripped of any allegations of sexual impropriety, buried in the NYT’s culture section. It was now basically just a piece about the firing of Lombardo for unspecified reasons, which understandably nobody gave much of a shit about.
The New York Times hasn’t issued a statement about this yet. But it’s not hard to believe that a story about a man as powerful as Weinstein would run into serious problems getting published.
