The past few days’ revelations have left me feeling physically sick. Sick because it happened to so many young impressionable women and sick because it happened to me as well. Pictured: Ivana Lowell
The dam has finally broken. After years of silence, the accusations are flooding in – to the shame of the movie industry and those who knew the truth but chose to remain silent.
While I am by no means the worst of Harvey Weinstein’s victims, I can say that I might have been the first person to tell the world about his despicable behaviour.
Not only did I work for Harvey and his company Miramax, I dated his younger brother Bob for a few years and, for a while at least, was at the heart of his circle – an experience I recounted in my 2010 memoir, Why Not Say What Happened?
And I really did say what happened on one bizarre occasion in particular, when Harvey squeezed his huge frame into my apartment, lay spread-eagled on my bed and demanded a massage.
I kept the details brief, yet the response was vicious – a legal campaign from Weinstein, who not only attempted to remove the passage but branded me a liar in public. Of course, this one incident barely scratched the surface of what I really knew and what the rest of the company – including his brother Bob – must have known. After all, it was the worst-kept secret in Hollywood.
The past few days’ revelations have left me feeling physically sick. Sick because it happened to so many young impressionable women and sick because it happened to me as well. At last, thanks to the courage and honesty of all the other women who have come forward and spoken up for themselves, I feel I can safely share the full details of my story.
It was 1989. I was a young British actress in New York struggling to make the transition from stage to screen when, in a chance meeting in an Upper East Side restaurant, I first encountered Harvey. Disillusioned and longing to return home, I had been pouring out my woes to a friend in Elaine’s – where the opening dinner scene from the Woody Allen movie Manhattan was filmed – when a bottle of expensive champagne was brought over.
‘Compliments of Harvey Weinstein,’ the waiter announced.
Turning around, we were greeted with a wave and a smile from a fat, dishevelled-looking man in a black T-shirt at the back. My friend told me Harvey Weinstein was an independent distributor who was finding big success with a movie called Sex, Lies, And Videotape.
Before I could learn more, Harvey stood up, waddled over to our table and plonked himself down. I was struck by his sheer bulk and overbearing presence. He introduced himself in a deep gravelly voice and we spent the rest of the dinner talking. I explained that I was dissatisfied with acting and I mentioned that I came from a literary background – my mother was novelist and Guinness heiress Caroline Blackwood and my stepfather the American poet Robert Lowell.
Relationship: Ivana Lowell with her former boyfriend Bob Weinstein, the brother of disgraced movie mogul Harvey
As the restaurant began to close, he said I should come and work for him because he needed people who had actually read books.
Flattered and excited, I agreed to meet him at the Miramax office the following morning. It went well. Harvey introduced me to his assistants, all attractive young women. He asked me what I would like to do at the company and we agreed that I should be in charge of everything literary, which meant reading not only scripts but finding books that could be turned into films. I was getting paid to do something I loved.
After lunch, we went back up to his office, where he shut the office door, made some comment about being tired and said he really needed a massage. He was standing behind a massive desk strewn with papers, Diet Coke cans, a brimming ashtray and half a slice of old pizza.
It suddenly felt very claustrophobic. He moved round his desk towards me and I quickly moved to the other side. He asked if I liked to give oral sex. It was such an outrageous question, I thought he was joking. I started giggling, trying to make light of it, but I wondered what he would do if he caught me. What could he do? The walls were paper-thin and his secretary was right outside.
I knew a line had been crossed but I wasn’t sure exactly what the line was. Fortunately, his intercom buzzed, he had to take a call and I slipped out of the office to reflect on an interesting first day.
The next evening, my phone rang and it was Harvey calling from his car. He wasn’t far away and he wanted to come up and talk. Within minutes, he was banging at my door. My one-bedroom apartment was small, with parquet floors and high ceilings. I hadn’t much furniture and there really wasn’t anywhere for him to sit, so he wandered down the corridor towards my bedroom.
Wearing his usual uniform of stained T-shirt and elastic braces, Harvey lay on my bed and asked me to give him a back rub, which I politely refused. Harvey didn’t seem to mind the rejection or seem in the least bit embarrassed to have made such an intimate request. Instead he spent the next half an hour swearing about work.
I asked him if his wife wasn’t going to wonder where he was but he said she didn’t care, she never listened or tried to understand him. He asked me to lie next to him but again I firmly declined and perched on my bedroom chair, like a nervous cat, praying he would get bored, which mercifully he finally did and he disappeared into the night.
I knew what happened was wrong on every level and I thought about telling Harvey that I didn’t think this was going to work out.
As years went on, Bob ran his division from Los Angeles while Harvey stayed in New York (above together in 1995)
But the next day when I went to the office I found that I had been assigned an office on the third floor of Miramax and was given a box of embossed cards with my name and the vague title Vice President of Creative Miramax Films. Harvey’s behaviour was reprehensible and demeaning, yet I was dazzled by the job.
So what if the price was to be on the receiving end of strange sexual requests? As long as I didn’t have to actually do anything – and after all, no one was really getting hurt, were they?
It didn’t take me long to work out the truth. Pretty young actresses were a common sight entering and exiting Harvey’s office. Speculation on how badly they wanted a part was a common office game. If the girl in question pleased Harvey then she would become flavour of the month, a regular at the Miramax screenings and parties. If she was very lucky she would be given a part in a film.
Somehow, I managed to keep inappropriate dealings with Harvey at arm’s length. I actually considered him to be a friend, and in many ways I respected and admired him, his knowledge and his passion for good cinema. He could be generous and even compassionate at times but then his volatile mood and voracious appetite would take over.
He never seemed to sleep and it was not uncommon to be called in for a meeting with Harvey at 2am. The lobby of whichever hotel he had made his base would have a constant stream of young actresses either going up or coming down from his suite at all hours of the night. Some were already quite famous, and back at the office we would speculate as to who had actually slept with him and who got away with just giving in to his demand for oral sex.
Looking back now, it all seems so tawdry and sordid, but working in such a toxic atmosphere seemed to have hardened everyone. We had all become cynical.
‘He never seemed to sleep and it was not uncommon to be called in for a meeting with Harvey at 2am’. Pictured: Weinstein with Gwyneth Paltrow in 1999
Neither I nor my girlfriend and colleague – a very pretty former actress – found it unusual when we were called into Harvey’s room in middle of the night to discuss the book division. We thought little of the fact that he greeted us wearing nothing but his hotel bathrobe. I did, however, try very hard to avert my eyes from the grotesque flashes of penis he gave me every time he moved.
The last encounter I had with Harvey of this nature was in New York with the same girlfriend, who was staying with me on my sofa bed. It was late at night when we heard a loud banging. I ran to the door only to see through the peephole the distorted but recognisable face of Harvey. ‘S***, it’s Harvey,’ I whispered to my friend.
‘Quick, let’s hide,’ she said, so we locked ourselves in the bathroom, hoping he would go away. Of course, he persisted and we eventually let him in. He barged past us straight into the bedroom and immediately starting undressing. He plopped down and lay naked on my bed. ‘Which one of you ladies is going to be nice and give Uncle Harvey a massage?’
By now we both knew what he really meant by ‘massage’. The sight of his huge postulant body and white belly was revolting and we both started giggling nervously. He seemed agitated and in a state of excitement. We cowered nervously in the adjoining living room as he raged.
Finally he sat up and, looking sort of dazed, slowly got dressed. To our relief, he left.
A few weeks later, he rang and asked me to join him with his brother Bob at Elaine’s. The moment I sat down, Harvey got up and left us alone. My stomach churned. Bob had a reputation around the office of being the stricter, more businesslike of the two. I expected a grilling on numbers and percentages, yet he didn’t seem at all interested in the book division. Instead, he was charming and self-deprecating, thinner than his brother but with the same intense energy and quick mind. Eventually, we started dating – and Harvey stopped calling. When I next bumped into Harvey and asked him if there was anything he needed work-wise, he just growled back at me: ‘No, you’re Bob’s property now.’
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has Harvey Weinstein amid the sex assault scandal. He is pictured holding the only personal Oscar he won for Best Picture for Shakespeare in Love in 1999 alongside his first wife Eve
Bob asked me if I had ever slept with his brother. I said of course I hadn’t but I did add that Harvey had made aggressive attempts.
I started to tell him about all the girls and about all of Harvey’s exploits but he became angry and said he didn’t want to know.
Whenever I plucked up the courage to try to talk to Bob about his brother’s despicable behaviour he would become furious and immediately shut me down.
It was much easier for him to bury his head in the sand rather than face the ugly truth. It was as if by not acknowledging the severity of the situation, he could just go make it go away.
Everyone else in the company seemed to be aware of Harvey’s exploitive treatment of women so I just assumed the brother he was so close to must have known as well. After years of a hot-and-cold relationship, we split up, but remained friends.
It wasn’t until I published my memoir in 2010 that things turned nasty. The moment Harvey read it, he went ballistic.
He called me and started to threaten me. He said he was going to ‘f****** sue me’, that I was a liar, that I made him sound like a pervert and that I was ruining his reputation. His publicist ordered me to take out everything in the book about Harvey. I refused.
Bob shouted at me too, and the next day there was a piece in the New York Post calling me a liar.
I told everyone I could what had happened but no one seemed to care or wanted to get involved. Harvey had become untouchable – until now.
Many people have asked why those in the industry didn’t raise the alarm.
Well I did, or at least I tried to. Harvey called me a liar, just as he called countless other women before and after me liars.
Now the whole world knows who the real liar is.