Behind the Bastards - Part One: It Takes A Village of Bastards to Make a Weinstein

Episode Date: May 29, 2018

Harvey Weinstein is a dull, gross, boring little puddle of a man who sexually assaulted at least 85 women, but it took dozens, perhaps even hundreds of people to make his behavior possible. In episode 5, Robert is joined by Anna Hossnieh (Ethnically Ambiguous) and they discuss the evil acts of Harvey Weinstein and the people that were involved. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in the world. I'm your host, Robert Evans, and this week my co-host is Anna Hosnia, producer extraordinaire, co-host of the podcast Ethnically Ambiguous, and All Around Woman About Town. Anna, today we are talking about Harvey Weinstein. What? Just kidding, I knew.

Yes, my guests for the show come in cold, but this is a case that it is impossible to come entirely cold on, because his whole saga has been one of the biggest stories of the last couple of years. Yeah, I couldn't help myself, I had to read all those Ronan Farrell articles about him. Some great articles. I'm a huge BlackCube fan, so like I was deep in there. Oh yeah? Trying to get involved.

Big fan of Israeli-aligned spy agencies. Yeah, what can I say, I'm a Mossad head. We'll be digging into some of that, a lot of that actually. Just as a heads up, this is going to be a two-parter episode, so if you're one of those people who hates the number two, you should be aware of that. It just wanted to be a lot longer in terms of research than we had anticipated. It's one of those things where every time I would finish reading an article and set down to write, two new ones would pop up.

There's just so much on this case. I would go so far as to say, I can't imagine one person's crimes being better reported than Weinstein's have, but it does mean that there's a lot to talk about, so yeah, we'll be dropping the second part of this on Thursday. I just kind of wanted to get, what is your understanding of the culpability of the people around Harvey Weinstein? Obviously, Mr. Weinstein has been accused at this point of dozens of sexual assaults, multiple rapes, spanning a period of time from the 1970s until just a couple of years ago, and probably going on before and after that, to be entirely honest.

What's your understanding of the guilt of the people around him? I do believe his company with his brother was aware of his behavior and used a lot of the resources to cover it up. I don't think his wife knew too much because I believe they lived somewhat separate lives because people, I feel like, in that sort of industry who are so high up, they spend a lot of time traveling, moving around. They have busy lives and not a lot overlaps. I think he had a lot of money and power to cover up a lot of things.

I do think people knew, but I think it's also one of those things where you just don't touch it because you want to protect your own interests. That's exactly, in fact, what we're going to be talking about today. For those of you who are a little bit less up to date on things, I'm just going to give a brief overview of the case. In October of last year, The New York Times and The New Yorker both started publishing what would become a long series of articles about sexual assaults by Mr. Weinstein. Initially, more than a dozen women accused of sexual harassment and assault.

After the First New York Times article, more and more accusations came coming in, including accusations of rape. As of the recording of this podcast, at least 85 women have come forward with accusations. He was fired almost immediately from his job at the company that bore his name and he's just turned himself into the NYPD. One of the things I thought was interesting about him turning himself in is he was pictured with three books, which he was there for like two hours. You don't bring three books to read to court while you're waiting to be arraigned.

He's holding a number of books, one of which was a biography of the director, Elia Kazan. I suspect he was trying to signal a message by the books he was carrying because Kazan was a very popular and well regarded director in like the 40s and 50s whose career was derailed by the Red Scare. He was a member of the Communist Party. He was like taken in by the House Un-American Activities Committee and he named names, which like further disgraced him. And so this biography is like someone looking, trying to evaluate his legacy now

and sort of redeem it because he made all these great movies and like it's a tragedy that he was railroaded by this moral movement that came around and wound up in the long sweep of history being seen as like horribly immoral, which is clearly how Weinstein views himself. That's his hope is that he's going to get, I think he's signaling by carrying this book into court that in 30 or 40 years, people will look at me as a genius who is unfairly railroaded by a movement that, yeah, that's the message he's trying, why else would you carry that book? I would argue not the same thing.

Well, no. And also like one of the things about it that is like Elia Kazan, you can like say what you want about the morality of turning in people during the Red Scare. But he was like an actual creative person who made art and it's kind of the same thing with Roman Polanski. Like Roman Polanski, you can say, you know, the crimes he committed weren't worth the movies we got out of him, but he made movies. Weinstein was never anything but like the money guy, like he was good at picking scripts

and good at being like, oh yeah, I figure like this guy might be famous, but he didn't make any of the stuff that he's famous for. So like that's, I feel like this guy in 50 years, the most notable thing about him in the annals of history is that his, the accusations against him sparked this movement. That's what he's going to be remembered for. He's not going to be remembered for anything he did as a producer, not in the long span of time. What a piece of shit. He's a real piece of shit.

And that's kind of why when we started working on this episode, I thought it was going to be more of a dive into Weinstein's life and everything he'd done and sort of cut it apart piece by piece like that. But the more I've read about him, he's not an interesting guy. Like he's a bastard, but he's not an interesting bastard. He's a dull, gross, boring little puddle of a man. I feel like you can't be that interesting if you're that interested in like raping women. Yeah, there's just not much to say about him other than the crimes he committed.

Right. And a lot has been said about that. And so, and I also think this is a case where he's going to get as much justice as a rich, probable rapist can get in our society. Yeah, he'll be playing tennis in prison. He'll be playing tennis in prison, but also like, it's not like Cosby where he's getting caught right as he's too old to really understand what's going on and he's not losing any productive years.

Harvey probably would have had another 10, 20 years running a studio or running his company if he hadn't gotten caught. So his career is being cut short and that's a good thing. This is all a long way of me saying this episode of Behind the Bastards is not going to focus on Harvey Weinstein. He's not the bastard that I think we're interested in right here. Because when you read all of the articles that have been published in the interviews with everybody who was around him,

it becomes clear that it took dozens, if not hundreds of people, and maybe even more to make his behavior possible. So my initial idea with this podcast was to sort of catalog all of the different people who helped him hurt so many other people. And over the course of my research, I did find a lot of enablers, like buildings filled with people who made this possible. But I also found a sort of foggy layer of doubt floating over everybody involved that makes me kind of uncomfortable and queasy.

So I keep going back and forth about whether or not this episode is a good idea, but we're just going to dive into it now. Yeah, that's interesting. It feels like when you're that powerful, like, oh god, the concept of power is one of the most terrifying things. You really think about it. It almost feels like just doing something very normal, like going to get coffee and just hanging with your friends is just,

it's not good enough anymore. Like once you've lived that life, like the stakes have to be raised and now it's, you know, now, you know, for fun, I invite women up to a hotel room and try and get them to watch me shower naked. It's like... So you're thinking about the impact that the power had on him. And I guess what I'm thinking about is... I guess it's just on everyone.

Yeah, that's what I'm interested in here. There's a really famous Edmund Burke quote about the Nazis where he says that, you know, all that's necessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing. And that's a really famous quote, it's almost comforting to imagine that terrible people succeed because good people don't do anything. The reality that you see in the Weinstein case

is that he succeeded for so long because a lot of good people were willing to help him. Yeah. And knew to an extent what they were doing. So, let's dig in. Harvey Weinstein was born on March 19, 1952. He and his brother Bob co-founded Miramax. Bob has also been accused of sexual harassment.

Together, they produced a number of famous movies including Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, The Lord of the Rings, and The King's Speech. In total, movies Harvey produced garnered more than 300 Oscar nominations, which is a lot of Oscar nominations. His earliest recorded victim was Hope Exoner de More, sometime in the 70s. She was an employee of a concert production company that he ran at the time. They were doing a job in Manhattan and staying in a hotel.

Harvey allegedly told her there'd been a booking mix-up and they'd have to share a room. Then, he allegedly raped her. His most recent reported assault was in March of 2015 when he allegedly groped Amber Betelana. That's the bird's-eye view of Harvey Weinstein's career as both a production guy and a rapist. Right.

Yeah. So, in between those two assaults, possibly before and after, there were dozens and dozens of other women. Some claim they were groped, some claim they were raped. The allegations of Lauren Siven are pretty standard. The journalist who claims Weinstein lured her into an empty restaurant, he part-owned and then hit on her. She says that when she turned him down, he put his body between her and the exit,

told her to, quote, stand there and shut up, end quote, and then masturbated into a potted plant. As you do. As you do. One woman turns you down. Yeah. So, Armin Amiri was the manager of that restaurant at the time when this happened. And when Siven came forward with her story last October,

he came forward too, because, well, he hadn't seen that incident. He realized that he'd seen Harvey do something similar. There's a quote from him. What I remember about this incident is that my sous chef came into my office furious, telling me that, quote, some fat fuck saying he's an owner, he didn't know the name, had come into the kitchen with a woman and shoved $100 billet him and told him to get out. So, yeah.

So, even in kitchens with people around? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God. Harvey, people cook. People have to eat that food. It's about to get worse if that's what's icking you out about this story. It's about to get even worse. So, according to Armin, Armin hears this from the chef.

The chef is like, yeah, this fat fuck just gave me $100 and shoved me out of the kitchen. So, he goes back into the kitchen with the chef, and he witnessed Weinstein, quote, fixing his belt. And then said, quote, the chef picks up a pot that had been placed on the stove. It had been defiled. It was so bizarre we couldn't believe it happened. He, like, gizzed in a pot? He gizzed in a pot.

Oh, my God. There it is. He gizzed in a pot in a potted plant at the same restaurant. Ew. I hope they burn that pot, because that is the most unsanitary. I feel like you burned the restaurant at this point. Yeah, at that point. Because if there are two stories of him ejaculating into random objects at this restaurant he

owned, he came on every square into that place. He was like, is that gizz? Is that gizz? Is that comb? Oh, God. This whole place is covered in gizz. These tablecloths were black this morning. Everything.

Ew. Yeah. I'm sorry. What's the restaurant's name? Oh, geez. I forget. Just so I can never, ever even walk by it. Operational anymore.

Better not be. Yeah. So, that's kind of a good microcosm of the sort of things he got up to, but it also gives you an idea of how many people are involved when you start talking about gizz because is that sous-chef a little complicit? That, particularly the case, it doesn't sound like it because Harvey was just shoving money at him and saying, get the fuck out of here. Right, but if he didn't know that the woman was dragged in there, because you don't really

know in a situation like that. Exactly, exactly. It's really unclear. And Armin said something like that. It's like, I didn't say anything about it because I didn't know anything about the woman involved. I had no idea what was going on. It was just some rich guy paying the masturbate in a pot that he technically owned.

So, yeah, it's a little messed up. Armin does claim that after Lauren Sivin's plant story went viral, Weinstein called him and asked him to deny that he'd ever done anything like that. Of course, by that point, the Harvey Weinstein name was as muddy as names get. Armin refused to do as he asked. But that was a time when it was easy to say that at Harvey Weinstein because... At that point, he was on his way down. Exactly, which is nothing against Armin.

Maybe he would have done the right thing if he'd known something was wrong in the moment. I don't know the guy. But what is important is that for more than 30 years, almost everyone that Harvey Weinstein asked to keep his secret was happy to help him do it. David J. Pecker is the CEO of American Media Inc. They are... Yes. Okay, what does that mean?

I'm familiar with him. I'm familiar that he's also on Trump's team and has some friends in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, he's got friends in Saudi Arabia. He's on Trump's team. And he is American Media Inc. is the company that's responsible for a number of magazines including the National Enquirer, which just so happens that the studio we're in has a lot of issues of the Enquirer. And the one I'm looking at right now, the big title of the story is

Exhumed John Bene's Body Now. So that's... They're classy people, the Enquirer. Yeah, so David J. Pecker is the CEO of American Media Inc. They own the National Enquirer, Weekly World News, etc. Harvey Weinstein and Pecker have been good friends for years. Their friendship was so deep that Harvey became known as an FOP, or Friend of Pecker. Which...

They're not great at acronyms. They basically have been friend of penis. Friend of penis. I mean, that's basically what friend of Pecker means. Friend of David? Like, why Pecker? Yeah, that's a status he apparently shared with President Trump. And when you are a friend of Pecker, you get special treatment from not just the Enquirer

and the Weekly World News, but the whole tabloid industry. Right. So I'll be listing all the sources for this podcast on our website. This info right now comes from a New York Times article entitled Weinstein's Complicity Machine. Quote, American media was known to sometimes help out allies in trouble with a strategy known in tabloid newsrooms as Catch and Kill, acquiring exclusive rights to damaging stories and then not publishing them.

So basically, this is the first and the clearest case of another person involved who's definitely a bastard. Because fucking Pecker, that's not helping Harvey for money. It's not helping him because you're afraid he'll fuck up your career. It's helping him because he's your buddy and you want him to keep his sexual assaults under wrap. Ronan Farrow and The New Yorker laid out a very active relationship between the Enquirer and Weinstein. We talked to a woman named Elizabeth Avalon, who is the former wife of Robert Rodriguez.

Rodriguez left her for Rose McGowan. So obviously there's understandable kind of bad blood between the two ladies. Rose claims that Harvey Weinstein raped her in his hotel room during the Sundance Festival. An Enquirer's reporter figured Avalon might have some dirt on Rose McGowan. And of course, it was his job as an Enquirer reporter to dig up dirt on anyone accusing anything of Harvey Weinstein to try to discredit them. He started calling Avalon. He called her over and over and over again.

And then he started reaching out to people she knew, like friends and family, just kind of harassing them until she agreed for an interview. So Avalon sits down for an interview with this reporter, and he repeatedly pushes her to say bad things about Rose McGowan. She wanted to make sure that the call was off the record and only for deep background. And the reporter said that it was, but he recorded the whole thing. And afterwards, he handed a recording to American media's chief content officer, Dylan Howard, emailed it to Harvey Weinstein and said, quote, I have something, all caps.

Amazing. Eventually she laid into Rose pretty hard, which is again, that's that's American media's chief content officer talking. Weinstein replied to him, quote, this is the killer, especially if my fingerprints are just the letter R, not on this, end quote. Howard assured him that the fingerprints weren't on it and said this conversation is all caps recorded. Okay, I'm sorry.

The letter R. Yeah, my fingerprints are not on this. That's more offensive than chasing it up hot. Yeah, you type out all the whole word fingerprints, but you don't have time for the R. That's stupid. I know. There's a lot of reasons to hate the man. Howard's definitely culpable here.

Yeah. That's gross behavior. And for what it's worth, like Avalon during the call said some not pleasant things about Rose McGowan, because understandably they had a history. She has expressed a lot of regret about it and is obviously has solidarity for her for the whole being horribly abused by Harvey Weinstein thing. So yeah, that's like that's fucked up for a lot of reasons because you're not just trying to bury the accusations of a woman who was harmed.

You're like playing on somebody's heartbreak and pain in order to like it's just it's almost impossible to like look at something like a sexual assault and be like how can I make this worse? Just use a bunch of women and dry them out and then hope it helps protect a man who is trash. Yeah, it's almost like a work of art in terms of being shitty people. It took a lot of garbage all coming together to make this landfill. So yeah, Pecker and Howard are both pieces of crap as well as the reporter who did that

hatchet job. I feel like that's also a bad guy. There are gonna be a lot of terrible reporters in this story. But so we're already up to at least three or four other complicit people. Was this reporter someone who worked for like Inquirer? Yeah, it was an Inquirer reporter. Why would she ever talk to an Inquirer reporter? Because he kept calling her family and friends.

So she finally was like fine, I'll talk to you. If you won't talk to anyone else, I will talk to you. Interesting. That's like where it got. So yeah, there are I mean just when we're talking about just the press, there are dozens of people implicated in keeping Harvey's secrets and we're going to get into another one of those stories in a minute. But right now, we gotta sell some stuff.

You like stuff, right? Huge fan. You got wallets and money. Anyway, go grab some money, grab as much money as you can and then tune into these ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we are talking about Harvey Weinstein or rather the people who enabled him to do the things that he did, all of the other bastards in the Harvey Weinstein story. We just talked about two guys, Pecker and Howard, who both ran the company that owned the National Enquirer and the Enquirer essentially helped dig up dirt on Weinstein's accusers. Now we're going to talk about another story in that vein. In 2014, Emily Nester was working as a temporary employee for the Weinstein company. She'd been there a day when Weinstein promised to help her career if she fucked him.

Well, yeah. The old classic, I'll help your career if you fuck me. I mean, he waited a good three or four hours, which is a lot of restraint for Harvey Weinstein. She turned him down and then he made her keep turning him down for more than an hour. Emily complained to her coworkers and they did the right thing. They reported it to management and a formal complaint thingy was made. And this is the company he owns. Yeah, the Weinstein company.

So the management just means nothing really. Well, there's other people. It's a big company. There are other people and as we'll get into, there was some resistance from within the corporate structure to Harvey. Like the company bore his name, but he was too big a company to be in absolute control of. I hope so. Although obviously he had a lot of power. Anyway, other people reported a formal complaint thing is made and eventually the matter does get to Harvey. He invited Nester to breakfast right after that.

And I'm going to quote from another Ronan Farrow, New Yorker article here. Throughout the breakfast, she said, Weinstein interrupted their conversation to yell into his cell phone, enraged over a spat that Amy Adams, a star in the Weinstein movie Big Eyes, was having in the press. Afterward, Weinstein told Nester to keep an eye on the news cycle, which he promised would be spun in his favor. Later in the day, there were indeed negative news items about his opponents and Weinstein stopped by Nester's desk to be sure she'd seen them. By that point, Nester recalled, I was very afraid of him and I knew how well connected he was and how if I pissed him off, then I could never have a career in that industry. That's heartbreaking. Well, yeah, it's heartbreaking. And I wonder how knowledgeable the people who are.

So like, I feel like a guy like Howard who owns American or who's the CEO of American media has to know with this. Because obviously, if he's helping his buddy out with this, he's used his organs of press for the same sort of purposes. So he knows what this looks like on a human level and he probably gets off on the power of that too. I don't know about a guy like Howard who directs the reporter to like find the dirt. I don't know about the reporter, like if they really, like maybe you don't let yourself think about it, like what you're a part of. True, I'm sure there's some level of disassociation from what you're really doing in order to get your job done. But even so, like, I couldn't imagine working a job like that. It just seems like so, like you would be dead on the inside.

So crushing to know that what you're doing, you're interviewing someone, not even for an article. You're interviewing someone so that some like greasy fuck in a suit can exercise his power over what 20 year old woman who has a one billionth of the wealth that he has. Right. So this guy can feel powerful in front of her. Like that's what you're putting in eight hour days for is so some dirtbag you've never met can feel powerful. Right. Like how do you do that? And like, is that, when it comes to like what would be justice is the fact that you had to be that guy and probably have to drink being that guy away every night of your life.

Is that punishment? Like, I don't know. I wonder. Or I don't know, maybe they just hire like a group of like sociopaths who don't feel empathy to work for them. Like in the interview, they just ask you a series of questions to kind of nail down the type of person you are. And if you're willing to do the work that needs to be done to get the information that needs to be gone. Well, and as I look at this National Enquirer article in front of me, one of the other article titles is I'm not your real father, Harry Prince Charles drops wedding bombshell. Actually, if you look deep into that, there are some points they make that are quite convincing.

So, I mean, it is one of those things, though, like obviously anyone these these people were calling them reporters, but you should put quotation marks around the word reporter because they work for the Enquirer. But like, I don't know, maybe the maybe part of the mistake is with me and feeling like the fucking shit in these rags was ever kind of lighthearted. Like you think about like, oh, bad boy, you know, they're talking about kooky fun. Like it's that was my mom's explanation to me as a kid when I would see these and the same things. I'd be like, mom, is Saddam Hussein really going to murder our president? And she's like, no, it's the National Enquirer. Everything in it is a lie. Why does it exist? Oh, because people think it's fun to read. Yeah. Now, I guess, yeah, when I was young, they used to have a lot of like cat woman on that lady.

Yeah, it would be wacky stuff. Yeah, fucking moon Nazis. Yeah. Um, so Nestor, you know, took a settlement and left the company and didn't didn't pursue the matter any further. Because she was like, if I make a deal about this, then Harvey Weinstein is going to drag my name through the mud in the press. Right. Did they make her take an or sign an NDA? Yeah, I'm sure they did. This story is full of NDAs, like almost everybody that you're going to run into who had a settlement or even who's speaking out now had an NDA at one point.

Like, I guess it's one of those things that at this point, the NDAs aren't worth that much, but they clearly held the dam together for a while. Yeah. Um, so Weinstein had what the New York Times described as a network of friendly journalists, gossip columnist, magazine writers, editors and authors that he knew would help him by publishing articles that attacked his enemies. These aren't all all through the National Enquirer. They're not all through Howard. Like he he's a high place guy in the film industry, so he's dealing with press all the time because that's an important part of his legitimate job is like building up interest and whatnot on the projects he's working on. Um, so he just knew a lot of people that he could call and plant stories to like if he if he wants to make someone look bad, whether because they're accusing him or because he just wants to punish them. Well, he's got probably hundreds of guys on the line and you have to wonder how many of them even knew what they were a part of. Like Harvey Weinstein calls you and he's got a legitimate scoop about another famous person.

Do you think why is he leaking this to me or do you just run with a story? Oh, Harvey's on the line. Yeah, Harvey's on the line. He's got another scoop about Rose McGowan. People want to read about Rose McGowan doing something like maybe you. You're crazy somewhere that whatever he's made up. Yeah, so do you even like that's where the complicity gets hard for me like it's easy in a case like the email exchange between the inquirer guys that we talked about where it's someone being like go after this person get dirt on Rose McGowan bring it back so that we have something to hold over her head. That seems clear, but a lot of the there's probably people who are right now journalists and gossip writers who are just figuring like oh my God how many of the stories that I wrote based on scoops that he or his people gave me were part of this. That's why I don't understand it's like I mean maybe I didn't know about it because I don't in my life I have not ever come across Harvey Weinstein outside of just knowing he's a movie producer but I don't understand how if anyone even heard rumors about him being like a creep and a rapist and just like overall power

or mongering psycho I don't know it's hard for me to understand like not stepping away and be like oh I've heard a lot of bad things about this person like maybe I shouldn't be involved and I guess that's what you're talking about it's like. Because I feel like if you're so far removed from him like you're working out a paper and Harvey calls and he's got your team zero whatever yeah yeah like. There's doesn't feel like he could affect you that much I mean maybe he can but I feel like you should be able to just step away and be like you know what this is not a story I'm going to work on. But maybe you don't like he's not coming to you saying like hey I need to make this lady look bad here's here's some dirt on her he's saying like hey you want a story and as it's more of a. Yeah you're always like job you're always short on stuff to write about you're always looking for the next thing to cover this well connected guy comes to you with a story. Yeah but even if you've heard the rumors. I mean but what are the rumors you're hearing there they're probably not Harvey Weinstein's a rapist especially if you're a male reporter that's probably not what you're hearing you're hearing Harvey Weinstein's a womanizer Harvey Weinstein's an asshole with a temper. Maybe I'm just maybe I just hate men so I'm just out here not trying to help anybody well this story this this is not a story that will increase your faith in men or your faith in journalists.

So Weinstein owned a publishing house. And one of the things you run across in just sort of the stories of how he would manipulate people is he offered and in some cases gave shitloads of people book deals. Like that was a common way if you were a reporter that he really wanted to get to do some work for him and the work that was definitely going to be questionable. This is how he would get over your professional scruples or over your reticence to work with him so like it's one thing for Harvey to give you a call and be like hey I got this story about so and so you know maybe you write it. And it's another thing for him to be like I want you to help me gather dirt on this person which is what happened to a New York Daily News columnist named AJ Benza. So Weinstein invited Benza out to dinner in West Hollywood and told him in short that he needed help in keeping his mistress secret when he divorced his wife. Benza was on board for this and recalled to the New York Times that Harvey had said quote I could supply your peer or that he said to Harvey so this is Harvey's like hey I've got I'm divorcing my wife but it's not set up yet I've got a mistress I need to keep this shit on the down low. And then AJ Benza says to him I could supply your PR girls with a lot of gossip a lot of stories and if people come at them with the Harvey's having an affair story they can barter.

Mr. Benza says Weinstein replied AJ it's got to be good stories and AJ said don't you worry about it. So that's like that's how these conversations are apparently. So they're basically like hey instead of publishing this why don't you look at this. Yeah. Wow so it's a lot of like. Yeah. Is red herring the correct. Yeah yeah I think that's the correct term so it's a lot of yeah.

And so he's finding people who are well connected because like a guy like Benza he knows what people in the daily news and he probably has friends at other. Yeah. Rags of similar. So he knows. Oh this guy's working on a story that might implicate Weinstein in an affair or some other bad behavior. What if I promise to give him two or three stories about somebody else like that's the that's what Benza's offering to do for Weinstein. And that's how a lot of this gets done. So he claims he didn't know about any of the rape acts accusations or the sexual assaults and that that's possible.

Most of the people in the story who enabled Weinstein and one way or the other are folks like Benza. They're people whose defense to moral culpability is that they just thought Harvey Weinstein was a gross person not a rapist. So and Benza again there was like a book deal on the line like that was that was what Harvey was giving him is he was like I'm going to get you like a fucking book out of this. Which I can say when I think about like what I would do in his situation it's easy to say like no of course I wouldn't take that deal. But back before I'd had a book deal like part of me wonders if I just thought this guy was trying to keep his affair in the under wraps. Maybe you do it. Maybe you do it and you cringe and you tell yourself that getting the book out will make it OK because you've got something to say or whatever. It would always be this ickiness in the back of your mind thinking you didn't fully get it from your own worth ethic.

No and that's that's what I wonder with and we'll talk about Ben Affleck in a little bit but about the people who legitimately have to credit a lot of their fame and success to Harvey Weinstein. It's like how they because a lot of them knew something was up and do it and again like is there that feeling of like Impa is that why Ben Affleck has a terrible back tattoo and drinks too much because he knows that he's he's. I think Ben Affleck knows a lot of things that are slowly. Man that actually does make him a great candidate to play Batman. Yeah dark past. Yeah he might be the most appropriate casting of Batman that we could have gotten. Poor Benny. Yeah well no not in any way shape or form.

OK now that we've talked about AJ Benza. So yeah I don't know like what you're viewing on Benza's moral culpability here like is that how gross is that if he really just thought he was helping a man hide an affair. Oh I mean that's something I would not be interested in so it's hard for me to separate my own like dislike of that kind of situation from him. So that's my promise like taking this book deal you know why you got that book deal. It's not because you're the like someone wanted you because you're so great at writing. Yeah you have this story or whatever it's because you helped a man cover up an affair like that doesn't feel right to me doesn't sit right. Do you have any student loans. No.

OK did you ever at some point was that like a thing that was that like a cross you had to bear. No I my parents do well for themselves. OK sorry I didn't mean to get super personal. I had a bunch of student loans that were cleared off when I got a book deal. OK. And so it was one of those things there was like a there was obviously like a creative like that's something I always wanted to have a book in the library. That was a huge thing for me from like a kid but it was also like I can get under the weight of this crushing debt in one fell swoop. Right if I get someone to buy my book.

I don't know that Benza had something like that going on but I can see how that would be almost impossible to turn when you put it that way. It's like my that's what I'm saying. It's like it's hard for me to put myself in that position. So immediately I have this disdain like why would you do that. But of course I don't know where that person's background is. I don't know if he had a mother in the hospital. I don't know anything about who he had maybe he had to pay medical bills for someone or for himself. Like I can say I can say in AJ Benza's defense and I don't know if he actually knew about the like maybe he knew more than he says he did.

But if he didn't know about the assaults and the rapes I can imagine myself being in a situation where I would help a creepy rich guy cover up an affair for enough money to pay for my romantic partner to get health care or whatever kind of shit like deal with some crippling. I want to condemn him and like to an extent you got it because Harvey Weinstein rapes dozens of people probably. That's the problem. It's like in the long run though. Yeah things that came out would weigh heavy on him. If it must be empathy. I don't know he is he does work for the New York Daily News.

So maybe he's had the empathy burned out of him by this point. But I don't know. Yeah I like I said I got into this one and you just condemn a whole list of people and it's it's hard with almost every one of these which brings me organically to Harvey Weinstein's co-workers at the Weinstein company or I should say employees. So in 2004 Lucia Stoller now Lucia Evans no relation to. Did she change her name or she just got married. She got married. Yeah I'm going to call her Lucia Evans just because that's what she goes by now.

She met Harvey Weinstein at a club when she was a sophomore in college. He called her in the middle of the night and suggested that she meet him in his office to talk about her career. She did the very savvy smart thing and said she only did readings during the day and for a casting director. Right. So she's making all the moves at this point. So Harvey has his assistant call her and set up a daytime meeting. First with Weinstein and then with a female casting director who worked for him. So this assistant calls is OK you're going to have a meeting you're going to come in you're going to talk to Harvey and then you're going to talk to

some so and so this lady who was a casting director which seems legitimate. Yeah. And that's what she was like oh a woman great I feel safe like you're not just meeting with Harvey this isn't he wants you privately in his room like he's going to talk to you probably to let you know how the process works and then he's going to put you with a casting director who's a lady this all feels legit. I feel so nervous. So she arrives at the meeting and it's just Harvey Weinstein alone in a room full of exercise equipment and take out food boxes which I'm assuming didn't smell great. Just looking at Harvey Weinstein. What in the world.

You just eat and then maybe work out but maybe it's just there to look at so you think at some point you'll work out. I feel like most of that equipment never got used. No there's no way. Yeah. But that's the kind of thing you can do when you're that rich in addition to having people cover up your assault. You bring the exercise bike into the meeting room I'm going to get in shape fucking Harvey Weinstein going to jog asshole. So she gets into this creepy room and Weinstein immediately starts alternating between praising and insulting her. He'll make comments like you know you'd be great for this role if you'd lose some weight that sort of thing.

So he's like he's doing the drop in the negging or whatever you call it. He told her that he had two projects in mind for her and then he forced her to give him oral sex overpowering her physically when she told him to stop. Harvey acted like the encounter was no big deal. Evans wondered how his other employees could not know what was going on. After that meeting she did meet with a female casting director who sent her scripts and watched her do a read several weeks later. Evans doesn't think the casting director was in on it but it's hard to say. So yeah like that's one of those things like she might not have she might have been helping him do this without even knowing it because she wasn't in that initial meeting. She was just being used essentially as cover and he had her do the work.

The casting director that's too hard to believe that they have no sense of what's going on you know because don't people exit and look frazzled like. There must have been people who saw her and that's why she says she can't imagine they didn't know what was going on because she probably walked out of that room. That room horrified and traumatized and like people wouldn't meet her eye but it's one of those. The sheer weight of encounters like this and it sounds like there might have been hundreds over the time that he was you know over the 20 or 30 years. And I'll say this from everything I can read there's a couple of things you find out number one a good number of them would have been consensual. You know obviously there's the fucked up power dynamic of he's got a bunch of money and he holds the key for your career but he didn't have to physically force them. They were they were a lot of them were people who are like OK the deal is I fuck you and then I get a part in the movie and there are people who were down for that. So that happened.

I think a lot of this would be telling yourself that that's what's happening in order to feel better about it but you work for Harvey. You don't say oh he's assaulting another woman you say that's Harvey Weinstein he's sleeping with somebody else and she's going to get a role doing something. So maybe that's part of what was going on in their head but I do feel like some of these women clearly came out looking traumatized. I just died a little. Yeah yeah it's it's rough and it's another one of the they get obviously is messed up asking random people to meet you in hotel rooms and apartments. But people who are just legitimate business partners of Harvey's who condemn him and stuff right now now also say like that's what he did with everybody. Like if you were working with Harvey. You would meet with him at random hours of the night in his hotel or his apartment.

That was just like the style of predator he was. But I'm going to guess that evolved naturally out of the kind of person he was rather than he's not just inviting these people because obviously he's willing to assault them at the office. But that's also camouflages it because then nobody thinks it's weird that Harvey has these young actresses meeting him at whatever hotel because everybody meets him at the hotel. Yeah. There's not too much suspicion. Although again like it happened so often that at some point they had to know they were lying to themselves a little bit. And speaking of lying to yourselves a little bit. It's time to break for ads.

And so rather than ranting about the evils of money which is really easy to do on a podcast about Harvey Weinstein a man who bought his way into raping dozens of people. I would like to sell you guys some cool products. That was smooth. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records.

We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one my personal history is raw inspiring and mind blowing. And for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads. From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so we just talked about how Lucia Evans met him in 2004 and he tricked her into meeting her alone in a conference room and then forced her to give him oral sex. And we're kind of wondering about complicity because there was part of why she felt safe and going there as a female casting director was promised to be there. So it's hard to say if that casting director knew what was going on, Evans doesn't think she did. But it's definite that some of his assistants, Weinstein's assistants, were complicit and knew more or less what was going on. I'm going to quote here from the New York Times article, Harvey Weinstein's complicity machine. Quote, some low level assistants were pulled in, they compiled bibles that included hints on facilitating encounters with women and were required to procure his penile injections for erectile dysfunction. End quote. Yeah, yeah. Did these assistants know Harvey was a rapist? It's hard to say.

Most of the Weinstein company people who have talked will insist that they just thought Harvey was an abusive creep and not a sex predator. A group of like 30 of them sent a statement into the New Yorker, which I'm going to read now. We all knew that we were working for a man with an infamous temper. We did not know that we were working for a serial sexual predator. We knew that our boss could be manipulative. We did not know that he used his power to systematically assault and silence women. We had an idea that he was a womanizer who had extra marital affairs. We did not know he was a violent aggressor or an alleged rapist.

So that's kind of their defense to moral culpability. It's again, it's the same as Benz's. I knew he was a piece of shit. I didn't think he was raping women. Right. Because I guess once that door closes, your position in the company doesn't really allow you to know too much more. But still, it's just, God, I would lose my mind if I was one of those assistants today. Well, and some of them definitely knew what was going on behind that closed door. There is a story in a New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear that makes me heavily doubt that they weren't sure what was going on. It's from a woman who went to work at the Weinstein company and applied for a position that would have put her very close to Harvey. I think she was going to be one of his assistants if she got this job.

And she recalled to the New Yorker that a female executive took her aside and said that she was too pretty to work for Weinstein because she would embarrass him. She continued to push for the job and so a former Weinstein assistant took her to lunch and said, quote, do not take this job. You will see things you will never be able to unsee and you will do things you will never forgive yourself for. Wait, so was she kind of being like, you're too pretty for him? You'll embarrass him to just be like, that was like an excuse to be like, trust me, just don't. Yeah, that was the executive trying to try and nicely keep her away from this job. And then when that didn't work, they were like, okay, get the lady who had the job and have her be like, don't fucking do this. The lady, he will come for you. That is terrifying.

So it's clear from that that the people who worked with Harvey both knew he was a predator and we're aware enough of how dangerous he was that they would protect people when they could. Yeah. Or if they liked you and knew you, they would try to keep you away from him. And that, I mean, it's nice that this lady was saved from a bad situation, but it's kind of damning for a lot of these people on a moral level because then they weren't unsure of what was happening. You don't warn someone away from a job like that unless you know, oh, you're going to get fucking assaulted if you get close to him. Oh, God, that is the word. They really, that's the unfortunate thing. I wish they'd use that language instead of trying to like, protect the situation. Just be like, honey, if you take this job, he will try and have sex with you. And that is that. He will try. He will find a way to have sex with you if it means holding you down. That's what he does. We all know it and we still work here.

Please don't judge it, which is that's a harder conversation to say. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people in this story who I have to assume have spent the last 20 years drinking themselves to sleep. In his first big article on Weinstein, Ronan Farrow noted that 16 former and current executives and assistants who'd worked with or for Weinstein had told him about, quote, unwanted sexual advances in touching, unquote, that they'd witnessed at work. So again, that's not closed door stuff. That's people telling a journalist like, I saw him touch a lady and she wasn't having it. She did not want it. It was clearly not okay. That number included employees who were, quote, enlisted in a subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. These are referred to in a lot of the reporting as honeypots, which is like a spy term for like, I feel like Ronan Farrow is great.

Incredible journalism, deserves a Pulitzer and all that. I feel like honeypot is the wrong term for this because that's a term you use for like a sexy lady spy. Yeah. And she like seduces the guy to get what she needs from him. And these, the women that Harvey uses to lure other women into feeling safe of getting close to Harvey. Yeah, it's not really honeypotting. It's not a honeypot. Yeah. I don't know what term you use. That's more just like emotional manipulation using women to. It's camouflage.

Yeah. It's rapist camouflage. Yeah, I'd be like, look, you can trust another woman. There's another lady in here. Nothing's bad has ever happened in a room with two ladies and a creepy man. Jesus. Several female employees, assistants and executives would sometimes join meetings with Weinstein and a woman he was interested in. And then at some point midway through the meeting, Weinstein would dismiss them and they would all leave him alone with his victim.

One female executive explained, quote, there was a large volume of these types of meetings that Harvey would have with aspiring actresses and models. He would have them late at night, usually at hotel bars or in hotel rooms. And in order to make these women feel more comfortable, he would ask a female executive or assistant to start these meetings with him. So that's. So at one point they would just excuse themselves. Yeah, exactly. Or Harvey would make it clear that it was time for them to excuse themselves and then they'd all leave. Which that's copability right there.

Yeah, that's for sure. You're a party to a crime. Not that I think any of these people are ever going to get charged, but if they were, they'd deserve it, I guess. I don't even feel good. Like I want to. Even they could have just walked behind him and been like. Oh God. Yeah.

Okay. So the woman who related that last quote insisted that she never participated in any of these honeypot meetings. Although she said she was asked to do so, but at least one former employee did come forward to Ronan Farrow to admit to being used as a honeypot. She reported that in one of these meetings, like she was sitting down at a meeting with Weinstein and some lady Weinstein wanted to get with. And midway through the meeting Weinstein turned to her while he'd been flirting with this lady and said, tell her how good of a boyfriend I am. So like that's again, it doesn't sound like these were just were being camouflaged. Yeah. We're being camouflaged and we're trying to help our boss hit on strangers.

Yeah. They're like wingmanning him. Yeah, they're like wingmanning him into sex crimes. And so again, I really want to get judgmental about these people and maybe I should be really like I came into this podcast wanting to do that. But they all when you when you read anyone who worked with him now their comments on it, they all seemed like they were so scared. Yeah. Which makes it harder for me to have that kind of righteous anger you want in a story about a bunch of people enabling a mass rapist. That former employee, the one who was a honeypot said that he's been systematically doing this for a very long time.

And she said that she often thinks about one time when Harvey whispered to himself as far as she could tell, after he like shouted at a bunch of people and you know, just had one of his like temper tantrums. There are things I've done that nobody knows. Like he started like shouting and screaming and then like at the end of it was just like repeating that to himself. To me, if I heard that, that's a rap. That is a rap. That's a crazy person. He's saying that after you know some of the things he's done. Yeah.

Like you're if you don't know every word, you know. Because that shows his self-awareness that he knows goddamn well that he is ruining people. Yeah. And he does not give a fuck. No. And then that saying that almost be like don't fuck with me. I've done things. Yeah.

Well, and he there's stories he's threatened to kill people. And I in fact, I think it was Selma Hayek who said that he made like some sort of comment like I could have you killed during an argument. Right. She like stood up to him. Yeah. She wouldn't have sex with him to make the Frida Kahlo movie and he made like a bunch of ridiculous demands. And he was like, well, okay, if we're still going to make this, you have to find $10 million in funding on your own and this and then she like met all of these demands. And so then he made her do a topless sex scene with another woman in the movie.

Which she said she did because she didn't want to see everybody else's work put away. Yeah. Because you know what, but anyway, like, and he would regularly when you read any of these articles about him, there's people will talk about the threats he would make. And it was most more common for him to make threats like I can destroy your reputation. I can get like I know people I can get you in the news like this will be we've already covered a lot of that. So these women who are acting as honeypots who knew that they were luring other women into a dangerous man's embrace were also like terrified of him. And I don't know how much that reduces their guilt. It doesn't make it fun to judge them.

Sometimes you just have no choice or your life will be over and that's what sucks. Yeah. It's like you can't you can't judge them because because of his power. But part of you also kind of wishes they did a little bit more to make it clear like. They certainly had a chance to be heroes and they didn't take it. I don't know how much of a villain that makes them. But people got hurt because of their actions. One of the women it's probably worth noting that the New York Times interviewed who Weinstein had assaulted Ashley Matthau.

She was a dancer in one of his films and she said that his assistant kind of pushed her into a car and told her that she was going to have a meeting with Weinstein for business purposes in a hotel room. And when she got to the room Weinstein pushed her on a bed and masturbated on her. She has a much colder picture of how all of the people around him acted. Let's think I feel like they're so disassociated. Yeah. She says that she was crying and his female assistant wouldn't even acknowledge her and that it all seemed like a well oiled machine. So when you. So dark.

And again when you when you listen to these women or a lot of them are women but like any of the people who worked with him they all point out how scared they all were. But then you talk about the experiences the women that heart be assaulted who were on the other end of this machine that he constructed. And it seemed to him that just a bunch of people following orders coldly not willing to look you in the eye which again makes me think. That's evil. Yeah. And I'm too sympathetic for these people. Yeah. When you do this.

That's so evil to not even acknowledge a woman crying that you clearly put in that situation is. Oh God. Yeah. Deserve nothing. That's so terrible. And again you might come back around here with one about to talk to you because some of Weinstein's assistance did resist Michelle Franklin confronted Weinstein about his behavior. He told her that a pen her opinion didn't count and he fired her. It seems like most of the employees who went along with Harvey's behavior did so out of a mix of a need and a desire for money and a fear that he could destroy their career forever.

A good case study in this is an assistant named Sandeep Rahal. Part of her job was to keep him supplied with the injectable erection drugs Caberject and Alprostadil. Injectable. So you just shoot up real quick. You got to shoot him. Most of these I think you have to shoot into your dick. Straight into it like the reins. I know that some of them I've talked to a porn industry people who will use Trimax which is a gel that you shoot right into your dick because it's like it's like guaranteed.

Like if you have to perform for a camera like it'll make it happen. And if I'm remembering correctly one of his initial defenses to why he couldn't have raped some of these women is that like well I'm not in good health it's I can't even get erect. People paying you to shoot your dick. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway getting Harvey his dick drugs was part of Miss Rahal's unofficial duties and when she talked to the New York Times Miss Rahal recalled that Harvey had an in depth knowledge of her personal life. He'd regularly bring up her student loans. He mentioned that he knew her younger sister where she went to school and that he could have her kicked out of that school and he offered her an extra $500 every time she's applied him with his erection drugs.

So he really he had info on everybody. Yeah. And it's entirely possible Miss Rahal was I don't know how the time frames link up but she would have been one of these women probably not looking in the eyes of another woman who Harvey had just assaulted. Right. Does the fact that she thought like her sister might get kicked out of school or Harvey could fuck up her financial life like see then I come back around to like they're obviously more victims I guess the question is like how much how bad are they to. They're victims of the industry of like a system that is uncontrollable. Yeah. And that's part of Weinstein's evil was building a machine to help him do this rather than like Cosby.

There were some people who sort of helped keep it under wraps but it wasn't anything like this like for the most part it was one guy and some fucking roofies assaulting a ton of women. Weinstein built an engine but also the pieces of that engine are culpable. Yeah. Like almost every part of that engine could have fallen apart at any point though because people were probably losing their minds. Yeah. And Miss Rahal says that like part of her job was to clean Seaman stains off of his couch and he would grope her constantly like while she would do pretty much anything. She's I think suing him now. So she's clearly a victim but like she's also helping this like what are you.

That's so crazy to me. Yeah. It's fucked. It's totally fucked. If anyone ever touched me in the workplace I make it very clear right now to all my coworkers listening I will burn this place to the ground. That's crazy to me. Oh cleaning Seaman that is. Yeah.

Oh my God. Yeah. And think about like I'm trying not to delve too much into Harvey's mind in this because fuck that guy but like the kind of entitlement it is to get come stains on a couch and then make your employee clean them. Yeah. Jesus Christ man. It's super gross. So now that we've entered the realm of really unclear bastards let's swing back to somebody who is clearly a bad person in this or a bad group of people I should say the Manhattan district attorney's office. Oh yeah.

Yeah the whole DA's office while everyone is involved in this part. So in the Bill Cosby podcast we talked about how Bill status as America's dad and most beloved entertainer probably contributed to the police. I think also in New York choosing to ignore early reports of predatory behavior about him just because they were like no we're not going to go after Bill Cosby. Yeah. Harvey Weinstein is kind of the opposite case. He's always had a reputation as being a rich sleazebag liberal so the police were happy to go after him. In March of 2015 Harvey invited Amber Batellana to his office in Tribeca. Amber is a model and a Miss Italy finalist who was at that point 21 and looking to start an acting career.

She met with Weinstein and surprise surprise claims he lunged towards her grabbed her breasts demanded to know if they were real and tried to put his hand up her skirt. Then he gave her tickets to a Broadway show and told her he'd meet her that evening which there you go. She was angry. Yeah. Like you'd be and she went immediately to the NYPD and the NYPD was great about it. They said yeah that sounds like a fucking crime. Yeah. Let's do some police shit.

So the special victim squad took the case and asked Amber if she'd be willing to do what's called a controlled call. That's where the victim calls the suspect or whatever and talks to them on a recorded line in the hopes that they'll confess to whatever it is that they did. They never got a chance to do a controlled call because while she was talking to the cops Weinstein called Amber. He apologized for his behavior and then asked her to meet with him again in his hotel room. Wow. So the two guys convinced her to meet with him again and she was kind of freaking out about this. She didn't really want to meet with him but they were able to convince her to do it and they gave her I think two cell phones to record the conversations with. They met at the bar in the Tribeca Grand Hotel and Weinstein told her about all the women whose careers he'd helped and offered to pay for a dialect coach.

Then he asked her to go up to his room while he showered. She said no one number of times and went up like going to the bathroom and talking with the cops and they convinced her to go up with him. Still recording. But then she stopped outside of the door to his room and refused to go any further. And that's where this conversation happened and you can find the tape on the New Yorker but this is an NYPD tape. So we're just going to play that in full. Let's give you a chance to hear what Harvey Weinstein actually sounded like when he was trying to get a woman into a room with him. Please I swear I won't. Just sit with me. Don't embarrass me in the hotel here all the time.

I know but I don't want to. Please sit there. Please. One minute. No I can't. Go to the bathroom. Please. I don't want to do something I don't want to. Go to the bathroom. Come here. Listen to me. I want to go downstairs.

I'm not going to do anything. You'll never see me again after this. That's it. If you embarrass me in this hotel. I'm not embarrassing you. It's just that I don't feel comfortable. I mean don't have a fight with me. It's not nothing.

Please I'm not going to do anything. I swear my children please come in on everything. I'm a famous guy. I'm feeling very comfortable right now. Please come in now. And one minute. And if you want to leave when the guy comes with my jacket. Why yesterday you touched my priest.

Please I'm sorry. Just come on. I'm used to that. You're used to that? Yes. Come in. No but I'm not used to that. I won't do it again. Come on.

Sit here. Sit here for a minute. Please. No I don't want to. I'm going to leave this now. You embarrass me. I don't. I'm going to call me again.

I'm sorry. I promise you I won't do anything. I know but yesterday was too much. The guy's coming. I will never do another thing to you. Five minutes. Don't ruin your friendship with me for five minutes. I know but it's kind of like it's too much for me.

I can't. Please you're making a big scene here. But I want to leave. Okay. Goodbye. Thank you. Yeah. That was terrifying.

Yeah it's horrifying. You heard that line where he says, I swear on my children's lives. I was just reading again another article today where someone pointed out, I think it was one of his assistants actually was being interviewed and she said that was his go-to line.

To bring his kids up? To say whenever he wanted someone to trust him that he hadn't meant something or that he hadn't done anything bad. I swear on my children that I would never do anything. They would never do it. She said he was constant. There was so much to unpack on that.

Yeah. Like one, five minutes. I won't do anything. Clearly you're lying. The police wanted to go in and basically catch him on tape trying to assault her. Yeah.

They want to get as much as they can on tape. Which is a little messed up on their end too because I feel like they probably had enough at that point and they didn't have to force her up. How would she have escaped? Were they planning on busting through the door and stopping it? I don't think so.

There's so much there. That is just so fucked up. It's about to get fucked her. So Amber had had too much at that point. She left immediately after that call. She didn't go into the room with him. The police felt like they had enough evidence to press charges.

So they pressed charges. They took her to the Manhattan DA's office. The DA's office spent two weeks, which is a really long time for this sort of thing, investigating the case and then decided not to prosecute. Now, this may have had something to do with the avalanche of articles

that came out in the meantime. So as soon as... About her. About Amber. Yep, in a bunch of... Classic, Harvey. Yeah, yeah. It turned out she'd been a witness in a bribery case

against Italian president Silvio Berlusconi and an unwitting inviotee to one of his Bunga Bunga parties. You've heard of that. What's Bunga Bunga party? Silvio Berlusconi is a creepy fuck who would have sex parties. She wound up at one of those not knowing what it was

and I think left. But anyway, she was like a witness in a bribery case against him. She had also previously accused an Italian businessman who she'd had a relationship with, I think, of sexual assault. And I guess the DA decided she wasn't credible enough.

Yeah. That it was just beyond the pale that an Italian supermodel would have had three inappropriate interactions with men in her life, which is like... It seems like if those are the only three times that she's been around creepy guys, I'm surprised. Yeah, I feel like...

Oh, God. People really don't give a shit about women. No, and it's likely that the DA probably got cold feet because of a prior high profile case where Dominic Strauss-Kahn, who was a bigwig with the IMF and a French politician guy, had gotten charged with the rape of a hotel maid.

They had to drop the charges against him because of issues with the witness's credibility. It's an interesting story. You should read into it. But for this, our purpose is the DA was scared of a repeat. And so, like everybody else in this story, who enabled Harvey Weinstein,

they were frightened for what going up against him could do to their careers, and so they backed down. Amber understandably lost any kind of faith in the American legal system. She settled privately with Weinstein. As part of the settlement, she was required to hand all of her personal electronic devices over to a company called Kroll.

Now, Kroll is a security services company. Their website claims that they're the, quote, leading global provider of risk solutions. I've heard that name before. Yeah, what they are is rent-a-spies. And that brings us to the end of today's podcast and is where we're going to start at part two, which is the army of spies that Harvey Weinstein

hired and utilized in order to keep his secrets. These are probably the clearest monsters other than some of the people at the inquire of this story outside of Harvey Weinstein, and it is quite a thing to unpack. So, if you want to join us on Thursday, we'll be getting into all that and finishing up the saga of all the mini-bastards

of Harvey Weinstein. Until then, I am Robert Evans, and my guest has been. I am Anna Hosnie, and I am horrified. You want to tell the people where they can find you on the interweb? Sure, you can follow me on Twitter, at Anna Hosnie, A-N-N-A-H-O-S-S-N-I-E-H. You can listen to my podcast, Ethnically Ambiguous,

on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. And you can follow my podcast on Twitter, at Ethnically Amb, A-M-B, on Twitter, where we post a lot of information about Middle Eastern news. You can find me on Twitter at, I write okay, where I also post a lot about Middle Eastern news.

You can find this podcast on Twitter at BastardsPod. You can find our website at behindthebastards.com, which will have some terrible pictures of Harvey Weinstein looking like a schlub, and as well as the sources, if you want to do more reading for yourselves. So, until Thursday, I'm Robert Evans.

Please keep feeling like you're covered in grease, because that's how I feel right now. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.