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

Episode Date: May 31, 2018

This is Part Two of, 'It Takes a Village of Bastards to Make a Weinstein.' Robert is joined again by Anna Hossnieh (Ethnically Ambiguous Podcast) and they discuss the people who enabled Harvey Weinstein.  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?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, dear Internet friends. I'm Robert Evans, and this is again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And this is part two of our two-parter episode on Harvey Weinstein. In part one, we started outlining all of the different people who had to essentially compromise their morality, do outright terrible things or questionable things in order to allow Harvey to prey on women

and get away with it for decades. And in this episode, we're doing more of that, starting with Harvey Weinstein's spy army. But before we get into that, I would like to introduce my guest for this episode, same guest we had last time, Anna Hosnia, a co-host of the ethnically ambiguous podcast and other things. Thank you for having me. Yeah.

All right, we're getting back into Harvey Weinstein's spy army. So Harvey Weinstein's net worth, at least before all this came crashing down on him, was generally reported as being in the $200 to $300 million range. Same. Really? No. Could you imagine? So this means he has enough disposable income to not just buy off people,

but pay for the services of companies. Two days ago, we talked about a company called Kroll. When Harvey would settle with people, he would have this security company go through their phones and electronic devices. Right, and fun fact, it's Nick Kroll's family, the comedian. Really? Yeah, same family. Really?

That's his grandfather's company. Well, that's unsettling. Really? Yeah. Two days ago, when I was like, oh, that's a familiar name, you didn't catch what I meant by that, I'm just crazy. No, no, I didn't catch what she meant at all. I didn't even think about, I figured it was like,

Kroll was some sort of weird acronym for something. Oh, no, that's their last name. Okay, well, so Weinstein hired Kroll security services to do things like when he would settle with a woman, they would go through all of that lady's devices to make sure she hadn't recorded Weinstein saying anything, didn't have any pictures of him. It was part of how he sort of cleaned up after himself. And in 2016, Dan Carson, chairman of Kroll's Investigations and Disputes Division, sent Harvey 11 photos of Rose McGowan and he together at events over the years

since the alleged assault. These were photographs of them having conversations, smiling. Kroll's whole goal there was to find as many pictures as they could of Rose McGowan talking to Harvey Weinstein and looking comfortable. To use against her to be like, look at them, what a great relationship, they love each other. Yeah, if she had a problem with him, why is she smiling in this picture with him? She's not stuck in a system that's oppressing her from start to the end, you know, no big deal. Yeah, so as soon as he got the photos from Kroll, Harvey sent them over to his defense attorney,

who called one picture of Rose and Harvey having a friendly chat, quote, the money shot, which is... That's disturbing. Yeah, it's like a omelette of grossness. When Weinstein was meeting with a reporter from New York Magazine, Kroll sent him a summary of criticisms of the reporter's past work, as well as a profile on the reporter's ex-wife noting it, quote, might prove relevant to considerations of our response strategy when Wallace's article

and our client is finally published. So basically, he got to use Kroll as sort of like an external brain almost, like he's like, this woman's gonna come out, I need someone to go through publicly available images and find everything you can that makes her look like my friend or whatever. That's what this company would do for him. It's skeevy, but nothing he's using Kroll for is super nefarious. Right, it's just more like a story manipulator. Yeah, I need someone to Google for a long time.

And so that I can then use the information they bring up. So that's what Kroll's doing. So I guess in Nick Kroll's family's defense, nothing that I've read about them doing is nightmarish yet. That changes when we get to a little company Weinstein also hired called Black Cube. Legends. Yeah, so Black Cube's website describes the company as, quote, a select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units

that specializes in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges. Yeah, so I spent some time on their website. I figured that Black Cube's work for Weinstein would fall under the litigation challenges category, because it seems like a challenging case with like 85 women accusing him now. So I moseyed over to the litigation support section of their website, and I read it and now I'm gonna read it to you. Understanding your opponent is a key element when building a strategy for a complex situation. Black Cube supports litigation processes by identifying your opponent's vulnerabilities, interests, priorities, and strategy.

Using our unique intelligence methodology, Black Cube enhances its clients' decision-making by providing otherwise unobtainable information. We help our clients identify their adversaries' sensitive points or vulnerabilities or evidence of their misconduct. Sounds like a show that Shondra Rhymes would make. Sorry, was that too much of a deep cut? That was a deeper cut than I was comfortable understanding. Like scandal, how to get a murder.

She loves that political operatives who are trying to find ways to use something against you. Well, that's exactly what they're doing. That's exactly how they frame it. We're helping our clients with their adversaries, and the reality is that they were helping a multiple-rapist attack women. Well, it's not sully the good name of fixers. I've got a great fixers in my time. True, but a lot of fixers do tend to get their hands dirty.

Yeah, and these people get their hands very dirty. In May of 2017, Rose McGowan got an email from Diana Philip, a high-ranking executive at Reuben Capital Partners. Philip explained that she was funding a program to fight workplace discrimination and wanted to know if Rose would speak at the program's kickoff event. She offered to pay $60,000, which I talked to anybody for $60,000. The two women met three times over the next two months to talk about women's empowerment and other issues. Rose found her very kind and eventually Diana Philip offered to invest in Rose McGowan's production company.

During one of their talks, McGowan mentioned that she was talking to Ronan Farrow about Weinstein. A week later, Philip emailed Farrow and asked him to meet with her. Farrow never responded because he's a smart guy. Yeah, he's like, well, it smells fishy. It smells weird. When the New Yorker published his first big Weinstein story three months later, Diana Philip emailed Rose McGowan. Hi, love. How are you feeling? Just wanted to tell you how brave I think you are. As you might have guessed, Diana Philip isn't a real person.

It's an alias made up by a former Israeli intelligence officer working for BlackCube. Philip and her entire company and its online footprint were all inventions of BlackCube. And a story just came out like the day we recorded this podcast, I think NBC put it out, where BlackCube was also fishing around the wives of several Obama administration employees to try and find compromising information it could use to make the Iran deal look bad. And the capital company that they pretended to be from was the same capital company. They just have this one fake company that they always pretend to work with, even though the stories have been out for a while now.

That's the thing is they email pretending to be someone else trying to help you to get into your life. Yeah, usually pretending to be someone with money so that they can be like, oh, I'm looking at investing or I can help you set up this or that. Yeah, I'm literally never responding to an email again. Yeah, never let anyone give you money. They are the Mossad. It's BlackCube. I won't even take pay for work.

It's all the Mossad. So one of the men who helped Weinstein coordinate his espionage efforts and really handled the direct interface with BlackCube was an attorney named David Boyce. He has an otherwise laudable career. He defended Al Gore in the 2000 election dispute and he argued for marriage equality with the Supreme Court. So he seems like a great guy. Yeah, seems like he's on the right path. That's actually terrifying.

Yeah, that you can be on the right side of history arguing in favor of gay marriage to the Supreme Court. But then on the other side to help manage Harvey Weinstein's spy army. Oh, Jesus. Trust no one, man. Well, just don't trust lawyers for fucking sure. So in 2017, while he was working for Weinstein, David Boyce signed a contract with BlackCube that defined their primary objectives as to, quote, provide intelligence which will help the client's efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading New York newspaper. Now, at this point, I should note that this leading New York newspaper was The New York Times.

Yeah, so that first article was Megan Tauhey and Joey Cantor. Apologies if I'm mispronouncing that. But this is the article that Boyce and BlackCube were trying to stop. Now, there seems like there might be a conflict of interest there because David Boyce and his firm were working for The New York Times as well defending them in a libel case at the same time. So obviously, when Ronan Farrow got into his reporting, he interviewed Boyce and he was like, this seems like a giant fucking conflict of interest. Boyce actually would speak to him. Yeah, Boyce did speak to him. As a representative for Weinstein? No, no, just talking to him, like, ask him, because Farrow had specific questions about Boyce's work with Weinstein.

And I think he just decided like it was better to talk than to, than to not for whatever reason. But when he was, it was a question if this was a conflict of interest because he was working for The New York Times, he basically said that it wasn't a conflict of interest because if BlackCube had found information that showed the, that Weinstein's accusers were lying, then that would be in the Times's best interest. Convenient. Yeah, exactly. He's a gigantic weasel. Yeah.

Which is kind of a bummer from a guy who otherwise sounded like a crusading hero lawyer. And he's not the only progressive gold star to get tarnished by the living poop cloud that is Harvey Weinstein. You ever heard of Lisa Bloom? Yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. She's an American civil rights attorney. She represented the women whose sexual assault allegations got Bella O'Reilly fired. Yeah.

In 2016, she represented several women who claimed Donald Trump had sexually assaulted them. Do you remember the anonymous woman who said that then candidate Trump had raped her when she was 13? Yeah. She was supposed to reveal herself at a press conference but backed away at the last moment under threats. Lisa Bloom was her attorney as well. She was also Black China's attorney. She was Black China's attorney. Yes.

So Lisa Bloom, another person with a great reputation, particularly when it comes to defending women who have been abused by powerful men. Right. And in fall of 2016, Lisa Bloom took a job with Harvey Weinstein. It sounded like the board was worried about the mountain of complaints and accusations. The story hadn't entirely broken yet, but you know, Rose McGowan I think was still was open at this point. And it was, they were basically trying to have her counsel him into being a better person so that it would improve his personal PR. And maybe help them get out ahead of any future stories that came out. I hate that kind of stuff.

Yeah, it's gross. So she sat down with Weinstein to decide if she wanted to take this job. And she says that he admitted that he had, quote, verbally made a lot of inappropriate remarks to women both inside the workplace and outside the workplace. End quote. But she's claiming she did not know anything about the abuse. Yes. That's why she took the gig. Yes, she's claiming she thought that he was admitting to being a gross guy who sexually harassed women but not assaulted and raped them.

And so she thought it was an opportunity to teach him and make him a better person. She lectured to him that hitting on these women wasn't okay because of the power imbalance. And I'm going to, I'm going to quote from the LA Times article here, which is quoting Lisa Bloom. He would repeat back to me the power imbalance, Lisa. I get it. I see it. He choked up. I don't know what's wrong with me.

I'm sick. I'm stupid. I've hurt people. What can I do now? And I said, you need to apologize. You can't turn back time, but you can do the right thing now. Don't go after the women and get help and stop it. He said, will you work with me to do that?

And I said, yes, I will. So. God, that sounds so PR. It's super gross. Who wrote that? Lisa Bloom. Yeah. So when the New York Times article dropped, Lisa Bloom showed up on Good Morning America to call Weinstein's behavior gross.

But also to say that he was genuinely remorseful. She said he was an old dinosaur struggling to adapt to new ways, basically. And that was the initial Weinstein line, as I did bad things. Right. And it's not like he's that old, you know? No, he's not. He's not. Also, pretty sure Steven Spielberg is older.

He's got a lot of power. Yeah. Don't think he raped dozens of people. He's not being creepy. Yeah. I mean, he may have been creepy, but he certainly didn't do this. I hate that whole. He's too old.

He doesn't understand. It's like, sure. You could say that for Twitter. But you can say that for harassing and sexually assaulting women. I'm sorry. But even back in the day, it wasn't okay to sexually assault a woman. Yeah. You could say that if he was calling women doll in the office and needed a talking to.

You can't say that when he grabs Rose McGowan and forces. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Like it's not the old, you can't use the old man excuse anymore. Yeah. Yeah. It's not.

Yeah. It just doesn't fly anymore. So yeah. So Lisa Bloom's role in the Weinstein machine was basically assuring the world that Harvey was very sorry about being a bad boy and totally committed to doing better. Some people attacked her for the seeming betrayal of all the victims she's represented. In an interview with the LA Times, Lisa explained that those women were why she decided to work with Harvey.

Quote. If there's a woman in my office crying, why won't he just admit it? Why does this have to be an open wound for my entire life? I don't want to litigate Lisa. Almost every single one comes to me and says if he would just apologize, then we could move on. End quote. Which I feel like is kind of bullshit.

If he again, if he had been really rude to a lot of women, that would make sense. But he committed crimes. The answer to a man who rapes dozens of women probably is not make him apologize. It's make him go to jail. Yeah. Maybe for his crimes. Yeah. And again, she says she didn't know about the rape or the assault.

Maybe that's true. Maybe they offered her a lot of money. I'm certain they offered her a lot of money. Based on my understanding of her, she seemed like she knew what she was doing. And then this happens and it's like, I don't understand. It's either a lot of money. Some of it may have been, you know, Harvey was a big progressive donor, you know, big donor to the, we'll get into the cleanse a little bit, big donor to a lot of good causes.

And maybe she thought he deserved a second chance or something. It feels like she knows better. It does. It felt like she would know better that this kind of person is not someone you can just make apologize. And all these women who've been harmed by him can just snap back like, well, he said, sorry. So now all my PTSD from being sexually assaulted, we'll just walk right out the door and I'm

fine. Let's go get some coffee. Like it's so much more than that. There's so much more, many, I'm about to lose my mind. Well, yeah, and that quote from the LA Times from her makes me think that she's full of shit, because the way she outlines that conversation with him sounds like a scene in a movie where the music swells. I just want to try to be better.

Can you help me? I don't understand. Yeah. And then it's like Pygmalion, but with sexism, um, Harvey, you got to try, give me a break. Yeah. Um, so Lisa Bloom, uh, insists that Harvey Weinstein dictated the entire apology that he sent out after the New York Times article was released. It's my personal conspiracy theory based on the things I've read about her that Bloom

either outright wrote his apology or heavily influenced it with direct advice on what to say. I'm going to read the apology. Let me know. I believe you. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Well, then I'll go into a couple of lines from the apology that makes me. First, it starts with him saying, I came of age in the 60s and 70s when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then. So one of her first things was saying he's a dinosaur from a different era, uh, he apologizes in the apology to anyone he may have hurt, which is at the time it came out at the start of this me too thing that was not the standard for a man who had been accused of this. It was like deny, deny, deny, which again makes me think that, that this is because

she was big on, no, you've got to apologize. You don't deny. You hit it on, which is again, good advice if you're not a rapist, if you're just a guy who fucked up, um, but then Harvey says, uh, over the last year, I've asked Lisa Bloom to tutor me and she's put together a team of people I brought on therapists and I plan to take a leave of absence from my company to deal with this issue head on. And then he misquotes, uh, Jay-Z lyrics, yada, yada, yada. And he ends by saying that he's going to give the NRA his full attention.

So he goes through his whole apology where he's saying like, I've been trying to do this for 10 years. This is a wake up call. I can't be more remorseful about the people I've hurt and I plan to do right by all of them. And then he says, I'm going to need a place to channel that anger. So I've decided that I'm going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party.

I'm going to do it at the same place I had my bar mitzvah. I'm making a movie about our president. Perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party. One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors at USC. Well, this might seem coincidental. It has been in the works for a year. It will be named after my mom and I won't disappoint her.

Yeah. It's like the sleaziest fucking thing in the world. Fuck you, Weinstein. And I feel like her hands are all over that. Yeah. Well, I feel like rarely are people like that are allowed to actually put their own thoughts because they can be such wild cards. Yeah.

And why would you want to if you've just hired this woman whose whole job is number one, she's got street cred as someone who's represented a lot of women in these cases. I feel like it was either the money or the prestige of getting to reform someone like Weinstein that got her in, but she definitely compromised. Her mother's a famous rights civil rights. Yeah. Her mother's Gloria Alred. Yes.

It wasn't her mom kind of like. Yeah. Her mom was something along the lines of, if I have to go into court against Weinstein and fight my daughter in court, I'll be willing to do it, something like that. Before you spoke up, I said the word compromised about Lisa Bloom. And I was going to use that as a lead into our ads by saying you won't have to compromise with these products and or services, which we're now advertising. So that's what I did.

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I don't want to say that if the women Lisa Bloom was talking to were saying all they wanted was an apology in their specific cases, I'm not saying that they're wrong or anything. But at the point at which she was saying this, there were people who were out and vocal about the stuff that Harvey had done, including Rose McGowan, I'm pretty sure. And those people were not happy with just an apology. So I don't know, it seems a little messed up to me. Maybe she just really thought he was just a sexual harasser. I don't know.

It's probably worth noting that I mean, there's a couple of things that are worth noting here when we talk about her culpability. First of all, is that she left Weinstein's employee like immediately after everything broke, like like a couple of days after I think she was on Good Morning America, I think 48 hours after the article dropped, she was out. She distanced herself from Weinstein once the rape allegations, you know, way in over her head. Yeah.

Wait a second. Yeah. She said, I was never aware there were allegations of sexual assault. Should I have, based on my log experience as a sexual harassment lawyer, assumed that it could have been a lot worse than what I knew? Yes, I should have assumed that. That's on me. So she acknowledged a fuck up.

Rose McGowan did claim that before she was fired, Lisa Bloom offered her money. If she quote, got on the Harvey's changed bandwagon, Lisa has denied this. Either Lisa Bloom client was Roy Price, Amazon studio chief and also the recipient of his own sexual harassment allegations. Kim Masters, the journalist who broke the price story, claims Lisa quote, spread rumors about her in order to kill a story. Lisa has also denied this. For her part, Lisa Bloom has admitted that representing Harvey was a huge mistake.

She hasn't said whether or not the fact that the Weinstein company was looking at turning her book about Trayvon Martin into a TV show had anything to do with her support for Harvey. Maybe it did. That's what's crazy is like, power and money is so, it will make people just lose their ability to just see right from wrong. That's really like the core of this story because he was one of the very few people in the world who could make anything a movie or a TV show. If he did, snap his fingers and say, your book's a TV, it's a TV show.

He's got that kind of cash. He made fucking, yeah, so. I hope their Thanksgiving with her mother was so awkward and just filled with silent looks of disapproval towards her. I hope that her book about Trayvon Martin, well, I don't know. I want to say I hope it didn't do well, but it's an important story. That's what's crazy. Is she another one of those people who publicly champions women and women's rights and all

this stuff and then is privately like just here for showing her reputation as a certain person? I am dying. Is she making the calculation the world's an ugly place? You gotta win when you can and everything's not going to be a victory. This guy's a creep, but the Trayvon Martin story is important. If I work with him, I can get my book made into a TV show and we'll do more net good than the harm that I'll do by helping this creep look like he's reformed.

I don't know. I struggle with that so much because yeah, that story's important, but championing this white male who has allegations against him that are just so dark and fucked up, again, this is me seeing it through my own bias, but it's just too much. I will never be able to understand people who can do that. I mean, give me five years, maybe I make a certain amount of money and next thing you know, I'm supporting Harvey Weinstein, who knows. It's a mess.

I don't care for it. Yeah, the amount's $5 million. The one who's worth $5 million or more is a fan of his. Okay. I'll talk to me in a few years. Let's see if I have the money. So yeah, I'm comfortable throwing some judgment, Lisa Bloomsway, and while we're talking about famous people that we want to judge, it's time to move on to my favorite candidate for

bastard of this podcast, Ben Affleck. Now in case you didn't know, have you heard of Ben Affleck, this guy? Oh, have I? He is a man with a terrible back tattoo who became rich and famous thanks to a movie called Good Will Hunting, and now he is Batman. Good Will Hunting was produced by Harvey Weinstein. I think Clerks as well. He was in that, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Wait, what's he in Clerks? No, he was in a Clerks. He's just a friend of Kevin Smith, right? Yeah. But he wasn't in that.

No, he was in... They did like Dogma or something together. Dogma. Is that what it was? Yeah, he's definitely in Dogma, right? Yeah, he is in Dogma. And so is Damon. Anyway.

So Ben Affleck, five days after the New York Times article dropped, Affleck released a statement that he was angry over the allegations about Weinstein and said, quote, I find myself asking what I can do to make sure this doesn't happen to others. He took a lot of flack for being late to the apology table because most of the people who'd worked closely with Weinstein had said something much faster. I'm not sure how very I think that that accusation is, but Rose McGowan was very angry at him. She tweeted this response after he sent out his statement, at Ben Affleck, God damn it, I told him to stop doing that.

You said that to my face, the press conference I was made to go to after the assault. You lie. So for a little bit of backstory, her claim is that Weinstein raped her in a, I think it was a jacuzzi, and immediately afterwards she had to go do like a press junket thing. And Ben Affleck saw her like shaking and traumatized like you'd be after a rape and was like, what's going on? And she told him what had happened. And then he said, God damn it, I told him to stop doing that. Which is what, eating too much?

Yeah. Like something so basic? That's a weird reaction. Yeah. Gosh darn. I think it's Ben Affleck was like, oh, traumatized, I know I have to be angry, so all faint anger. I'm Ben Affleck, human robot. Why don't you call the police instead of just telling him to stop doing that?

Maybe call the fucking cops. Someone just reported a rape to you. Harvey. Please. Harvey. Not again. So Weinstein's defense team jumped on this as an excuse to discredit Rose McGowan. They published an email from Affleck to Weinstein in early 2016 before the accusations broke.

The emails. Did it say, I have no idea of anything wrong you do? Yeah, that's exactly what it says. It's titled Rose McGowan and Ben Affleck says, she never told me nor did I ever infer that she was attacked by anyone. Many accounts to the contrary are false. I have no knowledge about anything Rose did or claimed to have done. Accounts otherwise are lies.

Wow. This is what he said to Weinstein in a private email that then Weinstein had released in order to try to discredit McGowan. That's how I send private emails too, just in case someone needs to release it in the future. So Affleck publicly says he supports and believes Rose McGowan. He's against Weinstein on this. I don't think he's addressed that email directly.

But what this says to me is that Affleck is just a gutless people pleaser. He sees her traumatized and so he does what he thinks she'll appreciate in the moment. Harvey asks him if she said anything and he denies it. Now that the issue is public, he's going to take Rose aside because he knows which way is the winds blowing, but he's basically a coward. That's Ben Affleck in a nutshell, I'm feeling. Yeah, and I think it's starting to wear on him because now he just looks crazy in any photo like he's been drinking and he always looks like he just stopped crying.

The back-tet. You've seen the back-tet. Oh, yeah. That's Falcon. It is an abomination. It's garbage is what it is. It looks like the eagle on the Mexican flag had a baby with like a bad watercolor painting of Snoopy.

Yeah, that's a phoenix. It's a phoenix. It's just bad. It's stupid. I'm bad at describing tattoos as well, which is my other podcast. Robert Evans describes tattoos poorly, but we'll have a picture of his terrible back tattoo. Oh, yeah.

And since the whole Me Too damn broke, Ben Affleck has been accused of groping and harassment by several women. There's a Vox article. We'll throw up on the side that gives a good breakdown. Number of it's on video. You can actually see him being creepy. Oh, yeah. That Hillary Burton one on Netflix.

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing what a fucking creepy is. He's apologized for that and he seems to be hoping his sight of things blows over. Convenient. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, like, again, we're already very late into this. We've talked about a lot of people.

I've done a lot of research. I don't really know where to stop when it comes to bringing it, people who might have been complicit. There are like the clear cases, the honeypots, the lawyers, the spies, the journalists that he had working with him. I have one question for you. Do you think, because Meryl Streep came out and said, I had no idea, do you think she had any sense of it?

She's the one I never could figure out. I could see it being possible because she has been such a huge star the entire time. Harvey Weinstein's been worth talking about that maybe she was protected. Maybe number one, he was like, because he usually went with people at the start of their career or kind of early on that he had some because nobody's got leverage over Meryl Streep. So I can definitely see he never was creepy to her because that would have been suicide. That's the thing. I feel like she was at a powerful enough bubble that they were almost protecting her from

such knowledge. And I think that's possible because it also, I doubt anyone would have needed to warn her about him because she's fucking Meryl Streep. She's not going to wind up in that situation. She's just too famous and rich. That said, it does seem like almost everybody who was famous and in movies pretty much knew what Harvey Weinstein was and I'd be kind of surprised if she'd never heard anything. Was she ever involved in any of the movies he produced?

I mean, Miramax made a shitload of stuff. So maybe. Or at some point they had crossed paths because yeah, she's in a lot of stuff. Yeah. I don't know. Like that's the kind of thing. I want to say like Mamma Mia, but that just feels like a Miramax Weinstein situation. I didn't find any clear evidence of her being, you know, complicit in any of this.

I didn't find any clear evidence of his wife being complicit, Georgina, and she said that she didn't even know he was cheating on her. And it's not impossible. Like they spent a lot of time apart. He was always in hotels and it's always in hotels and stuff and in private apartments that he had his assistants keep for him. Like he had private bang apartments and stuff. Naturally.

Yeah. Yeah. His assistants would keep him stocked with lingerie and whatnot. So it's possible she didn't. Yeah. I mean, he also seems like he could be like an annoying husband, so I'm sure she was fine with him. Yeah.

I wouldn't want to be around Harvey Weinstein. I don't. Again, it's kind of tough where to draw the line at like people to stop searching for complicity. And I think Hillary Clinton might wind up on the list if we have a wide enough definition of anything. You know, I would agree with that. Yeah.

Yeah. Weinstein donated her and her husband huge amounts of money over the years. He invited Hillary to movie premieres. He helped advise her Senate campaign in 2000. Back in 2016, during the election, Lena Dunham warned the Clinton campaign that Harvey was quote a rapist. Magazine editor Tina Brown also warned members of the campaign about Weinstein. No actions were taken by anyone in the Clinton camp to distance themselves from Weinstein.

Several days after losing the election, the Clintons had dinner with Harvey. They were planning a new TV documentary about her campaign. The talks only stopped after the New York Times article dropped. See, that's the thing is Hillary feels like a woman of convenience. And if it does not directly affect her and the cloud isn't over his head yet, what does it mean to her? Yeah. She's not affected by any of these people.

He's not going to hurt her. Yeah. And that's... Yeah. I would say that's probably fair. Yeah. So, the Weinstein story is so gross that even a lot of the guys who... Like when you read through the New York articles and stuff, there's a couple of people from

within the Weinstein company who seem like good guys, at least on first blush. Ivan Ryder is one of them. He was a senior executive of the Weinstein company. He should have been Ronan Farrow's articles a lot. He was... He worked with Harvey for decades. And when he learned that Lisa Evans from our Lost podcast had been harassed by Weinstein, he reached out to her and he basically told her that I fought with him about the mistreatment

of women for three weeks before the incident with you. I even wrote him an email that got me labeled by him as sex police. The fight I had with him about you was epic. I told him if you were my daughter, he would not have made out so well. And this is not someone who alleges Harvey raped her, by the way. So Ryder definitely opposed Weinstein from within the company. He refused to speak favorably of him to reporters, even when Harvey threatened to dig up dirt on him.

And he seems like one of the few good guys in this situation. But it's also worth noting that he only really started fighting back in 2014 and his objections to Harvey were on financial grounds. Basically he found out that Weinstein had been using his company credit card to pay to tip yacht staff, private jet flights to Europe to like fly models around and stuff for basically things to do with his affairs. He was using the company as a separate... Very typical behavior.

Exactly. And that's when Ivan Ryder really stood up. That's when he really started to care when money was involved. Yeah, here's how the New York Times put it. Concerned that his boss's activities were, quote, going to take the company down, Mr. Ryder and other executives decided they should act. Wow, so it was mostly self-interest at that point. Mostly self-interest.

Oh, God. So again, everyone in this story only does anything good or evil in fairness when their career is in jeopardy. I also don't like that line, if you were my daughter. It's like... Yeah. Who cares? Who's daughter?

She's someone's daughter. Someone's being. Yeah. Ugh. Which is, again, I don't want to yell at him for being the one person who actually spoke to one of his victims and was like, this is fucked up because no one else did. So he gets some credit. But good is a low bar in the Harvey Weinstein story.

It's like you still didn't call the police. Yeah. You didn't say anything to anyone else, really. Yeah, it is a very low bar. Another possible hero in this is a woman named Donna Gigliotti. In 1998, she helped one of Harvey's victims seek legal counsel and advised her on how to get a good settlement out of him because he settled with like a dozen women over the years, which is, again, people knew about this stuff.

There were accusations. He just was able to pay it off for a long time. And Donna Gigliotti is one of the women who knew about this because she helped one of these victims. But in 2010, when Harvey offered her a job as president of production at the Weinstein Company, she took it. Yeah. Everyone's got a price.

It's so crazy. Everybody's got a price and everyone is willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to keep their career rolling along, which I guess you could call Hollywood in a nutshell, even though I don't want to believe that because I fucking work here, too. This scares me. Like, who am I going to become? Yeah. Oh, boy.

Yeah. Well, you just wait till you hit that $5 million mark. Yeah. Again, it's hard not to read all of this and to come to the conclusion that there was just way too much money at stake for 99% of the people involved and not be gross. Saying blind to Harvey's crimes or just enabling him meant tens of millions of dollars. It seems almost nobody's capable of turning that down. In October of 2017, Scott Rosenberg, screenwriter of Beautiful Girls, posted his thoughts about

Harvey Weinstein on Facebook. Scott wrote for Miramax in the early 90s. He credits Weinstein with helping him sell his first two movies. He was there for many of the biggest years of Weinstein's career when he and Tarantino and Affleck were all watching their careers exploded into the stratosphere. So I'm going to read a selection from the post that he wrote. It was glorious. All of it.

So what if he was coming on a little strong to some young models who had moved mountains to get into one of his parties? So what if he was exposing himself in five-star hotel rooms like a cartoon flasher out of Mad Magazine, just swap robe for raincoat? Who are we to call foul? Golden geese don't come along too often in one's life. Which goes back to my original point. Everybody fucking knew.

But everybody was just having too good a time and doing remarkable work, making remarkable movies. As the old joke goes, we needed the eggs. Okay, maybe we didn't need them, but we really, really, really, really liked them eggs. So we were willing to overlook what the golden goose was up to in the murky shadows behind the barn. And for that, I am eternally sorry. To all the women that had to suffer this, I am eternally sorry.

I've worked with Mira and Rosanna and Lysette. I've known Rose and Ashley and Claire for years. Their courage only hangs a lantern on my shame, and I am eternally sorry to all those who suffered in silence all this time and have chosen to remain silent today. So Scott's opinion seems to be that he's a bastard, and so has Ben Affleck, so is Tarantino and probably the Clintons too. I'm going to guess Scott would classify everybody we've talked about today. The honeypots, the assistants, the lawyers, the journalists, the spies is the same kind

of complicit. Because when it comes right down to it, the ex-missade agents are guilty of the same basic crime as Ben Affleck. They could live with the knowledge that an old creep was molesting young women as long as the money was good enough. Oi. Yeah, that's a happy ending for our podcast. God.

Today. Well. How are you feeling, Anna? I feel lost. I feel confused. I did always say that if I would ever hire a bodyguard, it would be a massade agent, because I knew they would do whatever they could to protect me. Well yeah, I mean, if you're going to hire someone to dig up dirt, it seems like Black

Cube's good at it, although they didn't stop that article from dropping. Well, that's the thing is like the power of the people is so important. And I think that was so key in bringing down Weinstein, like all of this, like everyone knew. And for a second when you were reading that, I almost understood, and there was a moment of my psyche where I was like, whoa, what am I doing? When you're at that level and you're having fun, you're like, yeah, Harvey's fucking crazy.

And then you're just doing your thing because you're in this world, but it's impossible to take yourself out of that bubble and be like, wait a second, that's harassment, actually. You can't see past it because you're like, everyone's having a damn good time. Everybody's having, and you're all making so much money. Yeah. Yeah. And that is so fucking heavy. I can't.

I can't. Well, and it's, I promise not to turn any more of these into like anti-capitalist rants or whatever, but it is impossible to deny that it's not just that he had the ability to make people's careers. He had the ability to, with anybody he helped out, end their financial woes forever. Whatever you're worried about, whatever you're scared about, whatever your anxieties, you get a kid at home who's sick, you have to pay for your kid to go to college, you've got a mortgage payment do or whatever.

Harvey can make that go away forever. And all you have to do is be okay with him being a creeper. And I think most of us sitting down and reading Ronan Farrow's articles, most of us condemning Harvey Weinstein, most of us condemning all these people, I think most people, if they were in the situation, a lot of these folks were. If they didn't know exactly what had gone on, they weren't sure that it was rape, they just knew that it was fucked up, and there was a lot of money on the line. I think most people help keep the secret.

Yeah. That's my dark theory, yeah. I think if I were to look back, maybe I would too. I don't know. Yeah. I certainly can't know. Probably if there was enough pressure on me, I would crumble. I mean, I feel like I'm an anxious enough person that literally what I would do probably

would keep the secret but then move away and just try and put it behind me. Even if I was an assistant and I was put in that position and I was asked to do that, I probably wouldn't do it, but I also probably wouldn't have said anything. That's what breaks my own. And I feel like I might be the screenwriter in this who was willing to cash the check and ignore the creep and who, when it all came out, posted a very eloquent article apologizing but still made that money, still stacked that paper, still benefited from it. It's easy to apologize now after all these years.

Which is, again, it's a very eloquent apology and better than any of the other apologies. So he gets some credit for that and credit for acknowledging that everybody was garbage in this situation. But I do think that going back to my original question at the top of this podcast, who are all of the bastards in the Harvey Weinstein story, well, it's like he said, it's every fucking body. Yeah. Woo.

Anna, you want to plug some stuff? You guys, just be good people. Don't hurt anybody for the love of God. Don't hurt anybody. Don't use your power against vulnerable people just because someone works below you does not mean they owe you anything. No one owes you anything. Nothing belongs to you.

You sit there and keep your head down, work hard, and don't let anyone take advantage of you. And if you ever need to stand up against someone who is powerful, oh, God be with you. I don't even know. I don't even know if I believe in God, but Jesus Christ, I hope you make it out because this industry is so aggressive when it comes to just the big dogs taken down the little dogs. I don't even know.

It's crazy to think that I work in this industry and I don't know what I would do. Well, yeah. We're talking about a lot of this stuff and it's probably 80% of the crimes he committed happened within 10 miles of where we're sitting right now. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. We're in Hollywood right now.

Yeah. We're in Florida. Yeah. Yeah. That's heartbreaking. It's actually one of the places that he would go, the Peninsula Hotel. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

That's right here. That's a place I, when a few jobs ago, I would go there a lot for work. And I think when I started reading that, and I just like started to make that connection and I was like, oh, no, I really hope I was never in that hotel around the same time because that is horrifying to think about. Oh, God. And horrifying to think about what the wait staff at the Peninsula Hotel and the Tribeca Grand must have had to clean up.

Oh, yeah. And that whole like, oh, he's back. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, can't really say. I mean, I'm sure the gossip was there, but like, you can't do anything and that's heartbreaking. Yeah. Yeah.

It is. All right. Well, this has been Behind the Bastards. Check back next week when we'll talk about something that's more fun but still a terrible person. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK, two letters, and you can find this podcast on Twitter at BastardsPod.

You can find us on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com. We'll be putting up a selection of Harvey Weinstein looking just like the creepiest egg that ever fell out of a basket. And also pictures of him with Ben Affleck and Ben Affleck's terrible back tattoo. Ben Affleck's catching a lot of flak this podcast, but I feel like that's fine. He made his bed. Yeah. And now he has to rub his terrible tattoo on it.

All right. Until next week, I'm Robert Evans. Have a bastardless day. 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 was 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 podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.