Another day, another accuser.
Lupita Nyong'o has come forward with her own story of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein, and while he didn't ask her to watch him shower like he did with countless others, he did make a move on her in his own home while his wife and children were there!
"I tried to vet this famous producer by asking my dinner-table companions what they knew of him. A woman who was a producer herself cautiously advised me to ‘keep Harvey in your corner.’ She said: ‘He is a good man to know in the business, but just be careful around him. He can be a bully.’ And so I exchanged contacts with him in the hopes that I would be considered for one of his projects," she explained of their first meeting at a Berlin film festival when she was still Yale acting school.
Months later, the disgraced studio exec invited her to screen a movie with him and his family at their Connecticut home. Less than 20 minutes into the flick, he managed to coerce the actress away from the group and into a private room.
"He announced that he wanted to give me a massage. I thought he was joking at first," she recalled, noting that she offered to give him a massage instead so she could be in the driver's seat.
“It would allow me to be in control physically, to know exactly where his hands were at all times. He said he wanted to take off his pants. I told him not to do that and informed him that it would make me extremely uncomfortable. He got up anyway to do so and I headed for the door," she revealed.
Later that year, the two had another run-in at a screening in NYC, and Weinstein tried to get Nyong'o into a private room by suggesting that the two have dinner.
"I was stunned. I told him I preferred to eat in the restaurant. He told me not to be so naïve. If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing. He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them," she continued. When Nyong'o asked if they were "good" despite her rejection, he issued an ominous warning. "I don’t know about your career, but you’ll be fine," he quipped.
A lot of Hollywood is claiming they didn't know about Weinstein's reputation and misconduct, but Quentin Tarantino isn't one of them.
"I knew enough to do more than I did. There was more to it than just the normal rumors. The normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things. I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard. If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him," he told the
New York Times.
The famed director acknowledged that he knew about an incident between then-girlfriend Mira Sorvino and Weinstein, but that he didn't realize the severity of it at the time.
"I was shocked and appalled. I couldn’t believe he would do that so openly. I was like, ‘Really? Really?’ But the thing I thought then, at the time, was that he was particularly hung up on Mira. I thought Harvey was hung up on her in this Svengali kind of way. Because he was infatuated with her, he horribly crossed the line. What I did was marginalize the incidents. Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse. Everyone who was close to Harvey had heard of at least one of these incidents. It was impossible they didn’t," he said.
So why speak out?
“I’m calling on the other guys who knew more to not be scared. Don’t just give out statements. Acknowledge that there was something rotten in Denmark. Vow to do better by our sisters. What was previously accepted is now untenable to anyone of a certain consciousness," he urged.
This is the scandal of the century!
