Harvey Weinstein will, as his defense team admitted in a Hail Mary plea this week, die in prison.
Until then, may he rot.
As Justice James Burke said to Weinstein at sentencing: “This is your first conviction, but not your first offense.”
To anyone who still believes that Weinstein is a scapegoat for a #MeToo culture run amok, consider just some of the documents, one thousand in all, unsealed by the court yesterday.
Here’s Harvey — as almost everyone still calls him, like he’s some harmless, collegial old codger — secretly tracking down accuser Annabella Sciorra’s private email and cell number in August 2017, two months before he was exposed as a rapist, in a clear attempt to intimidate her.
Here he is in July 2017, hiring private investigators to dig into people on his vast so-called “red flag list” — people he worried were talking to reporters, including Sciorra.
An email, in part, to his crisis manager on October 26, 2017, in response to questions posed by Ronan Farrow regarding Sciorra’s claims: “This was consensual or deny it.”
Huh? It can only be one or the other.
Yet after all this strategizing, after desperate form-letter emails to such titans as Ron Burkle (he of “Air F—k One” infamy), Jeff Katzenberg, Mike Bloomberg, Lloyd Blankfein, Ron Meyer, Steve Rattner, Bernard and Delphine Arnault, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Ted Sarandos — slugged, Freudian-slip style, as “Hail Mary dics” — after hiring ex-Mossad to stalk and spy on his victims, further victimizing them — Weinstein stood in court at sentencing and gave his greatest performance yet: As a bumbling old man who merely misread some signals, who never really had any power, and who was finding this brave new world, in which women say “no,” so very confusing.
“First of all, to all the women who testified, you may have given the truths … I have a great deal of remorse for all of you,” he said. “We are going through this crisis right now” — meaning #MeToo — “in this country. The movement basically started with me” — there’s the real Weinstein, never missing a moment to self-aggrandize — “now there are thousands of men being accused.”
He described his experiences with his accusers as “wonderful” and said he “wasn’t about power.”
Rape is all about power.
Donna Rotunno, Weinstein’s lawyer, seemed to be trolling the justice system and all right-thinking people when, moments later, she called Weinstein’s 23-year prison sentence “obnoxious” and “obscene,” words most applicable to her client and her own victim-blaming of sexual assault survivors.
New York City is glad to see the back of her.
Weinstein’s sentence, just six years shy of the maximum, takes into account “prior bad acts” as documented in yesterday’s unsealing. In these pages, prosecutors cited incidents they could not raise at trial, including a rape accusation going back to 1978 and the litany of women, well over 80 in total, who have relayed remarkably similar stories of predation and assault over the years, in various cities, states and countries.
Of his guilt here, there is no doubt.
But yesterday’s document dump also proves that Harvey Weinstein, his pleas in court to the contrary, is a psychopath and a sadist who has never squandered an opportunity to harm someone.
There are some real gems here, the testimony of over 100 people who describe him, in the prosecution’s summary, as a “vindictive, abusive individual who has destroyed much more than he has created in his years on this earth.”
To wit:
In 1998, Weinstein stole a friend’s social security number and used that to apply for and get a United States passport.
He bragged about having people killed.
He forced his assistant out of a car and left him on the side of the road. He abandoned this same assistant in a foreign country and threatened to harm him physically.
He threatened to “cut off” another man’s “genitals with gardening shears” — and knowing what we do about Weinstein’s own deformed genitalia, it’s not hard to see where he got that idea.
One witness, a former longtime employee, told prosecutors Weinstein possessed “zero compassion” nor “empathy” and was a “despicable, demeaning, coercive, threatening” boss who would “make you do things you don’t want to do.”
Another former employee told prosecutors that back in the late 1980s, Weinstein “threw a table full of food on top of him” during a morning meeting at the Cannes Film Festival.
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