‘Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/opinion/sunday/harvey-weinstein-rowena-chiu.html

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Harvey Weinstein told me he liked Chinese girls. He liked them because they were discreet, he said — because they knew how to keep a secret. Hours later, he attempted to rape me.

You’ve most likely never heard of me. I’m not an actress. I don’t even work in Hollywood anymore. I was one of many ordinary, unfamous women trying to do their jobs who were abused by Harvey. What happened on that night would shape the rest of my life. Unbeknown to me, I was about to keep a secret — a devastating, suffocating secret, one that would drive me to attempt suicide twice, one that I wouldn’t breathe a word of to my husband of a decade, one that would silence me for the next 21 years.

In 1998, I had recently graduated from Oxford with a degree in English literature, and my one ambition was to succeed in the film industry. This was perhaps unexpected, given my background: I was born just outside London, to parents who had emigrated from Asia and whose middle-class aspirations for my sister and me took the form of more conventional professional careers, like law or medicine. I regularly attended church and thrived in this sheltered environment.

Working in Hollywood would have seemed an unattainable dream to me back then. So it was like an answer to prayer when I was chosen, while answering phones at a talent agency, to assist Harvey in London on his European productions. When my future colleague, Zelda Perkins, interviewed me, she warned that my potential new boss had a reputation for inappropriate behavior and towering fits of rage, but I was to “handle him robustly” and I would be totally fine.

In July 1998, Harvey was en route to London to attend a private screening of the new cut for “Shakespeare in Love.” I watched as tension levels in the office rose. In the taxi to the screening room, I was coached: “Do exactly as he tells you and you’ll be fine.” My first task was to simply sit directly in front of Harvey during the screening. At one point, fearful that my head was blocking his view, I attempted to shuffle over. “Sit down!” he instantly roared, adding an expletive. I should have known better and left the room (and the job) that very instant.

Years later, I realized this was part of the grooming process — a test of how much I would tolerate. Harvey played games of this sort impeccably, testing how far he could go, wielding both the carrot (if you survived working with him, he could make your career) and the stick (if you refused his advances, he would do his best to ensure you never again worked in the movie industry).

I’ve had many years to ruminate on how I fell into Harvey’s trap, and the best way to understand it is through the four power dynamics of gender, race, seniority and wealth.

The first power imbalance — that of man versus woman — was obvious. I was a woman in an industry in which women still struggle to be taken seriously. Harvey was a man in an industry in which men dominate, and he often used that dominance to claim sexual favors.

The second power imbalance was around race — the fact that Harvey was white and I was a person of color. My ethnicity initially marked me as different and inferior: He assured Zelda that he wouldn’t harass me because he didn’t, as I remember it, “do Chinese or Jewish girls.” Then later, he turned around and defined me in terms of sexual exoticism, telling me, just before he tried to rape me, that he’d never had a Chinese girl. It affected our dynamics in other ways too. The idea of the Asian immigrant “model minority” is a cliché, but at least in my British-Chinese family, we were afraid of standing out. I was taught not to talk back — to aunties and uncles, to my parents, to my teachers, to perfect strangers. I learned the social benefits of being deferential, polite and well behaved. As with many Asian women, this meant that I was visible as a sex object, invisible as a person. Harvey may not have created this imbalance, but he and many others have capitalized on it, knowingly or unknowingly, to abuse women of color.

The third power imbalance was around seniority. Harvey was a power player, and I was the lowest person on the totem pole. Assistants are the unseen work force that props Hollywood up, and yet we have zero leverage. I was invisible and inconsequential.

Finally, the wealth — Harvey was a multimillionaire, with all the influence money could buy. I was a fresh graduate loaded with student debt. Even during the few months I worked with him, I saw firsthand the influence that money could buy. Later, I was to discover that it could even buy silence.

At the Venice Film Festival later that year, these four power imbalances collided in a late-night meeting with Harvey. I had expected to discuss potential film productions and scripts, and we did. But after hours of fending off his chitchat, flattery, requests for massages and a bath, ultimately I found myself pushed back against the bed. I’d worn two pairs of tights for protection, and tried to appease him by taking one of them off and letting him massage me, but it hadn’t worked. He’d taken off the other pair and I was terrified my underwear would be next. Harvey moved in: Please, he told me, just one thrust, and it will all be over. I was terrified and pleaded that we should go back to the scripts, that I had a boyfriend, that Zelda would worry about me. In the end, I was able to wriggle off the bed and leave; I believe this is because Harvey thought there would be another night to play the game, and half the fun was the chase — the opportunity to prolong a situation in which he could exert power. I would be back, he must have thought. The four power asymmetries dictated it would be so.

The next day, when I relayed these events to Zelda, we sat on the floor and cried. Our options were painfully few. We were two young women, with limited resources, stranded in a foreign country. Despite this, Zelda bravely confronted Harvey immediately, at least ensuring that I would never be alone in the same room as my predator again. We vowed to seek a resolution upon our return to London.

Yet, when we began attempts to report Harvey to his superiors or the police, multiple senior individuals acted to shut us down. Some outright laughed in our faces. The message was always the same: Who would ever believe us over the most powerful man in Hollywood?

A senior colleague advised us to hire lawyers, but we had no experience in how to do that, nor did we have Harvey’s deep pockets. We eventually found a small firm that agreed to represent us, but the imbalance of power between our lawyers and his lawyers led to us accepting an outcome we had not sought. We had wanted to report Harvey to his superiors; instead, we were pressured into signing a nondisclosure agreement that prevented us from speaking to family and friends, and made it extremely difficult to work with a therapist or a lawyer, or to aid a criminal investigation. Chillingly, it also required us to identify anyone we had already spoken to.

The negotiations were conducted under conditions of extreme duress: We were once kept at the office overnight, from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., escorted to the bathroom, provided with the barest minimum of food and drink and not permitted pen and paper to keep notes. We were not even allowed to keep a copy of this most egregious of agreements: We had signed our lives away in a complex 30-page document that we could not refer to.

But even after the weeks of intense pressure, when I finally signed the nondisclosure document, accepting a settlement of £125,000 (about $213,000) and agreeing to stay silent forever, the trauma was not yet over. Zelda and I were told to consider this period of our lives a “black hole,” never to be mentioned again. We felt we could not see each other again, lest we slip up and accidentally discuss these events — so we would not communicate until almost two decades later.

I signed the agreement, thinking it would be easy to find another job; in reality, I spent six months interviewing at dozens of film companies in London. Everyone wanted to meet; no one wanted to employ an assistant who had left Miramax under suspicious circumstances. Unable to find work elsewhere, I ended up in a role in Hong Kong that I suspected Harvey created to keep me in his orbit — dependent on Miramax and yet sidelined in Asia. I was miserable. And the worst was to come.

I was embarking upon almost two decades of living with a secret trauma of such magnitude that I would attempt suicide twice before I finally quit Miramax. I lived in constant fear of Harvey’s abuse, control and power; that the story would come back to haunt me; that I would inadvertently slip up on my promise to never speak of this. I suffered, completely isolated from those around me who could have provided the support I needed: a loved one, a trusted pastor, a respected therapist — even the man I would marry. I spent decades grappling with guilt that I took the job, that I hadn’t left the room sooner, that it was somehow my fault, that I hadn’t handled Harvey “robustly” enough, that I was not tough enough to work in the film industry.

Other survivors have said things like “I’ve been waiting for this knock on my door for 27 years,” but for me, I lived in terror of that knock. Over the years, various journalists have tracked me down. I always hid. In summer 2017, the New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor finally stood on my driveway in California; it would take 18 months before I dared speak to her.

After Ms. Kantor and her colleague Megan Twohey broke the Weinstein story two years ago, I watched from the sidelines as the #MeToo movement unfolded, too afraid to share even a simple #MeToo on Facebook. My four children were young, and I was terrified that journalists would surround the house and that my children would be followed to school. I had been so completely silenced that although I was central to a story that had ignited a global movement, I did not participate. Remaining silent had become integral to my identity, both as a woman and a person of color.

Then, in September 2018, I watched another woman, Christine Blasey Ford, speak up about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Coincidentally, only a few minutes from my house she was living the very existence I’d feared — getting death threats and leaving her home to take refuge in hotel rooms. In January, I had the privilege of sharing my story with Dr. Blasey and other survivors in a group interview conducted by Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey. I was still unresolved about going public. But meeting others who’d had similar experiences created a seismic shift within me.

It still took several months for me to agree to participate in Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey’s book, “She Said.” But it is important to me now that I speak up, that I allow my voice, an Asian voice, an assistant’s voice, to join the array of voices in the #MeToo movement. Since the story broke in October 2017, many actresses, from the relatively unknown to the superstars, have come out with stories about Harvey. Yet the stories of assistants have gotten relatively little attention by comparison, and tragically, even fewer of those voices have been of women of color.

Last month, 21 years after Harvey attempted to rape me, I finally stepped out of the shadows to allow the public to know my name. The day after I was interviewed on the “Today” show, Harvey denied my account and threatened to sue me, claiming we had a consensual “six-month physical relationship.” It isn’t true. But muddying the waters is a common tactic of abusers.

Saturday was two years to the day that Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the Weinstein story. I don’t know what the path ahead looks like. But for now, I am getting used to being stopped in the street to talk about #MeToo; I am happy that my children can know my secret; I am grateful to be able to be honest with family and friends, who are coming forward in droves to offer support. I can briefly glory in the relief that I am no longer sitting on a sickening secret that has — finally and ultimately — come to light.

Rowena Chiu is a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein.

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