Harvey Weinstein

• 1. Introduction

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  Harvey Weinstein was thanked by name in 34 Academy Award acceptance speeches. That is as many times as God was thanked, and only Steven Spielberg, with 43 mentions, was thanked more often. The tally comes from an analysis of speeches made between 1966 and 2016. Weinstein, born on the 19th of March 1952, is an American former film producer. He is also a convicted sex offender. Both facts belong to the same life, and this documentary takes both seriously. It asks how a promoter of rock concerts built a company that reshaped independent film. It asks what his combative methods did to the movies and the people he worked with. And it asks how October 2017 ended his career and sent a reckoning around the world.

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• 2. Queens and Buffalo

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  Max Weinstein cut diamonds for a living, and his wife Miriam, born Postel, raised two sons in the Electchester housing co-op in New York City. Harvey was born in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, with a younger brother named Bob. The family was Jewish, and Miriam's parents had immigrated to the United States from Poland. Max died in 1976. Miriam died in 2016.

  Harvey went to John Bowne High School and then to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he studied from 1969 to 1973. He never graduated, choosing to put his energy into business instead. With Bob and a partner named Corky Burger, he formed Harvey & Corky Productions, which independently promoted rock concerts in Buffalo through most of the 1970s. The acts it brought to town included Frank Sinatra, the Who, Jackson Browne and the Rolling Stones. A longtime friend named Jonathan A. Dandes, who followed Harvey to Buffalo, described him as "aggressive" and "consumed" in matters of business.

  Profits from those concerts paid for the next step. In 1979 the brothers launched an independent film distribution company and named it Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. Its first releases were mostly concert films, such as Paul McCartney's Rockshow. Rockshow was only a start, and the company's first real hit was still a few years away.

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• 3. Miramax Rises

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  Martin Lewis produced two British films of benefit shows for the human rights organization Amnesty International, and the Weinstein brothers acquired the rights in the early 1980s. Working closely with Lewis, they edited the pair into a single movie tailored for American audiences. The Secret Policeman's Other Ball opened in May 1982 and became Miramax's first hit. It raised considerable sums for Amnesty, which credited it with lifting its profile in the United States. The brothers spent the rest of the decade building on that success with arthouse films that earned critical attention and modest commercial returns.

  Errol Morris's 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line gave Miramax its first wide attention. The film followed Randall Dale Adams, a wrongfully convicted man sentenced to death row. The publicity around the case led to Adams's release, and it brought nationwide notice to the studio. In 1989 Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape launched successfully and made Miramax the most successful independent studio in America.

  That same year the studio collided with the film ratings system. The MPAA gave an X rating to Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and to Pedro Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! An X rating effectively blocked nationwide release. Weinstein sued the MPAA over the rating system. A court later threw out the lawsuit, yet the MPAA introduced the NC-17 rating two months afterward.

  In 1993, following the success of The Crying Game, Disney offered the Weinsteins $80 million for ownership of Miramax. The brothers accepted, which raised their Hollywood clout and kept them at the head of their company. Their first blockbuster, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, arrived in 1994, alongside the popular independent film Clerks. Pulp Fiction was nominated for Best Picture in 1995 but lost to Forrest Gump. In 1997 The English Patient won Miramax its first Best Picture award. Good Will Hunting and Shakespeare in Love followed, both collecting numerous Academy Awards. Weinstein himself won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love.

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• 4. Cutting Room Wars

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  Peter Biskind's book Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film denounced how Miramax released and edited arthouse films. Its example was 54, which began as an arthouse project. After Ryan Phillippe's sudden rise to stardom, Weinstein forced director Mark Christopher to re-edit and re-shoot the film to make it more mainstream.

  Foreign films got similar treatment. Weinstein re-edited several Asian films and dubbed them in English. The dubbed versions of Shaolin Soccer and Hero scored badly in test screenings, so both reached American cinemas in their original language. He also re-edited Farewell My Concubine, the 1993 Cannes Palme d'Or winner, for American theaters. Louis Malle, who headed the 1993 Cannes jury, was furious. He said the version seen in America was twenty minutes shorter, "but it seems longer, because it doesn't make any sense."

  When Weinstein was put in charge of the American release of Princess Mononoke, a samurai sword reportedly arrived in the mail from director Hayao Miyazaki. Attached to the blade was a stark message: "No cuts." Miyazaki later said his producer had actually sent it. He had traveled to New York to meet Weinstein and said he was "bombarded with this aggressive attack, all these demands for cuts. I defeated him."

  Guillermo del Toro's Mimic and Ole Bornedal's Nightwatch, both 1997 projects, drew similar complaints about altered vision. Weinstein always insisted such changes served the financial viability of the film. "I'm not cutting for fun," he said in an interview. "All my life I served one master: the film. I love movies."

  Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American, from 2002, tested that defense. Weinstein delayed its release after the September 11 attacks because test audiences reacted to its critical tone toward past U.S. foreign policy. Told the film would go straight to video, Noyce planned a Toronto International Film Festival screening to rally critics. Weinstein agreed to the screening only after star Michael Caine, who threatened to boycott publicity for another Miramax film, lobbied him. The film drew mostly positive reviews, and Miramax eventually released it in theaters. It was alleged that the studio made no major push for awards, though Caine was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

  Weinstein acquired a reputation for ruthlessness and fits of anger. According to Biskind, he once put a New York Observer reporter in a headlock while throwing him out of a party. During a dispute over a test screening of Frida, he shouted at director Julie Taymor, "You are the most arrogant person I have ever met!" He then threatened to beat up her husband, the composer Elliot Goldenthal, for not defending her. A 2004 New York magazine article showed Weinstein as somewhat repentant about such clashes.

  A Newsweek story of the 13th of October 2008 renewed the criticism. It accused him of "hassling Sydney Pollack on his deathbed" over the release of The Reader. Weinstein offered $1 million to charity if the accusation could be proven. Journalist Nikki Finke then published an email from Scott Rudin, sent on the 22nd of August, saying Weinstein had harassed Anthony Minghella's widow and a bedridden Pollack until Pollack's family asked him to stop.

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• 5. Beyond Miramax

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  On the 30th of September 2005 the Weinstein brothers left Miramax to form The Weinstein Company, known as TWC. They started it with several other media executives, the directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and Colin Vaines, who had successfully run Miramax's production department for 10 years. TWC was a mini-major film studio, and Harvey served as co-chairman alongside Bob from 2005 to 2017.

  In February 2011 filmmaker Michael Moore took legal action against the brothers. He claimed they owed him $2.7 million in profits from his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which he said "Hollywood accounting tricks" had denied him. In February 2012 Moore dropped the lawsuit for an undisclosed settlement.

  In September 2009 Weinstein publicly opposed efforts to extradite Roman Polanski from Switzerland to the United States. The case concerned a 1977 charge that Polanski had drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, to which he pleaded guilty before fleeing the country. Weinstein's company distributed Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a film about the case, and he questioned whether Polanski had committed any crime. Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley replied that the guilty plea showed the act was a crime and that several other serious charges were pending.

  Weinstein's reach extended well past film. He won seven Tony Awards for plays and musicals, among them The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical and August: Osage County. On television he produced the fashion reality show Project Runway, which made stars of designer Michael Kors, model Heidi Klum and editor Nina Garcia. He helped revive the Halston brand with Tamara Mellon, Sarah Jessica Parker and stylist Rachel Zoe. He also licensed the option to revive the Charles James brand. Celebrities cast in a Weinstein movie were asked to wear Marchesa at least once, the label of Georgina Chapman, his then-partner and later wife. His production companies made fashion-themed films including Madonna's W.E., Robert Altman's Prêt-à-Porter and Tom Ford's A Single Man, and stars of his films appeared on more than a dozen Vogue covers.

  In politics, Weinstein was a longtime supporter and contributor to the Democratic Party. That included the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and in 2012 he hosted an election fundraiser for Obama at his home in Westport, Connecticut. He also took up gun control, poverty, AIDS, juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis research, and he criticized the lack of universal healthcare in the United States. He sat on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a New York City non-profit that targets poverty, until October 2017.

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• 6. October 2017

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  On the 8th of October 2017 Weinstein was fired from TWC after a list of sexual abuse charges was released to the press. That month The New York Times and The New Yorker reported that more than a dozen women accused him of sexually harassing, assaulting or raping them. The accusations dated back to the late 1970s. Weinstein denied "any nonconsensual sex." By the 31st of October more than 80 women had made allegations of harassment or rape against him.

  Institutions moved quickly. He was suspended from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He resigned from the Directors Guild of America, and leading political figures he had supported denounced him. The Los Angeles Police Department opened a criminal investigation for alleged rape, while New York and London police began investigating other assault allegations. On the 10th of October 2017 his wife Georgina Chapman announced she was leaving him. They reached a settlement in January 2018, and the divorce was finalized in July 2021.

  The allegations set off a wave of "national reckoning" against sexual harassment and assault in the United States, known as the Weinstein effect. The #MeToo hashtag campaign encouraged people to share suppressed stories of sexual misconduct. Added to other harassment cases earlier in the year, it produced allegations across many industries. Many men in positions of power were swiftly ousted, first in the United States and then around the world.

  Honors fell away as well. The University at Buffalo revoked his honorary doctorate, saying his conduct "contradicts the spirit of the honorary degree." French President Emmanuel Macron revoked his Legion of Honour, both in late 2017. A British Film Institute fellowship and the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University's Hutchins Center were also rescinded in 2017. After his conviction in 2020, his honorary CBE was stripped on the 18th of September.

  Months of attempts to sell TWC or its library failed, and the company filed for bankruptcy. Lantern Entertainment purchased all of its assets in 2018. The company was shut down on the 16th of July 2018.

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• 7. Black Cube

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  In November 2017 Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Weinstein had hired Black Cube, a British-Israeli private intelligence firm, to stop publication of the abuse allegations. Using false identities, Black Cube investigators reportedly tracked and met journalists and actresses. One of the actresses was Rose McGowan, who accused Weinstein of rape. Weinstein reportedly had Black Cube, Kroll and other agencies target or collect information on dozens of individuals. They compiled psychological profiles that sometimes focused on personal or sexual histories.

  Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak admitted introducing Weinstein to Black Cube. He denied knowing how Weinstein would use its services.

  Weinstein reportedly asked Woody Allen, Farrow's father, for help in stopping Farrow's reporting, and Allen declined. He also reportedly used Black Cube against journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor. According to Kantor, a Black Cube agent posing as a women's rights advocate tried to manipulate and dupe her.

  Weinstein also approached Hillary Clinton for help in stopping Farrow from publishing. Clinton publicist Nick Merrill emailed Farrow and unsuccessfully tried to persuade him not to publish. According to Rose McGowan, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, helped Weinstein's lawyer David Boies try to bribe McGowan into silence about her allegations.

  In 2019 the documentary Untouchable was released, built around interviews with several of his accusers.

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• 8. Courtrooms

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  On the 25th of May 2018 the New York County District Attorney's Office charged Weinstein with rape, criminal sex act, sex abuse and sexual misconduct involving two separate women. He surrendered to the New York City Police Department that day and was released after US$1 million bail was posted. He gave up his passport, wore an ankle monitor, and could travel only within New York and Connecticut. His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said Weinstein would plead not guilty.

  The trial date was set for the 6th of January 2020. On that same date, Weinstein was also charged in Los Angeles with raping one woman and sexually assaulting another in 2013. After deliberating for five days, the New York jury convicted him on the 24th of February 2020 of two of five charges. They were one count of criminal sexual assault in the first degree and one count of rape in the third degree. He was found not guilty of predatory sexual assault, which could have led to a life sentence. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison on the 11th of March. He was held first at Rikers Island and then at Wende Correctional Facility in Erie County, New York.

  On the 2nd of June 2022 the Appellate Division upheld the verdicts. Judge Angela Mazzarelli wrote, "We perceive no basis for reducing the sentence, and we have considered defendant's remaining arguments and find them unavailing." On the 25th of August 2022 he was granted a further appeal before the New York Court of Appeals.

  On the 20th of July 2021 Weinstein was flown to Los Angeles. His trial there began in October 2022. He faced 11 counts of rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual battery, stemming from alleged acts between 2004 and 2013. Four counts were dropped, and on the 19th of December 2022 he was found guilty of three of the remaining seven. The convictions included rape, forced oral copulation and third-degree sexual misconduct. He was sentenced to 16 years on the 23rd of February 2023, to be served after his New York term rather than at the same time. In June 2022 London's Metropolitan Police had also charged him with two counts of indecent assault against a woman in 1996.

  On the 25th of April 2024 the New York Court of Appeals overturned the New York convictions and ordered a retrial. It said the trial judge had made "egregious errors," and the ruling stated that Weinstein had been "tried on his character, not the evidence." Ashley Judd, one of the first women to disclose her rape, told The New York Times, "We still live in our truth. And we know what happened." Rosanna Arquette said, "Harvey was rightfully convicted." Rose McGowan said, "We are not victims. We are people that were injured by evil." Weinstein stayed in prison because of the California conviction.

  His health became part of the story. He had undergone surgery for Fournier gangrene in 1999. In July 2024 he was admitted to the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital with what his lawyers said were COVID-19 and double pneumonia. On the 9th of September 2024 he underwent emergency heart surgery. In October 2024 he was reported to have chronic myeloid leukemia, and on the 2nd of December 2024 he was hospitalized in Manhattan after blood test results described as "alarming."

  On the 12th of September 2024 a New York grand jury indicted Weinstein on new charges. He pleaded not guilty to one count of criminal sexual act in the first degree, and the judge agreed on the 23rd of October to fold that charge into the retrial. Jury selection for the retrial began on the 15th of April 2025. On the 11th of June 2025 he was found guilty of one count of criminal sexual act and not guilty of another, with no verdict on an allegation by a third woman. The next day, the additional charge ended in a mistrial. On the 15th of May 2026 a mistrial was also declared in the retrial of the Jessica Mann case after the jury deadlocked. A hearing was set for the 24th of June 2026 to decide whether prosecutors would seek yet another retrial.

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