I Still Live With What Harvey Weinstein Did
An interview in Hong Kong lingers with me until this day, six months after he was sentenced to prison
This essay contains a description of sexual assault.
I met Harvey Weinstein in 2014. I was reporting on politics for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong when a friend of a friend asked me to translate during his dinner meeting. At the restaurant, Harvey introduced himself with brio. He was charming and tenacious and said he was in town working on several important projects. He wanted to talk to the press. We agreed to an interview, and his assistant took my information.
A few days later at the Mandarin Oriental, his assistant arrived 30 minutes late and informed me Harvey was not feeling very well but also very busy, and could I come upstairs to do the interview? She led me to the suite, where Harvey talked animatedly about his new Netflix drama, Marco Polo. He handed me a portable DVD player and headphones, and I put it on to watch the preview. When I looked up, his assistant had gone. Harvey was also gone, reemerging from the bedroom in a bathrobe. “You seem like a cool girl, not one of those bimbos walking around here,” he began.
The rest of the story sounds redundant now. I reached for the perfunctory “thank you but I…
