Rebecca Traister Shares Harvey Weinstein Rage & C#nt Calling, Battery Story

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Photo illustration by The Daily Beast

Writing for New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister shares a Harvey Weinstein story that will leave you speechless.

On a related topic, the women of Hollywood need to open their beautiful mouths, even if it's to say that they never had a problem with Harvey Weinstein. Apparently, many didn't. To say nothing, however -- Meryl Streep, for starters -- is not acceptable for two reasons: 1) it's wrong and they need to stop calling themselves feminists if they say nothing at all; and 2) the Republicans are having a field day with their hypocrisy charges already. Liberal women say nothing when the boy is one of our own. Meanwhile, we crucify the Catholic bishops. Republicans are correct if this silence continues.

I do crucify the Catholic bishops and I am not being quiet. I'm also not Meryl Streep. How about we give them until Mon/Tues. If they say nothing, we had better draft a friendly but direct letter to the goddesses we look up to in Hollywood.

Here is Rebecca Traister's Harvey Weinstein encounter:

In my mid-20s, I became a reporter and fact checker at the New York Observer, and part of my beat was covering the film business in New York. The night before the 2000 election, I was working on a story — perhaps my first seriously reported story — about O, the violent reimagining of Othello that Miramax’s Dimension division was then sitting on, perhaps out of deference to the cringey clean-media message of the Al Gore–Joe Lieberman campaign, which Weinstein was publicly supporting; already there was talk of Weinstein’s ambitions in Democratic politics. After Weinstein failed to respond to my calls for comment, I was sent, on Election Eve 2000, to cover a book party he was hosting, along with my colleague Andrew Goldman. Weinstein didn’t like my question about O, there was an altercation; though the recording has alas been lost to time, I recall that he called me a cunt and declared that he was glad he was the “fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” When my colleague Andrew (who was also then my boyfriend) intervened, first calming him down and then trying to extract an apology, Weinstein went nuclear, pushing Andrew down a set of steps inside the Tribeca Grand — knocking him over with such force that his tape recorder hit a woman, who suffered long-term injury — and dragging Andrew, in a headlock, onto Sixth Avenue.