Former New Yorker Editor Compares Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump
by EG
As the list of Weinstein's accusers grows - it now includes Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie - the picture is emerging of a man who used his status as a way to sexually harass and abuse women. And to Tina Brown, former New Yorker editor and Weinstein colleague, that picture looks like a certain would-be president who boasted about just such behavior on the 'Access Hollywood' bus.
Tina Brown knows Harvey Weinstein well; Brown left her plum position editing The New Yorker in the late 1990's to go into business with Weinstein and Miramax Films and start a new, ill-fated magazine called Talk.
On Tuesday, she described her experience working with him (The New York Times described their relationship as a "strained collaboration" in 2002) and weighed in on the scandalous allegations made against him over the last few days.
"What I learned about Harvey in the two years of proximity with him at Talk was that nothing about his outward persona, the beguiling Falstaffian charmer who persuaded — or bamboozled — me into leaving The New Yorker and joining him, was the truth," Brown wrote. "He is very Trumpian in that regard. He comes off as a big, blustery, rough diamond kind of a guy, the kind of old-time studio chief who lives large, writes big checks and exudes bonhomie. Wrong. The real Harvey is fearful, paranoid, and hates being touched (at any rate, when fully dressed)."
Brown also served as chairwoman of Talk Miramax Books, and said in her piece on Tuesday that she noticed strange contracts on the books, "book deals with no deadline attached authored by attractive or nearly famous women." She said one such contract was with a private plane stewardess.
She also described Weinstein's efforts to kill bad press. "Harvey spent most of the hours of his working day ensuring that all the bad stories went away, killed, evaporated, spun into something diametrically its opposite," she wrote.
Read the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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