Quentin Tarantino Kept Quiet About Harvey Weinstein

Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino has admitted that he knew producer Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed young women but didn't think much of it. Tarantino says he dismissed Weinstein's behavior as "Svengali" situations and "a boss chasing a secretary around the desk," which seems to write off sexual harassment and assault as either cute and quaint or somehow creative. Not only did Tarantino not speak up about the behavior, he kept working with Weinstein.

“Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse,” Tarantino said, and we have to admit that he's right.

Via Us Weekly.

Quentin Tarantino revealed that he has known for decades about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct towards women in Hollywood.

“I knew enough to do more than I did,” the 54-year-old director told The New York Times in an interview published on Thursday, October 19. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors. The normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”

The Oscar winner explained that he regrets not having spoken out about the disgraced Miramax producer, 65, in the past. “I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard,” he said. “If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him.”

Tarantino admitted that he knew about Weinstein’s alleged encounter with his own former girlfriend, Mira Sorvino, and he was also aware that Rose McGowan had reached a settlement with the producer after she claimed he sexually harassed her.

“I was shocked and appalled,” Tarantino said upon discovering that Weinstein had allegedly assaulted Sorvino. “I couldn’t believe he would do that so openly. I was like, ‘Really? Really?’ But the thing I thought then, at the time, was that he was particularly hung up on Mira. I thought Harvey was hung up on her in this Svengali kind of way. Because he was infatuated with her, he horribly crossed the line.”

“What I did was marginalize the incidents,” he explained, noting that he continued to work with Weinstein for years and wrote off the allegations as minor misbehaviors. “Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse.”

The Pulp Fiction director added that, when he first read the sexual misconduct accounts published by The Times against Weinstein, he wasn’t surprised. “Everyone who was close to Harvey had heard of at least one of these incidents,” he said. “It was impossible they didn’t.”

Tarantino said he didn’t take the second or thirdhand accounts he heard too seriously. “I chalked it up to a ‘50s-‘60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk,” he said. “As if that’s OK. That’s the egg on my face right now.”

Get the rest of the story at Us Weekly.

Do you think Quentin Taratino was justified in not standing up to Harvey Weinstein in the past? Let us know in the comment section below.