Write an article based on this summary:

– Ronan Farrow continues his investigation into Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault and harassment settlements with a new piece in the New Yorker, offering the strongest evidence yet that Weinstein's brother and Weinstein Company partner was in the know. Though Bob Weinstein has denied prior knowledge of allegations from more than 75 women, Farrow reports roughly $600,000 paid to two British accusers 20 years ago came from Bob's personal bank account. Bob, who was operating Disney's Miramax with Harvey at the time, confirms the payment but says he only agreed because Harvey said "he was fooling around with two women" who wanted money "and he didn't want his wife to find out." The payment was also hidden from Disney, but Bob says "there was nothing to indicate any kind of sexual harassment." While Bob Weinstein remains as head of the Weinstein Company, a $275 million bid for its assets led by Maria Contreras-Sweet, former head of the US Small Business Administration, would see 51% of the company controlled by women, reports Deadline. Such a change might be necessary, according to the Weinstein Company's remaining board members, financier Tarak Ben Ammar and director Lance Maerov. They tell Fortune Weinstein should've been fired in 2015 for alleged misuse of company funds but was protected by billionaire friends and board members, including James Dolan and Dirk Ziff. That same year, Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez says she received a $1 million settlement after Harvey groped her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt, per the New Yorker. Three other accusers discuss allegations of their own, with each other, at Slate.

In recent weeks, more than 75 women have come forward to accuse movie producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment or sexual assault. The stories that Weinstein’s accusers tell—of uncomfortable encounters in hotel rooms; of ostensible business meetings interrupted by requests to give him a massage, to watch him shower, to disrobe; and sometimes of sexual violence, including rape—echo each other in striking ways. In many cases, these women also describe having spent decades feeling isolated, alone, and ashamed of their brushes with Weinstein.

 But they were far from alone. And so we invited three of these women to speak with each other about their experiences. In an honest and emotional conversation, they discussed what happened to them and how they’re feeling now about the cascade of Weinstein stories—and allegations against other powerful men—that has followed. (Through a spokesperson, Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex, and of retaliation against women who rebuffed him or complained about his behavior.) You can listen to their conversation here, or read a transcript that’s been condensed and edited for clarity below.

 Alice Evans is an actress who has appeared on The Vampire Diaries and Lost. Katherine Kendall is a photographer and actress perhaps best known for her role in the film Swingers. Tomi-Ann Roberts is a professor of psychology at Colorado College who studies emotion, gender, and sexual objectification.

 Slate: The Weinstein encounters you three have described took place in three different decades, which strikes me as a testament to the immense scope of what we’ve learned about Weinstein’s behavior, in the ’80s, the ’90s, and the early 2000s. Tomi-Ann, can you describe how and when you met Harvey Weinstein and what happened?

 Tomi-Ann Roberts: I was in between my junior and senior year in college, and a number of my college friends and I lived in New York that summer doing things like internships. I had been considering both a theater major and a psychology major at Smith College. That summer was an opportunity for me to do some auditions for commercials, get some head shots, things like that. I was working at a restaurant. It was at this restaurant that I met the Weinstein brothers, who introduced themselves to me as a production company. I remember learning about how they named their company Miramax after their parents.

 Before I knew it, Harvey had indicated, when I said that I was an aspiring actress, that they were now going to be doing their first movie that they would be directing. They had been, I think, prior to that, importing foreign movies. That was very exciting, as you might imagine.

 For the rest of the summer, I would receive scripts and updates about the movie. I remember going to the offices at one time. Then I was invited to an apartment. I presumed that other people involved with the movie would be at this evening event, because why would I be invited to something in the evening?

 I arrived at this apartment to find Harvey. He called me down the hall. He was in the bathtub. I stood there frozen, of course. I’ve since wondered, why would something like that be so frightening? Here’s a man in a bathtub.

 Slate: Just the surprise of it.

 Roberts: Exactly, and I don’t know, the temerity of him to think, “I’m just gonna present myself to you in this way.” Knowing that that would be very off-putting to me, he tried to calm me down and say that nakedness was something that I needed to be comfortable with, would I please take my top off because surely the movie would have some nudity scenes and I needed to show him that I was comfortable with that, which of course I wasn’t.

 Slate: What did you say?

 Roberts: I wish I could remember my exact words. It was such a flooding experience. I do know, and I’m ashamed to say, that I was not aggressive in any way. I was terribly frightened of poking this bear. I very politely excused myself. I said I wasn’t sure that I was actually really cut out for this kind of thing and, “Please accept my apologies, but no thank you,” and exited.

 Slate: How did you feel afterward?

 Roberts: It was in the days long before cellphones. I remember I went to a payphone and I called the apartment where my boyfriend was and said, “Wow, wait until you hear what just happened to me.” I think what I felt was speechless, and also, frankly, I felt ashamed. I thought, “What did I think was going to happen, reaching for something like a movie?” I was a college kid. This was obviously way out of my league. I can’t say that I was traumatized. I was demoralized, I think, is what it was.

 Slate: How did the experience affect your career aspirations and ambitions?

 Roberts: I can’t probably say that there’s a direct line between that experience with Harvey Weinstein and my research on the sexual objectification and sexualization of girls and women, but there certainly is a dotted line.

 These were the kinds of experiences that accumulated for me. That wasn’t the only time a man presented himself to me in an aggressive way, seeking something from me. It wasn’t the only time my physical appearance was commented upon in a context when I would’ve rather been recognized for my competence. That began to interest me.

 I returned to Smith. I majored in psychology. I went on to earn my Ph.D. from Stanford. I began to study what the consequences are to girls and women of living in a culture that routinely treats us as though our sexualized bodies are the most valuable thing we have to offer.

 Slate: Do you think that the experience affected your interest in acting, in the world of Hollywood?

 Roberts: Absolutely. I really threw that aspiration in the wastebasket, I have to say. At the time I thought, as I said earlier, that this was just something I wasn’t cool enough to be able to participate in. Ugh! Looking back, I can’t believe that. I do think that there was a whisper inside of me, some sort of feminist whisper that said, “Get out now.” At the time, I think what I thought was, “OK, well that was a learning experience, and I am going to not pursue acting.”

 Slate: Katherine, can you describe how and when you met Harvey Weinstein, and what happened?

 Katherine Kendall: I was in my early 20s, and I had my agent set up a general meeting with Miramax. I went to Tribeca and met with the people at Miramax. Harvey was the guy I met with. I remember there were other people there, women. He had one woman in particular that was his primary assistant. In the actual office I felt very safe and like I was doing the right thing. The meeting went really well, and he gave me two scripts to read.

 It was the early ’90s, but they were doing interesting independent movies, and he made me feel like I was a fit there. I had been spending the year auditioning. I maybe got two guest spots or something, and the rest of the year was just auditioning. Here he was giving me this validation, like, “You’re on the right track. Keep on.” At that point in my life, I needed to hear that, because listening to [Tomi-Ann’s] story, I think, “God, I wish I’d taken a hard left and gone and studied psychology and done something more constructive.”

 I say that only because I think what happened was I did put so much hard work into acting, and after this incident … it was a profound incident for me, and it did affect the way I looked at my career. I think it pushed me back a lot. I stayed in it, but I had a conflict now that I was living with, that made it much harder to pursue with the same zest and purity that I had once started with.

 As I left the office that day, on my way to the elevator, Harvey stopped me and he said, “Welcome to the Miramax family”—he used the word family, making me feel very included and cozy—and “Now you can come to screenings and all kinds of things and meet people.” I really felt like he was gonna be a mentor. He said, “In fact, there’s a movie this afternoon. Are you available?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “OK, I’ll have my car come pick you up.” He did. We ended up going to a movie, the movie Red Rock West. It was a Miramax movie, but we were just going to the theater on the Upper West Side.

 Slate: Just paying for tickets, popcorn in the lobby?

 Kendall: Basically, yeah, with 10 other people in the theater. I was mortified and already had this sinking feeling that I’d been had, of course. Afterward, I had to orient myself and find my way to a subway stop and see how I was gonna get home. He’d had a car pick me up. It was all strange.

 He said, “My apartment’s right here. Will you come up for one second?” I thought, “No, I’ll just wait down here.” He said, “Just come up for one second.” He negotiated with me to get me to come up to his apartment. I didn’t feel right about it, but then I thought, “He’s married. I know he’s married. He’s talked about his wife. He’s too visible to do anything.”

 We went upstairs. He made himself a drink. He was inviting me to relax. We talked about art, movies, politics. Now I started feeling like, “Oh, OK, the meeting’s back on. Now he’s getting to know me even more.”

 Slate: He seemed interested in what you had to say.

 Kendall: Yeah, and I felt validated and respected as an artist, again, and maybe even safe, which is the strange part. Then he went to the bathroom. The first time he came back with a robe on, and he asked me for a massage. I couldn’t believe that it went into that place. I don’t know why, again, looking back, why was that so strange, but it was just so awkward for me. I was young. He was much older than me at that time. It really felt different, the age difference. It was also just the touching, wanting me to touch him. Suddenly, everything was definitely off now, and I knew what it was about. Now it was just having to get out of there.

 Slate: What did you say when he came out in the robe?

 Kendall: I said, “No. I’m not comfortable.” He’s like, “Everybody does it.” I said, “I’m just not that person. Sorry.” I apologized. Then he went back, and I thought he was gonna get dressed, but then he came back, and he came back fully naked.

 That was when I went from just shock to adrenaline-rush shock. I remember feeling very much like … I remember distinctly feeling like, “Is this the moment that that happens to me?” It makes me emotional to think about it, but, “Is it gonna happen? Is that gonna happen to me right now?” I don’t even want to say the word. I was so scared. He’s so big. That’s a big guy. He was between me and the door. Then it became this back-and-forth of, “Just let me kiss you. Just let me touch you. Just give me a massage. Just lift up your shirt and let me see your breasts.”

 I got mad. I said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.” I did a good job of I think sticking up for myself, because over my dead body was he gonna have his way with me. I knew that. I felt that kind of strength that you feel when they talk about women that move cars for their children or something. I was like, “No. No. Just no.”

 It was a long negotiating process to get out of his apartment. I finally got out. He said, “I’ll let you leave. If you let me just get dressed, I’ll take you in a cab myself.” I agreed to that, I think because I felt like I should play nice, the whole way. I think that that was the safest way to go.

 Then he took me in a taxi. I got out at a bar downtown in the Lower West Side, and I just went into the bar, and I went right up to the bartender and I said, “Can you please talk to me like you know me and like you’re supposed to be meeting me here?” Because Harvey was in the taxi, and he was looking through the window of the taxi for a good 20 minutes.

 Slate: Just waiting outside the bar?

 Kendall: Just staring. Staring me down.

 Slate: That’s so frightening.

 Kendall: It was so weird. It was so frightening and so eerie. I knew that he knew he had done something wrong. Was he trying to manage it? Was he trying to threaten me? There was a lot of levels to him that I saw within this event. There was a little boy, “Come on, just let me see your breasts,” and then there was this, “Come on, come on,” bully and real tough, mean guy. It was a lot of levels.

 Slate: Asking to see you out and drop you off almost seems like an attempt to assert normalcy, like, “We’ve just had a normal day together, and I’m just dropping you off.”

 Kendall: 100 percent, yeah. I was shaking the whole time in the car and the whole time at the bar. I knew that I had to play along almost, to get to my free spot.

 Slate: You described, as you were beginning to tell the story, how it left you feeling like you had a conflict in pursuing your career after that. Describe what that conflict was.

 Kendall: I just remember the next day … I talked to my mom about it, obviously. I cried on her shoulder. There was this conversation about, “What can you do?” I just remember thinking, “I can’t do anything. I can’t go up against this guy. He is Hollywood.”

 Even then, I knew who he was and who he was going to become, and [thought], “I’m nobody. Who’s gonna believe me? Who’s gonna care? If I go up against him, he will snuff me out so fast. If I don’t go up against him—either way I’m living now with the new knowledge that there’s only a few things people care about in Hollywood: money, sex, and the movies. They don’t care about you. It doesn’t matter. Unless you can play that tough, then maybe this isn’t for you. If sex is the currency that you’re supposed to use, I can’t do it. I’m not made for it. I spent all this money and time in acting school, and now I know I’m not made for this.”

 All that being said, I just want to say I know there are actresses … who got through without doing that. Come on. There are plenty of strong and talented, beautiful women who have made it, have made great careers for themselves. I don’t want to say that’s the only thing that happens in Hollywood, but there was something about me that knew that day that this was gonna happen, and it could happen on such a high level that I just knew I didn’t have any [way to] fight back, that whoever I talked to didn’t have the power to do anything about it or seem to care. Then you see someone like Harvey continue to get celebrated over and over again.

 Slate: I want to ask all three of you what it was like to watch his ascent over time, but before I do, Alice, your encounter with Harvey was at Cannes in 2002?

 Alice Evans: In 2002, in Cannes. I think I’d run into him before that time, vaguely, but this one stood out. I want to also say that my encounter was not in any way as harrowing as the two we’ve just heard.

 The reason I wanted to speak was that when I first heard on something like the 6th or 7th of October that people had started to come forward, and the New York Times and the New Yorker pieces had come out, I was like, “Finally!” Then about three days later, I heard that he was denying it, and I remember feeling so angry because I know at least five or six women who have had horrendous moments with Harvey, just absolutely horrible times in hotel rooms and bathrobes. Although my experience wasn’t that, I knew that the only way to empower the women that had come forth already and for them not to be called liars was for more of us to come forward and say, “We know. We know that this man is an absolute vile creep.”

 My particular story happened in 2002. I’d been on a great roll as an actress. I’d been an actress for about six years. In 1999, me and my then-boyfriend, I’d met him on the film 102 Dalmatians, we were the two young leads in the film, and thanks to that, we’d had a few really good years, both of us.

 He was in New York. I was in Cannes to promote a film that I’d done the year before. Things were very exciting. He was flying in to Cannes the next day to promote a film that he’d done. We were very much in love, and it was amazing. It was my last night on my own in the hotel. I went down to the bar on the beach. I was looking around for somebody I might’ve known, so I went, stood at the bar. Literally, I turn around and Harvey Weinstein’s right next to me.

 My first thought was, “Oh my God, I’m gonna get to meet Harvey properly.” It’s really weird, because I’d actually met one girl in Paris after she’d come from her meeting with Harvey and seen her shaking, but just like you said, there was this mythical person who had the power to turn you into a Gwyneth Paltrow or anybody, whoever you want to choose. I was like, “Oh my God.” Also because of his politics. We all knew that he was a Democrat, and so am I. I thought, “He’s intelligent, and I’d love to talk to him.” I just thought, “What am I gonna say? I don’t know what to say.”

 I said, “Hi.” He said, “Hi.” He said, “I’m Alice.” He said, “I know.” Very clever. I don’t know if he did know or not. I said, “My boyfriend, Ioan Gruffudd, tested for you last night in New York.” He said, “I know, and he did an awesome job.” That was just incredible, because I was like, “Wow, he knows us. We’re just these British actors, and oh my God, I’m in Cannes, and … ” I was just, “Oh really? Did he really?” I was thinking, “I can’t wait to tell him, it’s gonna be amazing, that he did an awesome job, he might be getting this big movie.”

 Then something—what [Katherine] said just then about the bathrobe and the moment when you went, “Oh, this is gonna happen”—I don’t know how it transitioned. It was almost like it was an out-of-body experience. All of a sudden, he was saying, “I want to touch your tit. I want to touch your tits.” We were in this full bar. It was almost like, “No, hold on. This can’t be happening,” but it is. It’s weird because when I was 18 I had a nasty car accident, and the car flipped over and we landed on the back and I remember thinking, “Oh, this is how I’m gonna die.” It was the same feeling. It was like, “Oh my God, this is going to happen to me now.”

 He wanted me to go into a bathroom that was about five feet behind me. He was moving in on my personal space. He wanted me to go into the bathroom, into a cubicle. He was gonna follow me, he was gonna touch my breasts and my private parts, and it was just gonna …

 The weird thing is, I didn’t say, “What the hell do you think you’re … ” I was saying, “I don’t think I should, because I’ve got a … ” I was coming up with ridiculous excuses. As [Katherine said], you can’t quite believe it’s happening, because, and it sounds crazy, but—this is gonna sound really awful—I thought that I wasn’t the sort of girl that people come on to like that, because I didn’t give that vibe … I think that’s a horrible thing for me to say, but I think that I maybe thought that there were girls who did give that vibe, but that I didn’t. I feel stupid for thinking that it would be any different than that.

 Basically, he just inched forward, and I inched back, and he inched forward, and I inched back, and then it got to the point where it was very clear I was gonna escape and run. As I was escaping, he was like, “Whatever. I hope your career goes well, and I hope your boyfriend’s career goes well.”

 Two days later we got news that my then-boyfriend, but now husband, had not got the role. My mother had just passed away. My father had just remarried. I was a little bit lost. I didn’t have anybody else to talk to.

 I confided in somebody, and my husband doesn’t want me to tell this part, but somebody who was related to the team of people that were working for him, and that was part of that. I said, “This thing happened, and I’m so sorry, and I don’t know if it had anything to do with … ” He was like, “Did you have to mention Ioan’s name?” I remember thinking, “Oh shit, that’s why,” as if to say, “You didn’t have to bring our client into this.”

 Look, I don’t blame him, and I’m not trying to witch-hunt him, but the weird thing is that for many years, all I could think of was, “Why did I say ‘boyfriend’?” Ioan never was called for Miramax, and neither was I.

 Kendall: I don’t want to interrupt, but I know why you said your boyfriend. Of course you said, “My boyfriend.” You were making yourself safe immediately.

 Evans: You know what? You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right.

 Kendall: You were legitimizing yourself as an actor, and your boyfriend, too, and you were trying to meet Harvey in a business way, which is what you’re supposed to do when you’re an actor.

 Actors, we can’t pick up a guitar and just play in our living rooms. We are completely dependent on someone to hire us. You’re not gonna go do a monologue in your bedroom.

 Slate: You can’t busk on the subway.

 Evans: Exactly. We absolutely are dependent on someone to hire us and then somebody not to edit us out at the end.

 Kendall: You might’ve helped your boyfriend get the job that night had you had a certain conversation with him and it had gone a certain way.

 Evans: That’s the way that we do think in Hollywood …

 Kendall: Not just in Hollywood, everywhere. People like to work with people they like, everywhere. If you make a connection with this man then it might make him give Ioan the job. That’s why you brought his name up.

 Evans: It is. What was crazy was when the person said, “You could’ve just … ” The person didn’t even say, “I’m sorry. Are you OK?” The person said, “I’m really angry with you for bringing up his name.” I was like, “Yeah, I know. Yeah, I’m sorry about it.”

 Kendall: The thing that [Tomi-Ann] was saying in the beginning about shame. I think all of us …

 Slate: Yeah, I’m struck by, in each of your accounts—Tomi-Ann, you described this, too—each of you described your story and then you described a second layer where you were looking back and critiquing your own actions. You each had built in, “I was too apologetic. I was too this.” It’s striking. Tomi-Ann, what’s your response to hearing these other stories?

 Roberts: First of all, when Alice starts by saying, “My encounter wasn’t nearly as harrowing,” already here you are apologizing. Presented with this moment in time—and Katherine talked about it, and so did Alice—there’s this moment where you go, “Oh hell. Here it comes.”

 I think you mentioned your boyfriend also as a way of saying, “Here’s a boundary. I’m gonna name the fact that I have a boyfriend.” The room starts spinning and you think, “What are the rules here?” Then all of a sudden you realize, “Here’s what the rules are. The rules are, simply because you are female, you are violatable. I’m gonna violate your boundaries anyway. You can try to put some up, but here I come.”

 Evans: I was talking to my husband about this today, because the accusation with Al Franken [was published] today, which is a little different I think, to some of the ones that we’ve been hearing about, [like] Roy Moore. My husband said, “I’m terrified.” I said, “Why are you terrified?” He said, “If Al Franken’s being accused because he tried to kiss this woman and put his tongue … ” he said, “That’s happened to me before. I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.”

 I said to him, “You don’t understand. For me there are two completely separate types of men. There are the ones that maybe try and get the wrong end, and actually I’ve tried with men and got the wrong end and they’ve said no, and I’ve gone, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I feel embarrassed,’ and then there are the ones that you say no and you realize they’re not going to stop.” I was trying to explain to my husband how completely different those two types of men were, and how, as far as I was concerned, that they weren’t gonna get mixed up.

 Then I realized that at the moment, there are a lot of men thinking of that drunken time they had when they were 23 when they got the wrong end of the stick, and where does that leave us?

 Kendall: You mean like a pass gone awry?

 I was thinking a lot about this—and I don’t know what Tomi-Ann thinks, but I would like to know since she’s a psychologist—but I know for me, my body had a very different reaction in this situation with Harvey than it has with a man that made a pass at me that I didn’t want to make a pass at me.

 Evans: Yes, exactly what I was trying to say.

 Kendall: I had an out-of-body experience with Harvey. I was shaking like a leaf. I think my adrenaline was through the roof. I have two or three situations where I saw him afterward over the years. One of them: A friend of mine said to me the other night, “Katherine, we went to the premiere of The English Patient together, and you threw up in the car on the way home, and now I know why.”

 Evans: Oh, Jesus.

 Kendall: I totally blocked that out.

 Slate: Wow.

 Kendall: I don’t remember that at all. I don’t know if you do that over a pass gone awry.

 Slate: It seems like it’s about whether the person making the pass is actually curious about your answer, whether it’s a “Hey, are we in the same place?” and they’re concerned about where you are and will respect it if you’re not.

 Evans: What Ioan was worried about was that somehow the two overlapped. I’ve had maybe four or five Harvey-type encounters in my life, one with a famous rock star in a hotel room, which was a similar thing, where I tried to get out the door and he slammed the door on me so I couldn’t leave and then I ran out shaking. It’s so different. It’s literally, “I’m gonna get raped now,” whereas the pass gone awry thing, the man feels embarrassed, and you both feel embarrassed. I was trying to explain to him how different they were. I think it’s hard to put into words.

 Kendall: One takes you in. Like [Julia] said, one is checking in, and one is just like, “You’re not there. You’re not a person.”

 Roberts: A pass is a question, and it’s seeking an answer from another actual human being.

 Slate: Tomi-Ann, I’m curious whether you knew about Weinstein’s reputation, since you didn’t continue to pursue a Hollywood career … I think you’ve described in some interviews sitting in Oscar parties and occasionally, in ones where you felt like you were with the right crowd, sharing a little bit of what had happened to you. Did you know that you weren’t alone?

 Roberts: No. No. I just knew that I would ask, “Is this a Miramax movie?” I remember The English Patient so well. It’s so crazy that you [Katherine] say that you threw up and you don’t remember it, but I remember being sick in that movie. It’s so strange that you’re saying that.

 Kendall: I didn’t remember. My friend just told me the other night. He took me to dinner and he said, “Do you remember?” I was like, “What? No.” “Yes, Katherine, you barfed in the car.”

 Slate: You were sick watching it, too?

 Roberts: I think that all of those movies, Good Will Hunting, they became just sickening.

 Kendall: I feel exactly the same.

 Roberts: It would be an ordeal for me to get through them. I would think, of course, “This is a wonderful movie,” and then you leave the theater and you’re talking with your friends and everyone’s saying what an amazing movie it was, and there’s something rotten.

 Kendall: I know the feeling so well.

 Evans: Then everybody was saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” every time they got an Oscar, to Harvey. Then to hear Kate Winslet recently saying that she was told to say thank you to him, and she deliberately didn’t, and now realizing that I was thinking, “Ah, there go all the people that managed to finesse their relationship with Harvey Weinstein.”

 Slate: Both with Weinstein and then with the many men, almost too many to name, about whom allegations have come out in the last month, there’s been a lot of dissecting of these public apologies. Harvey Weinstein’s was certainly among the least effective documents we’ve seen. A lot of people spent time last week picking apart the apology of Louis C.K. and wondering whether it was good enough or not good enough. Obviously a lot of those commentators are just people who know the work: people who have seen The English Patient, people who watched Louie. I’m curious, for you guys, what you would want out of an apology—whether any apology could be satisfying.

 Evans: I don’t personally think much of apologies. I’ve asked myself in many situations in life what I think about apologies, and I think if somebody’s done something that is neglectful or was done because they’d drunk too much alcohol or that they had a silly thought, and they apologize, it’s fine. But I think for certain things … I don’t know about how you two feel, because I feel that it was a different level of attack that happened to you two.

 Kendall: I don’t know how I feel, because I am in general a very forgiving person, and I don’t know if that has to do with me being a “nice girl” or just an empathetic person that wants to believe that people can change and that we’re all born pure. I know that most abusers were abused. I would like to hear what our psychologist on the panel has to say about that, but everything I’ve read does suggest that. I think that’s a really interesting, important part of this.

 Roberts: I think there are a number of layers there. There’s research on apologies. There’s research on forgiveness. I will say that we’ve all been subjected to an apology that really felt nothing like it was an apology. Here’s the thing. When someone apologizes for our having been hurt, what they’re saying is, “I’m sorry you felt that way,” and that is not at all an apology. An apology is about actually acknowledging the harm that your own action or inaction made happen. That’s something that’s quite hard to come by in any public forum. There’s no room for that. You never hear a politician do it properly. You never hear anybody do it properly.

 In our own intimate relationships, we could get in fights with the person we love the most, and we’re so mortified that we’ve hurt them that we cling fiercely and we say, “But I didn’t mean to. But I didn’t mean to.” Then it turns out that our partner says to us, “Nevertheless, you did.” Then we finally have to say, “I am sorry.” That’s rare. I don’t see very many genuine apologies among these many, many, now, men who have been named as serial harassers or abusers.

 Then I think the second thing is so interesting. Forgiveness is such a puzzling phenomenon. We know that clinically, forgiveness is a powerful, powerful source of rehabilitation in one’s self.

 Evans: For the forgiver or for the forgiven?

 Roberts: For the forgiver, and here’s the trick: There are some conditions under which the forgiven doesn’t even need to goddamn know. Why should they know? You can go through the process with your therapist, with your loved one, of finding a way to let go of the bond that exists between your powerful negative emotions and this event. You can do that through forgiveness, but the person who harmed you doesn’t ever need to know.

 Evans: That makes perfect sense to me …

 Roberts: I think for me, the power of forgiveness, it’s in between your own ears. There are going to be some occasions where you will get a tremendous amount of healing by engaging in that process but never letting the harm-doer even know.

 Slate: I’m curious to know what it’s been like for the three of you the last month. Katherine and Tomi-Ann, you were in that second New York Times story right in that first week of revelations, sharing these things that you’d only discussed with a few people for years, even decades. What has it been like to (A) see so many other women come forward about Harvey Weinstein and (B) to be part of a set of people who I think are very brave, who seem to have triggered a massive cultural watershed moment—

 Kendall: It’s been wild. I’m so touched and grateful to have met the women … even though I wish it had never happened to them. I feel so close to you all. It helps my healing. It really helps, because I think the loneliness of feeling like it’s just me makes the trauma of it worse. I think that when you realize other people have been hurting too and you’re not the only freak that’s hurting, that there’s something really healing about that. I’m also flabbergasted by how many women, maybe every single person I know, every single woman is a #MeToo. I didn’t know that that would be the case.

 Slate: Tomi-Ann, what’s it been like for you?

 Roberts: Oh gosh. It’s been everything Katherine just said, absolutely, but I think also I wasn’t prepared for the kind of re-traumatization that would come from … I ended up having to make an outgoing message in my email that said, “I have already told my story, and if that’s all you want are the salacious details of that story, don’t contact me. I’m happy to talk about larger issues, because we will not be quiet anymore.”

 Evans: That is exactly why I wanted to do this piece and not almost every other single offer I’ve had. It’s because they wanted, “Can we do a piece with Alice where she recounts to camera the anecdote?” You know that’s just gonna be the loop that will be just played again and again.

 Kendall: It is re-traumatizing.

 Evans: Yeah, whereas for me it’s much more important what we’re gonna do, where we think this is gonna go, what we think this means on a larger scale.

 Roberts: I think in my case, too … this has turned out to be this ironic, this strange platform for me to talk about my career’s worth of research on these issues. Then I think, “Oh God, did it take having to tell the story to be able to … ”

 Kendall: That’s such an interesting place that you just took it for yourself, because I think that we’ve been bursting to talk about this for our whole lives. Come on. We just got to vote. As women, where we are right now in society, it’s right there at the tipping point, and this is the moment. You’ve been studying this, I think, because it’s been an issue your whole life. Luckily, in this lifetime, we get to see people wanting to talk about it. I never thought we would.

 When I first talked to Jodi Kantor from the New York Times, I was like, “Wait, this is a story? You think this is a story?” I’d minimized it so much that I just thought, “What? You care about me? Why now? Are you serious? This can’t be.”

 Roberts: I was meant to be grading exams. I saw the first New York Times piece, with Ashley Judd and others. I set my exams aside, and I wrote an email to Jodi Kantor. I sent it on to my mother and my adult daughters, because I said, “Surely Jodi Kantor won’t read this email, or certainly she won’t care about my story. I’m a 54-year-old college professor, my God,” and the next morning she was on my voicemail. She called me. It’s the same thing you’re saying, Katherine, “This is a story? You care about mine?”

 Slate: One thing that’s been striking about these stories and some others that have come out is just: It’s not a corporation, and there’s not an HR department that you can call—as we’re also learning, HR departments don’t always handle everything well either—but the fluidity of work in this industry seems to contribute to some of these dynamics. What steps do you think should be taken to prevent behavior like this from affecting the careers of women entering the industry?

 Evans: I feel like, it’s very simple to me. It’s not necessarily about men and women … it’s about bullying. I was bullied a lot as a child. My mother … used to say, “The best thing to do is take the high road.” Sorry: Fuck the high road. I shouldn’t—

 Slate: You can swear on this podcast.

 Evans: Fuck the high road, because I tried for years and years to take the high road, and I tried “ignoring” them, and I’m doing little quote marks with my fingers there, because they just threw more iced lollies at my back and shouted things like, “Slut,” which was the word everybody was called for some reason in England back in the ’70s and ’80s. I had a horrible time.

 It wasn’t until I was about 14, and there was a girl that used to meet me every night after school, and she used to say, “I’m gonna beat you up, but not tonight,” she said, “Another night.” I would walk around with this terror. Then finally she said one day, the same thing, “I’m gonna beat you up, but not tonight, tomorrow.” I just said, “Just do it. Just do it.” She punched me in the face. I just looked around at her, and I just punched her back in the face. Then something took over me, and I grabbed hold of her hair, and I started repeatedly punching her back in the face. I went to quite a rough school, I have to say. We were having this full-on fight. It was a massive changing point for me. I realized that you cannot ignore a bully.

 Interestingly, my daughter, who’s now 8, in preschool, started being bullied in exactly the same way that I was. I turned around to my daughter and I said, “No. If somebody says something to you, anything, you have to say something back to them, and if somebody pushes you, you have to push them back. I don’t care if that gets you into trouble,” because I know, from years and years, that it doesn’t get better if you appease somebody. It really doesn’t. Does that make any sense to you, Tomi-Ann?

 Roberts: I think there are so many layers there, as we know. What did we each do to try to get out of our bullying encounter? We were very polite. We appeased this gigantic man because we didn’t want to poke the bear.

 I think you have to equip your child with the wherewithal to understand that if you’re at school and you have your teachers as witnesses, then you say right back to that bully, “Do not speak to me that way.”

 But you also have to allow for … I wish we heard from more women who ended up having to do the thing to get out of the room. I don’t feel like a hero. I don’t feel like a hero that I left relatively unscathed. I think for a lot of women, the only way out of the room is to …

 Evans: Well, Natasha Henstridge just beautifully spoke on the Today show yesterday about this. She had encounters with Harvey Weinstein and Brett Ratner. The Brett Ratner one really, really, really upset her. She had to go through with the act because he wouldn’t let her out of the room. I’ve known Natasha for a long time. I didn’t know this about her, and I teared up watching her talk. [Note: Ratner’s lawyer has “categorically” disputed the allegations against him from Henstridge and several others, including more women whose accounts were published since this conversation.]

 Roberts: We all get to have people feel as though we were heroic because we didn’t go along with it, but in some cases, my God, it’s the only way you’re going to save yourself …

 Slate: The last question I wanted to ask you guys—and you’ve done some of this already, which has been great—is really just what you want to know from the other women who have been through this. We’ll start here with each other. Tomi-Ann, I’m curious what you want to ask that you haven’t had a chance to ask yet.

 Roberts: I think I’ve already been able to feel such a community, as Katherine also said. To confess to you all that I felt ashamed is so relieving, because the biggest forgiveness here is to my own self. I have to forgive my 20-year-old self for thinking that the only reason I didn’t go along with this was because I was a chicken or a prude or something. I guess I’m wondering if you have found ways to forgive yourselves.

 Evans: I find it very hard to forgive myself about anything.

 Kendall: It’s hard, right?

 Roberts: It’s really hard.

 Kendall: I had a couple moments of feeling very loving towards my 24-year-old self. I want to say, “Hey girl, if you could see me now, if you could see what’s happening now … ”

 Roberts: “You’d freak.”

 Kendall: Yeah. I’m glad that girl got to grow up and be this girl.

 Evans: I think one thing that comes to mind for me, and I saw this a lot on some of the negative comments on Twitter, where there was one person … who said, “You wanted the bright life. You wanted to be a famous star. You wanted to be rich and famous. Ha. You should’ve chosen a normal job like everybody else.”

 I thought it was interesting because I think that in myself I’ve always felt guilty because maybe I was brought up not to want to choose a job that was vain and self-aggrandizing, perhaps, if one succeeded, and that somehow these people had now caught me out …

 All of a sudden these people are coming out and saying, “You see? You see? If you wanted to go into that, then you deserve whatever you get.” I think, “No. No. Actually, no, because this is my job, and everything I’ve ever done in my life, everything we have, our lovely house with our lovely pool, our lovely kids, is paid for by acting. Therefore, it’s a legitimate job that we’re doing.”

 We have made a living from acting, and it is viable, and it’s OK to want to be an actor. People that are growing up now should be allowed to know that you can want to be famous.

 Kendall: And successful.

 Evans: And successful, or to earn money. You can want to be in the spotlight, and that doesn’t mean that then if things go like this, wrong, you have to accept the—

 Kendall: Storytelling is a healing art, whether you’re behind the mic or animated.

 Evans: An art that’s been around forever and ever and ever.

 Kendall: We need storytelling in our culture. It helps heal us. There’s no reason to diminish it. Some characters in movies are sexy. They shouldn’t be subject to being raped because of it.

 Roberts: The other thing that has struck me over all these stories is, my God, we’re resilient. Really. We shouldn’t have to endure these things, but we do.

 Kendall: Every single woman.

 Evans: Some people endure a lot worse and have endured a lot worse, and they don’t have a platform.

 Kendall: No, they don’t.

 Evans: That’s why we need to use our platform.

 Kendall: That’s why something more needs to happen from this. That’s why there needs to be a next step, for other people’s voices to be heard, people that don’t have a platform.

 Evans: That’s why I don’t want to stop talking.

 Published Nov 21, 2017, 5:00 AM ET ||||| EXCLUSIVE: The first true bid for the assets of troubled The Weinstein Company will be a difficult one to beat for any bidders thinking of getting into the fray. It starts with the woman fronting the bid, a Mexican immigrant who served in the Obama cabinet and has built banks and businesses and has four bona fide backers, some in Silicon Valley, ready to pony up $275 million in funds that are at the ready and will not have to be raised.

 Those funds would take TWC’s long-suffering investors out of the equation, and far exceeds the $150 million-$175 million that Colony Capital offered in a bottom-feeding bid that was fed to the press as cataclysmic when the board rejected it. The new bid also means that TWC would not have to close the bridge loan with Fortress, with the proceeds from the U.S. sale of Paddington 2 sufficient to keep the company running while the bid comes through. Also important and a disappointment to several publications waving the pom-poms for it, TWC should be able to divert a bankruptcy filing.

 The bid by Maria Contreras-Sweet, former head of the U.S. Small Business Administration for the Barack Obama administration, has a plan that would leave 51% of the company controlled by women. She’s got four backers behind her as well as Loeb & Loeb, Ernst & Young and FTI’s Roy Salter as advisors. This could erase what seemed like an indelible stain of scandal and could reignite the company by removing the stigma on assets that include library titles, the Kevin Costner-Taylor Sheridan series Yellowstone, movies like the recut Benedict Cumberbatch-Michael Shannon-starrer The Current War and the Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes musical In The Heights, as well as numerous other series and films. It might make possible the David O Russell-directed series with Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore, which was scrapped at Amazon even though it had a two-season commitment.

 Deadline got hold of the proposal letter and you can read it below. Moelis & Co is handling the sale. But a couple of things. The Wall Street Journal, which was leaked the Contreras-Sweet bid, reported that Gloria Allred has blessed it. She’s not part of the consortium proposing to take over the company; she is repping several women who’ve accused Harvey Weinstein of wrongdoing and has already filed civil suits. What her endorsement means is that the bid comes with properly set aside contingency funds to make whole the coming wave of plaintiffs. Deadline reported that was the plan all along, to set aside funds that would be paired with insurance policies to handle claims against Weinstein. The White Knight bid also calls for staff to continue to be employed. Likely gone will be what is left of the board of directors, which approved an unconscionable contract re-up for Harvey Weinstein that ostensibly made it impossible to fire him for cause despite all the scandalous reported wrongdoing, as long as he funded settlements to make misbehavior and potential scandals disappear.

 While numerous potential suitors including Lionsgate and MGM mobilizing, the leaders might well push other bidders away from the table; in Hollywood right now, appearance means everything, and it will be a daunting task to best the amount and terms offered by Contreras-Sweet. The Board of Directors might have hoped for $300 million or more, but it’s hard to imagine it’s going to get any better than this.

 Here is Contreras-Sweet’s offer letter, which is now making the rounds in the financial community: ||||| On April 20, 2015, the Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez sat in an office in midtown Manhattan with an eighteen-page legal agreement in front of her. She had been advised by her attorney that signing the agreement was the best thing for her and her family. In exchange for a million-dollar payment from Harvey Weinstein, Gutierrez would agree never to talk publicly about an incident during which Weinstein groped her breasts and tried to stick his hand up her skirt. “I didn’t even understand almost what I was doing with all those papers,” she told me, in her first interview discussing her settlement. “I was really disoriented. My English was very bad. All of the words in that agreement were super difficult to understand. I guess even now I can’t really comprehend everything.” She recalled that, across the table, Weinstein’s attorney was trembling visibly as she picked up the pen. “I saw him shaking and I realized how big this was. But then I thought I needed to support my mom and brother and how my life was being destroyed, and I did it,” she told me. “The moment I did it, I really felt it was wrong.” Weinstein used nondisclosure agreements like the one Gutierrez signed to evade accountability for claims of sexual harassment and assault for at least twenty years. He used these kinds of agreements with employees, business partners, and women who made allegations—women who were often much younger and far less powerful than Weinstein, and who signed under pressure from attorneys on both sides. Weinstein also hid the payments underwriting some of these settlements. In one case, in the nineteen-nineties, Bob Weinstein, who co-founded the film studio Miramax with his brother, paid two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, roughly six hundred thousand dollars today, to be split between two female employees in England who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault. The funds came from Bob Weinstein’s personal bank account—a move that helped conceal the payment from executives at Miramax and its parent company, Disney, as well as from Harvey Weinstein’s spouse. In an interview, Bob Weinstein acknowledged the personal payout but said that his brother had misled him about the reasons behind it. “Regarding that payment, I only know what Harvey told me, and basically what he said was he was fooling around with two women and they were asking for money,” Bob Weinstein told me. “And he didn’t want his wife to find out, so he asked me if I could write a check, and so I did, but there was nothing to indicate any kind of sexual harassment.” A former senior Miramax executive said that it was implausible that Bob Weinstein did not know about the nature of the allegations, which were reported to the company. It has become common practice to use nondisclosure agreements to resolve allegations of sexual misconduct. Some legal experts, including the victim’s-rights attorney Gloria Allred, who is representing some of Weinstein’s accusers, stress that victims may actually prefer such agreements. Allred told me that her firm had represented “thousands” of people who have entered into confidential settlements and said, “some people don’t want their parents, their friends, members of their community to know.” But recent revelations of sexual abuse by powerful men in entertainment, politics, journalism, and other fields have raised questions about whether the use of these agreements should be curtailed, particularly when there is a stark power imbalance between the accuser and the accused. In numerous cases, such agreements have allowed abuses to continue unabated, sometimes for decades. The comedian Bill Cosby and the television personality Bill O’Reilly both repeatedly used secret settlements to resolve allegations of sexual misconduct. Last week, Congresswoman Jackie Speier disclosed that the House of Representatives had paid more than seventeen million dollars to settle two hundred and sixty claims of harassment over the past twenty years (a figure that includes sexual offenses as well as harassment based on race, age, or other factors). Speier is working with a bipartisan group of politicians to introduce federal legislation that would overhaul the way Congress handles harassment claims, including offering better legal counsel to employees with allegations, and removing a long-standing requirement that they sign nondisclosure agreements. “The category of cases where I think we have a problem is the heavy hitters, the rainmakers,” Samuel Estreicher, a professor of law at New York University whose work focusses on employment issues, told me. In cases like Weinstein’s, Estreicher said, “repeat offenders are able to operate under a cloak of silence with the help of nondisclosure agreements.” Zelda Perkins, a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, was one of the women involved in the sexual-harassment and assault settlement that was underwritten by Bob Weinstein. Even twenty years ago, when the settlement was signed, Perkins recognized that Weinstein was engaging in a pattern of behavior. She fought for—and obtained—requirements specifically intended to prevent Weinstein from continuing to victimize women. The settlement mandated that Weinstein receive treatment from a psychiatrist of Perkins’s choice and that Disney be notified of future harassment settlements made by him. Nonetheless, Weinstein’s misconduct continued, in secret, for decades. “What I want to talk about at this point is not what Harvey did,” Perkins told me. “It’s more about the system that protected him and that enabled him, because that’s the only thing that we can change. Money and power enabled, and the legal system has enabled. Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture, that’s our fault.” Harvey Weinstein’s criminal-defense attorneys, Blair Berk and Ben Brafman, said in a statement, “Because of the pending civil litigation and related investigations, it is inappropriate to respond specifically to each of the unsupported and untruthful insinuations contained in this article. Suffice it to say, Mr. Weinstein strongly objects to any suggestion that his conduct at any time has ever been contrary to law. Be assured that we will respond in any appropriate legal forum, where necessary, and fully expect that Mr. Weinstein will prevail against any claim of legal wrongdoing. Mr. Weinstein categorically denies ever engaging in any non-consensual sexual conduct with anyone and any suggestion that he acted improperly to defend himself against such claims is simply wrong.”

 Gutierrez told me that she had grown up watching her Italian father, whom she described as a “Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde person,” beat her Filipina mother. When Gutierrez tried to intervene, she was beaten as well. (Gutierrez’s father could not be reached for comment.) As an adolescent, Gutierrez became the caretaker of her family, supporting her mother and distracting her younger brother from the violence. “Because of trauma in my past, being touched for me was something that was very big,” she said. Her first concern, she said, was protecting other women from violence. She only signed her secret settlement after her options for criminal justice were shut down. After Gutierrez contacted the police, Weinstein drew upon a network of high-powered defense lawyers, former law-enforcement officials, and private investigators who help the wealthy try to thwart criminal investigations. Unbeknownst to her, Weinstein’s attorneys hired K2 Intelligence, a firm founded by the corporate-intelligence magnate Jules Kroll, and tasked its agents with insuring that the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, did not press charges against Weinstein. One of Weinstein’s defense lawyers, Elkan Abramowitz, whose clients include New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and who is a partner at the firm that formerly employed Vance, oversaw K2’s work. The intelligence firm hired Italian private investigators to dig up information on Gutierrez’s sexual history, according to three individuals with knowledge of its work. (A spokesperson for K2 said that the firm’s work in the Gutierrez case involved only online and public-records searches regarding her past.) The investigators discovered that, as a young contestant in the Miss Italy beauty pageant, in 2010, she had attended a “Bunga Bunga” party hosted by Silvio Berlusconi, who was then the Italian Prime Minister, where he was accused of having sex with prostitutes. The Italian investigators also claimed that Gutierrez engaged in prostitution. (Asked if she was comfortable with The New Yorker printing those allegations, Gutierrez said, “Absolutely.” She flatly denied ever engaging in prostitution. She said she quickly left Berlusconi’s party and later testified as a witness against him when Berlusconi was charged with abuse of power and having sex with a minor. He was acquitted on both charges but later was found guilty in a separate bribery case.) Current and former K2 employees, all of whom had previously worked at the District Attorney’s office, relayed the private investigators' information about Gutierrez in calls to prosecutors. Two K2 employees said that those contacts were part of a “revolving door” culture between the D.A. and high-priced private-investigation firms. Lawyers working for Weinstein also presented a dossier of the private investigator’s findings to prosecutors in a face-to-face meeting. (Joan Vollero, a spokesperson for Vance’s office, said that such interactions with defense attorneys are standard procedure.) When Martha Bashford, the head of the District Attorney’s sex-crimes unit, subsequently questioned Gutierrez, she grilled her about Berlusconi and her personal sexual history with unusual hostility, according to two law-enforcement sources. “They went at her like they were Weinstein’s defense attorneys,” one of the law-enforcement sources told me. (A source from the D.A.’s office who was present for the questioning acknowledged that the meeting focussed on Gutierrez’s past in Italy but said that Bashford was “professional” and not hostile.) Gutierrez remembers being baffled by the line of questioning. She had found the N.Y.P.D. supportive and, at the request of police investigators, had participated in a sting operation in which she met Weinstein and secretly recorded a conversation in which he admitted that he had groped her. “It was weird,” she told me. “I’m, like, ‘What is the connection? I don’t understand. Just listen to the proof.’ ” On April 10, 2015, two weeks after Gutierrez reported Weinstein to the police, the D.A.’s office announced that it wasn’t going to press charges. Two law-enforcement sources told me that the N.Y.P.D. was troubled by the decision, and, shortly afterward, the department’s Special Victims Division conducted an internal review of the last ten criminal complaints in Manhattan stemming from similar allegations, of groping or forcible touching. “They didn’t have a quarter of the evidence we had,” one law-enforcement official said of the other cases. “There were no controlled meets, and only rarely controlled calls.” Yet, the source said, “All of them resulted in arrests.” (Vollero said that many of the arrests cited in the review involved subway groping, including some that were witnessed by police. “Cases involving sex abuse on the subway typically have many more witnesses than other types of misdemeanor sexual abuse,” she said.) Before and after the D.A.’s decision not to press charges, several of Weinstein’s attorneys made donations to Cyrus Vance’s campaigns. All told, Abramowitz, who presented the K2 dossier to the D.A.’s office, has contributed $26,450 to Vance since 2008. In an interview, Abramowitz said that the donations were appropriate. “Cy and I were friends and partners long before Harvey Weinstein came into my life,” Abramowitz told me. “My contributions to his campaign were based on my belief that he is a solid choice for District Attorney.” David Boies, another member of Weinstein’s legal team, donated ten thousand dollars to Vance’s reëlection campaign in the months following Vance’s decision not to press charges. “The idea that my contributions to Cy Vance’s campaign had any relationship to that investigation, I think, is absurd,” Boies told me, adding that he had a close relationship with Vance but never called him about the Gutierrez case. Boies argued that Vance’s office had made a reasonable decision and accused Gutierrez of engaging in prostitution in Italy. “There were transcripts of Italian proceedings where it was described how for years she had performed various sexual acts for various specified amounts of money,” Boies told me. Gutierrez said that any records of the type Boies referred to were a product of her testimony against Berlusconi, who she said used his power to smear her and others involved in the case. “They said that I was a Bunga Bunga girl, that I was having affairs with sugar daddies,” Gutierrez said. “What the hell else were they going to say, that I killed someone? Anyone who knows me knows those things are completely fake.” Gutierrez said that the decision not to press charges shocked her. “We had so much proof of everything,” she recalled. “Everyone was telling me, ‘Congratulations, we stopped a monster.’ ” She began to worry about her future. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat,” she told me. New York tabloids, including the New York Post, to which Weinstein had fed stories in the past, had been publishing lurid reports about Gutierrez that mirrored the information in K2’s dossier. “What did I do wrong?” Gutierrez said. “The only thing I did was exposing something bad that happened to me.” The coverage sometimes included photos from Gutierrez’s modelling career. It was as if “just because I am a lingerie model or whatever, I had to be in the wrong,” Gutierrez said. “I had people telling me, ‘Maybe it was how you dressed.’ ” (Gutierrez had dressed in professional office attire to meet Weinstein, with thick tights because of the cold weather.) Gutierrez, who still supports her brother financially, began to worry that she wouldn’t be able to make a living. “My work depends on image, and my image was destroyed,” she said. Attorneys that Gutierrez consulted advised her to accept a settlement. “I felt pressured,” she told me. “I said no at first.” Eventually, however, she relented. “I was forced by the fact that newspapers completely bashed me, by the fact that I was alone, by the fact that I was twenty-two years old,” Gutierrez told me. “I knew if he could move the press in this way, I couldn’t fight him.” Gutierrez said that she knows that many people will judge her harshly for taking the money. “A lot of people are not empathetic,” she said. “They don’t put themselves in the situation.” Gutierrez’s settlement, a copy of which I reviewed, bears Weinstein’s signature and orders the destruction of all copies of audio recordings of Weinstein admitting to the groping. Gutierrez agreed to give her phone and any other devices that might have contained copies of the recording to Kroll, another private-security firm retained by Weinstein. She also agreed to surrender the passwords to her e-mail account and other forms of digital communication that could have been used to spirit out copies. A sworn statement, pre-signed by Gutierrez, is attached to the agreement, to be released in the event of any breach. It states that the behavior Weinstein admits to in the audio tape never happened. “The Weinstein confidentiality agreement is perhaps the most usurious one I have seen in decades of practice,” an attorney familiar with the agreement told me. After the contract was signed, Gutierrez became depressed and developed an eating disorder. Eventually, her brother, who was concerned, came to the United States. “He knew I was really bad,” she said. He took her to Italy and then the Philippines “to start again.” She told me, “I was completely destroyed.”

 Harvey Weinstein had been using similar tactics with women for more than twenty years. Zelda Perkins, the assistant who signed a nondisclosure agreement with Weinstein twenty years ago, in the U.K., said that she also regrets her decision. In recent weeks, she has begun talking to the press, flouting an agreement that she now feels is unjust. “I think it’s a really important symbolic thing to do right now,” she said. “To stand up and question its legitimacy publicly.” Perkins said that while working for Weinstein she experienced nearly constant sexual harassment. “From my very first time left alone with Harvey, I had to deal with him being present either in his underpants or totally naked,” Perkins said. She told me that she had to buy condoms for him and clean up after his hotel-room encounters. “We had to bring girls to him,” she said. “Though I wasn’t aware of it at first, I was a honeypot.” Weinstein, she said, never succeeded in pressuring her into sex or any physical contact, but she called the barrage of advances “exhausting.” In 1998, Perkins hired an assistant of her own. She warned candidates for the job that Weinstein would make sexual advances, and rejected “very overtly attractive” applicants. In the end, she chose a “prodigiously bright” Oxford graduate, who asked not to be named in this story because she fears legal retaliation. In 1998, during the Venice Film Festival, the new assistant emerged from her first meeting alone with Weinstein distraught, saying that he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room. “She was shaking and she was crying,” Perkins recalled. Perkins confronted Weinstein immediately. “He stood there and he lied and lied and lied,” Perkins recalled. “I said, ‘Harvey, you are lying,’ and he said, ‘I’m not lying; I swear on the lives of my children.’ ” The assistant was too frightened to go to the police, especially in a foreign country. After returning to England, Perkins notified Donna Gigliotti, a producer who worked with them on the Academy Award-winning film “Shakespeare in Love.” Gigliotti, who recalled Perkins coming to her about the incident, told me that she was an outside contractor and “could not report it internally.” Perkins and the assistant resigned from Miramax and sent notice of impending legal action to Weinstein. Their letter set in motion frantic meetings at Miramax, according to former employees, and a fusillade of calls directed at Perkins and the assistant. Perkins said that the night after she resigned she received seventeen calls from Weinstein and other executives with “increasing desperation.” Perkins played me some of the messages, recorded on her answering machine and preserved because she thought she “might need them as protection.” In them, Weinstein veers between anxious pleading and terse demands. “Please, please, please, please, please, please call me. I’m begging you,” he says in one. Perkins and the assistant hired lawyers from the London-based firm Simons Muirhead & Burton. Perkins said that, in hindsight, the attorneys seemed intent on foreclosing any outcome except a settlement. The lawyers told the women that because neither had gone to the police immediately after the incident, reporting the attack at that time was “very clearly not an option.” Perkins said that she asked about reporting the incidents to Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of Disney, which at the time owned Miramax, because she knew that Weinstein’s relationship with Eisner was under strain. The lawyers dissuaded her from that, too. “They just said, ‘No way. Disney will crush you. Miramax will crush you. They will drag you, your family, your friends, your pets through the mud and show that you are unreliable, insane. Whatever they need to do to silence you.’ ” Perkins said that she felt trapped. “I was, like, ‘Right. O.K. So, we can’t go to police because it’s too late. We can’t go to Disney ’cause they don’t give a shit. So who do we tell? Where’s the grownup? Where’s the law?’ ” (Razi Mireskandari, the managing partner at Simons Muirhead & Burton, declined to comment on the negotiations or the final settlement, saying that the terms of the agreement barred him from discussing it.) Perkins initially pushed back on accepting what she called “blood money,” saying she wanted a donation made to a charity for rape victims. Her attorneys told her that the idea was a nonstarter. “I was a twenty-three- or twenty-four-year-old girl sitting in a room with often up to six men telling me I had no options,” she told me. (She did note that one of her own lawyers was a woman.) “That’s just downright wrong.” In the end, the women’s attorneys agreed on the settlement of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to be evenly split between the two former employees. Unbeknownst to Perkins, the money came from Bob Weinstein’s personal bank account. While Bob Weinstein said that he had no knowledge of the purpose of the payments and has previously maintained that he and the rest of the board found the allegations against his brother to be an “utter surprise,” several former employees said that they found the idea that he lacked any knowledge of the misconduct implausible. “Bob may not have done the things, but he was complicit in covering it up for years,” one said. (Last month, Variety reported that a female showrunner who worked on the Weinstein Company drama “The Mist” accused Bob Weinstein of sexual harassment in 2016. He denied the claim.) The agreement that Bob Weinstein underwrote with Perkins and the assistant required the women to have any of their lawyers, accountants, and therapists who might become aware of the settlement sign their own nondisclosure agreements. One clause required that they personally make calls “to tell people to shut up,” as Perkins put it. But Perkins also successfully demanded that provisions be added to the contract that she hoped would change Weinstein’s behavior. The agreement mandated the appointment of three “handlers,” one an attorney, to respond to sexual-harassment allegations at Miramax. Miramax was obligated to provide proof that Weinstein was receiving counselling for three years or “as long as his therapist deems necessary.” Perkins had to approve the therapist and attend the first session. The agreement also required Miramax to report Weinstein’s behavior to Disney and fire him if a subsequent sexual-harassment settlement was reached in the following two years. But Miramax, Perkins said, “stalled and stalled and stalled.” The company implemented the human-resources changes, but other parts of the agreement were not enforced. She pressed for months, then gave up. “I was exhausted. I was humiliated. I couldn’t work in the industry in the U.K. because the stories that were going around about what had happened made it impossible,” she said. In the end, Perkins moved to Central America. “I’d had enough,” she said. After Perkins decided to go public with her story, some law firms she approached for advice were reluctant to represent her, she told me. One said it worried that doing so would undermine confidence in its own nondisclosure agreements. “It appears fraternizing with me may put these other ‘big hitter’ law firms into a conflicted position,” she said. She has only been able to obtain a few pages of her own legal agreement. Both her former law firm and Weinstein’s continue to adhere to a stipulation that she never personally possess a full copy. Read Two Settlements that Harvey Weinstein Reached with His Accusers Weinstein’s agreements appear to have become more restrictive over time. Prior to his agreement with Perkins, Weinstein reached a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement with the actress Rose McGowan, who has publicly claimed that Weinstein raped her, in 1997, at the Sundance Film Festival. Notably, the agreement did not include a nondisclosure provision, but McGowan signed away her right to sue Weinstein. She said that she wanted to pursue charges at the time, but that her lawyer instead convinced her to sign the agreement. “That was very painful,” McGowan said. “I thought a hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money at the time, because I was a kid.” ||||| The Harvey Weinstein sexual assault saga is a scandal for the ages. But the grave accusations of harassment and, in some cases, rape from over 100 women have helped shed an important if disheartening light on the widespread misconduct of many rich and powerful figures in Hollywood, the media, government and elsewhere.

 The story has been so big that it has let another scandal disappear: a corporate backstory about how a group of billionaire board members from the worlds of Wall Street and entertainment let Harvey Weinstein stay in power. It features an all-star cast that included James Dolan and Dirk Ziff—and later, in cameo appearances, Paul Tudor Jones and Marc Lasry—who oversaw an almost unimaginably toxic corporate culture built and led by their friend, according to two directors who long opposed Harvey Weinstein.

 In an extraordinary case of governance-gone-awry, these distinguished figures—brilliant in managing their own ventures—allowed themselves to be deceived by a charismatic mogul, whose blatant business abuses, including allegedly spending millions of dollars of TWC funds on his own personal projects, mirror his serial alleged abuse of women.

 Weinstein was fired by the board of Weinstein Co. (TWC) on Oct. 8, just three days after the New York Times published a report detailing extensive allegations of abuse and harassment by the Hollywood legend; on Oct. 17, Weinstein resigned from the company’s board. (He still retains an ownership stake in the company.)

 Here, Fortune reports for the first time the extent of the dysfunction of this dysfunctional corporate board—one that an insider calls “the ultimate shit show.” The board’s inaction helped Harvey Weinstein remain all-powerful for more than a decade, as directors from the vanguard of the business elite enabled him to stay atop the company.

 Weinstein has admitted to some of the inappropriate behavior and has denied other allegations. He has categorically denied taking part in nonconsensual sex. He has not made public statements regarding allegations that he mismanaged the company or used its funds inappropriately.

 Weinstein declined Fortune’s request to respond to critics of his management. Holly Baird, a spokesperson for Harvey Weinstein, sent Fortune an email stating that, “We are not commenting [on issues involving the board] and Mr. Weinstein is not available for interviews.” Messages requesting a response from TWC, and others seeking comment from Harvey’s brother and co-founder Bob Weinstein, were not returned.

 Harvey and Bob Weinstein at the 52nd Annual ICG Publicists Awards in February 2015. The bylaws and ownership structure of The Weinstein Co. made it nearly impossible for independent board members to influence the brothers' behavior. Mathew Imaging 2015

 Weinstein’s attorney David Boies did address the issue in a letter to director Lance Maerov in August of 2015. In the letter, reviewed by Fortune, Boies states that “Harvey has dedicated himself to making TWC a success.” Boies did not question Maerov’s assertion that TWC was losing money on an operating basis—according to Maerov, it had a deficit of $65 million in 2014—but argued that Maerov’s assertion that “TWC ‘never generated a profit’ ignores the hundreds of millions of dollars in asset values created by the film and television business.”

 PART ONE: Buddies on the Board

 None of the celebrated names that once served on its board are now engaged in salvaging the battered Weinstein Co. Hedge fund manager Jones, publishing heir and mega-investor Dirk Ziff, and Lasry, chief of distressed debt colossus Avenue Capital and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, quit the board over the weekend of October 6, following the publication of the damning New York Times investigation that set the scandal in motion.

 A fourth director, Tim Sarnoff, grandson of the founder of NBC and RCA, and president of production at film processing company Technicolor—described by anti-Weinstein directors as a Harvey loyalist—departed along with them. (Dolan, executive chairman of MSG, owner of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, had left in mid-2016.) For Sarnoff, Ziff and Lasry the last official act was participating in the stormy conference call that Thursday evening, Oct. 5, when all but Jones voted to effectively fire the Hollywood titan they’d long supported.

 That exodus leaves just three of the nine pre-scandal directors to rescue a once-fabled filmmaker. That cleanup crew consists of Harvey’s brother, co-founder, and longtime co-chairman Bob Weinstein, who’s running the studio, and the two directors who, they maintain, had long wanted to dump Harvey Weinstein.

 The anti-Harvey survivors are Tarak Ben Ammar, a Franco-Tunisian financier who’s a leading adviser to a number of global media chiefs, including Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi, and Vincent Bollore; and Maerov, EVP of corporate development at ad giant WPP, and a top lieutenant of its CEO, Sir Martin Sorrell.

 Tarak Ben Ammar and Harvey Weinstein attend the "Miral" premiere at the 67th Venice Film Festival in 2010. Ben Ammar, along with fellow TWC board member Lance Maerov, says he tried to keep The Weinstein Co. from renewing Weinstein's contract in 2015. Pascal Le Segretain Getty Images

 Ben Ammar and Maerov, who’ve served on the board since TWC’s launch in 2005, assert that Weinstein for years bullied and insulted employees, directors, and his brother, squandered outside investors’ money, and ran TWC not to earn profits for its outside investors, but as a personal fiefdom that bestowed celebrity and power.

 “If Harvey Weinstein had run TWC honestly and responsibly, and shown respect for the people around him and investors’ money, Tarak and I would have supported him,” Maerov tells Fortune. “But he wasn’t interested in running the studio honestly and responsibly. He was running it for his own self-aggrandizement.”

 Adds Ben Ammar, “Harvey was so powerful in all circles, social, political, fashion, charity, entertainment, that he used all those tools to get what he wanted. He traded on his social currency like no one else. He began to think that he was untouchable, and that was his downfall.” (In this story, all references to a person as “Weinstein” are to Harvey Weinstein.)

 Ben Ammar and Maerov have discussed their concerns about Weinstein in other recent interviews, including with Fortune. But they’ve revealed little about the boardroom infighting, until now. Neither Weinstein nor the company has made any previous comment on boardroom issues during Harvey Weinstein’s tenure as co-chairman.

 A missed opportunity

 The critical standoff came in 2015. Weinstein’s offenses, say Ben Ammar and Maerov, had escalated into misdeeds so damaging that the board and investors had ample cause to terminate the film mogul.

 Early that year, the board suspected that Weinstein had been misusing company funds, according to Ben Ammar and Maerov. Weinstein hasn’t commented on this allegation. But through his attorney in 2015, Weinstein agreed to repay more than $7 million in company funds that, as his lawyer acknowledged in documents Fortune has reviewed, he had used for personal projects. And in April, news that an Italian model had accused him of groping her in his Tribeca office made headlines worldwide. “At that point, Lance and I pushed to refuse him a new contract,” says Ben Ammar. “But we were blocked by his allies, who held the swing votes, and who were really acting more like his buddies than representing the best interests of TWC.”

 The two long-time dissidents insist that TWC wouldn’t be verging on collapse if the group they describe as Weinstein’s loyalists—Dolan, Ziff, Sarnoff, as well as prominent investors—had joined in their effort to dump him two years ago. (Lasry and Jones joined the board after Weinstein won a new contract.) None of the recently departed directors have spoken out on this issue, either to Fortune or elsewhere. “The tragedy is that if we’d removed Harvey two years ago, we’d still have issues, but the talent would have stayed, because Harvey would have been long gone as CEO. We’d look a lot cleaner and less damaged than we do today,” says Ben Ammar.

 Fortune reached out to seven former directors who served since 2015, as well as to the Weinsteins. Technicolor, where Sarnoff serves as deputy CEO, did not respond to emails requesting comment. Ziff did not respond to messages left at his office. A source provided a statement from Jones explaining why he declined to sign a press release calling for Harvey’s departure, but Jones made no further comment. Dolan offered the following statement via a spokesperson: “We’re not interested in discussing these matters at this time. Information discussed in a boardroom should remain in the boardroom.”

 TWC is now seeking to either sell itself in its entirety, or shed individual assets such as its TV unit and film library. A potential deal with the private equity arm of real estate investor Colony NorthStar failed to materialize. Still, say the two directors, TWC is already benefiting from sales of its movie assets. In mid-November, Warner Bros. agreed to pay around $32 million for the distribution rights to TWC’s Paddington 2, a sequel to a box office smash starring an endearing toy bear.

 It’s especially galling to Ben Ammar and Maerov that the directors they consider Weinstein loyalists bolted from the board when the scandal broke, and that Ziff, Jones and Sarnoff didn’t sign the press release issued on Oct. 6 that condemned Weinstein’s alleged sexual abuse and effectively fired him. “I’m disappointed that his friends didn’t stay on the board at that critical time, so we could make a united statement,” says Ben Ammar. “Bob [Weinstein] deserves a lot of credit for standing with us. But the others split, and gave us no help in navigating today’s tough waters.” When the press release was issued, Ziff and Sarnoff had already left the board. A source provided Fortune with an email that Jones sent to Maerov explaining that he was not signing the release because of possible legal issues in effectively firing Weinstein.

 Most of all, Ben Ammar says, the departed directors missed a crucial opportunity to take a stand at a turning point in cultural history. “This became the biggest scandal in the world,” says Ben Ammar. “There was a sexual harassment regime before the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and a sexual harassment regime in the post-Harvey Weinstein world. They should have stayed to do their duty and denounce him. Instead, they ran for the hills.” Ziff, Jones, and Sarnoff have not provided comment on why the left the board, either to Fortune or in public statements.

 Partying with the board

 According to Ben Ammar and Maerov, the ex-directors were overly swayed by their personal friendships with Weinstein. They assert that Dolan, Ziff and Jones all had close social ties to the famous producer. “Weinstein traded on those friendships, on his social currency,” says Maerov. “He spun a kind of spiderweb,” says Ben Ammar. “He had three tables at the Oscars, he had Emmy parties, he hosted bankers, investors and politicians at glamorous events. He could be so charming. He was Mr. Charming and Mr. Bully all in one. Lots of prominent people, including TWC directors, got caught in the spiderweb.”

 Maerov is somewhat sympathetic to the bygone directors. “These are people who were used by Harvey,” he says. “Lasry and Jones weren’t even there for the vote on his contract. They didn’t have the benefit of the historical facts. Directors who supported Harvey were betrayed just as we were.” Ben Ammar is more adamant. “Sure, Harvey is a great salesman. I was friendly with Harvey. But you have a special duty to tell a friend when he’s wrong, and they didn’t. These are highly successful, sophisticated people. What comes first isn’t friendship, but your duty as a director.”

 By going public, Ben Ammar and Maerov are taking a highly unusual step: Exposing the anatomy of a boardroom brawl. And Fortune‘s reporting, along with other press accounts over the years, support their assertion that half-a-dozen key directors, most of them billionaires, were close friends of Weinstein’s, and in one case did business with TWC.

 Ziff and Weinstein were renowned in show biz circles for partying together. In a 2012 interview on CNN, Weinstein boasted that he and Ziff had had a blast when years earlier they’d chaperoned a young Chelsea Clinton to a rock club on Martha’s Vineyard. Harvey publicly praised Dolan as “one of my and Bob’s best friends” when Dolan left the board in June of 2016. Lasry and Weinstein were neighbors in Westport, Conn., and according to a source familiar with the situation, they and their families regularly socialized together. They also shared a bond as major fundraisers for the Democratic Party.

 Harvey Weinstein (second from right) and Dirk Ziff (far right) attend the ASP - The World Surf League cocktail party on July 24, 2014 in New York City. Ilya S. Savenok Getty Images

 TWC was also, as are many studios, a customer of Technicolor, where director Sarnoff is an executive, for its 3D projection system, and post-production services. In 2011, Technicolor chose TWC’s The King’s Speech to launch its new “MediaEcho,” an app for viewing movies on tablet devices. (A Dow Jones story on October 11 reported that Technicolor had stopped extending credit on services it’s providing to the Weinstein Co., and that CEO Frederic Rose, a former TWC director, had sent an email to executives weighing whether to end all business with the studio.)

 Richard Koenigsberg, a partner in an accounting firm with a prominent entertainment practice—one that did not do business with the Weinstein Co—stayed to sign the Oct. 6 press release condemning Weinstein’s alleged harassment but left the board in mid-October. He did not respond to a message from Fortune. Marc Lasry and Jeff Sackman, a Canadian movie producer who resigned as a director in late 2015, also declined to comment.

 Fortune was able to obtain some not-for-attribution observations from people familiar with the thinking of former directors whom Ben Ammar and Maerov viewed as Harvey Weinstein’s allies. Weinstein’s backers had what they considered sound reasons to take his side. According to people familiar with their viewpoints, Weinstein’s allies reckoned that Harvey epitomized the Weinstein brand, and that without him there would be no Weinstein Co. He’d also recently launched a highly successful television franchise that attracted lucrative bids, and they believed that losing Harvey might jeopardize a future sale. Former directors, according to people familiar with their point of view, also strongly object to the perception that Weinstein controlled the board.

 Both the dissidents, and the Weinsteins in previous public statements, credit former directors with substantial contributions to the business. Bob and Harvey Weinstein praised Dolan for helping TWC develop a lucrative TV franchise. Ziff brought valuable expertise in distressed debt. And Ben Ammar and Maerov praise Sarnoff for joining an unsuccessful attempt to obtain Weinstein’s personnel file, in 2015.

 It’s important to note that when the face-off occurred in 2015, according to both Weinstein’s loyalists and opponents, evidence of alleged sexual abuse was still too sketchy to clearly merit firing him. Though both camps were deeply troubled by the groping scandal and other revelations, Ben Ammar, Maerov maintain that they and his other opponents wanted to dump him for business reasons rather than sexual abuses. “Tarak and I never bought the Harvey Weinstein myth like a lot of other directors,” says Maerov. “We watched the guy for 10 years, and he totally mismanaged the company.”

 PART TWO: A Contract Showdown

 To fathom how Harvey Weinstein survived so long, it’s important to examine the board structure that granted immense power to The Weinstein Co.’s co-founders, Harvey and his brother Bob.

 In 2005, TWC debuted with $950 million in capitalization, consisting of $500 million in equity and $450 million in debt. The equity holders fell into two categories. Bob and Harvey Weinstein initially held 50% of the shares in a class called the “W series.”

 The balance was owned by a large syndicate. Goldman Sachs was the lead investment banker in the financing of TWC, an equity investor, and provided debt financing as well. To this day, the roster of “A series” investors encompasses many marquee names in finance, media, and fashion: Goldman, Japan’s SoftBank, Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management Group, Eton Park, French luxury conglomerate LVMH and TV network TF1, and WPP, the global advertising firm.

 The “W” and “A” shares had equal voting rights. It was the rules governing the board, and an ironclad “operating agreement,” that favored the Weinsteins. The board consisted of nine members; the Weinsteins had two seats, and the charter granted them the rights to name a third director to represent the W shares. Koenigsberg occupied that seat from the launch in 2005 until his departure in mid-October.

 In addition, the operating agreement granted the W shareholders, meaning the Weinsteins, full control over all decisions involved in running the studio.

 The A shares were also allocated three seats, representing the outside investors. Ben Ammar and Maerov filled two of them. The third seat remained vacant for several years until Ziff—a Harvey supporter, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar—was installed over their objections in the fall of 2015. That, as we’ll see, was a turning point in the war over whether to grant Weinstein a new contract.

 The three additional directors were in the “independent” group. The rub is that the bylaws granted the Weinsteins authority to recommend the “independents.” “Goldman Sachs had the right to approve the choice, but under the bylaws, their approval couldn’t be ‘unreasonably withheld,’” says Maerov. (Goldman declined to comment.) And according to Ben Ammar and Maerov, it was Harvey who, in most cases, handpicked the three supposedly non-affiliated directors. When the scandal erupted in early October, the independent directors were Lasry, Sarnoff and Jones, all seen by Ben Ammar and Maerov as Weinstein loyalists. “That’s how he controlled at least six out of nine seats,” says Maerov. “It was a structure that was incredibly investor-unfriendly.”

 Two directors grow anxious

 So why did Ben Ammar and Maerov keep serving on a dysfunctional board that by its very design severely curtailed their influence, and augmented Harvey Weinstein’s power? Maerov explains that although he held a seat from 2005 to 2013, he was a non-voting observer in that period. “Then in 2013, I was appointed to the former Goldman ‘A’ seat, and I had more potential influence as a voting member. My marching orders were to protect the investors and get as much of their money back as possible.” Ben Ammar tells Fortune that he also remained to protect the interests of the outside investors.

 The rules contained another provision that thwarted the board’s efforts to control costs, according to Ben Ammar and Maerov. Each Weinstein brother had the right to veto expenditures for the other sibling’s projects, but no other board member had that power. According to Maerov, what seemed like a clever design to protect shareholders in theory turned out to be counterproductive in practice.

 “Each brother was supposed to be a check on each other’s expenditures. That’s how they were tied together,” says Ben Ammar. “But even though they each claimed the other’s movies would always lose money, Harvey also said yes to Bob’s spending, and vice versa. If Harvey blocked Bob’s new project or expenditure, Bob would block Harvey’s next project or expenditure. So nothing got blocked, and the spending was excessive.”

 Maerov adds that although the board approved the annual budgets, that authority was almost meaningless. “We’d approve and they’d never adhere to it,” he recalls. “The approval process was almost a joke. If they missed the budget, there was no recourse.”

 The company consistently lost money, according to Maerov, Ben Ammar and other former directors. In his August 2015, letter to Maerov, Boies, Harvey Weinstein’s attorney does not dispute that TWC was taking losses, but insisted that the studio had created substantial wealth via its library and TV businesses. A couple of years after the launch, say Maerov and Ben Ammar, Ziff extended TWC a lifeline in the form of a loan worth tens of millions of dollars. (Ziff has not publicly confirmed doing so.) In 2009, TWC underwent a major restructuring in which the lenders exchanged debt for a large portion of the equity. Ziff’s loan was partly turned into equity, which enhanced his candidacy for an “A” series board seat. The Weinsteins’ holdings were diluted, but they kept tight control through their effective hold over six of the nine board seats.

 Harvey’s contract: An impregnable fortress

 According to Ben Ammar and Maerov, Harvey’s first five-year contract, granted in 2005, mandated that all subsequent employment agreements incorporate at least “equal or better terms.” Hence, when the initial agreement expired in 2010, it was essentially renewed through 2015 containing the same remarkably favorable safeguards.

 Like its predecessors, the 2010 contract stipulated that Weinstein could be terminated only for two types of offenses, according to Maerov. The first was a conviction for a felony involving “moral turpitude,” a category that would obviously encompass sexual assault. “But being accused with convincing evidence wasn’t enough,” says Maerov. “He had to be convicted of a felony, and not just any felony, only one involving moral turpitude. If we’d had documentary evidence of sexual harassment, the absurdity of his old contract still would have prevented us from terminating him.”

 Second, he could be terminated for a major misuse of TWC funds. But that condition contained a major loophole. Here’s the escape hatch: If Weinstein were caught misappropriating funds, he would be granted a “cure period” in which to refund the money. In other words, misusing company cash wasn’t sufficient to terminate him. As long as Weinstein paid TWC back, he’d remain employed under the same highly advantageous contract as if he’d done nothing wrong. “He had the right to put the genie back in the bottle,” says Maerov.

 In late 2014, Maerov says, a TWC executive secretly reported to him that Harvey was allegedly misusing company funds. “He was appalled by what Harvey was doing,” declares Maerov. According to Maerov and Ben Ammar, Weinstein had tapped the company’s credit facility to advance himself funds against future receipts from movies he owned personally, and paid Marchesa, his wife Georgina Chapman’s fashion brand, $75,000 for dresses that he’d given to a business acquaintance in Qatar. “We were shocked he was making gifts with company money,” says Ben Ammar.

 The board put Weinstein on notice that he needed to return the money, or risked being terminated, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar. He complied: In a letter reviewed by Fortune from February of 2015, a lawyer for Weinstein did not state that Weinstein had misappropriated funds. The letter, however, lists over $7 million in TWC funds that Weinstein was pledging to refund to TWC––and did refund as promised. A later letter from Boies, who was also representing Weinstein, to Maerov in late July of 2015, also alludes to the issue, referring to “instances in which Weinstein assertedly used company funds for personal purposes without compensating the company.” Boies goes on to write, that Weinstein wants to resolve the issue “in a cooperative manner.”

 Other documents state that in February of 2015, Weinstein refunded $6.86 million for use of TWC’s credit facility, and go on to affirm that he repaid the $75,000 for the dresses. They also address a third issue: Weinstein’s use of TWC personnel for his personal projects. The documents state that Weinstein agreed to provide a $700,000 payment to TWC as compensation for time and services that TWC employees spent on ventures that he owned exclusively, independently of the company.

 A fight over files

 Weinstein’s existing five-year contract was expiring at the end of 2015. The main role in the negotiations fell to Maerov, who was one of two directors serving on the compensation committee. The other director, Jeff Sackman, resigned in the midst of the acrimonious talks, leaving Maerov as the comp committee’s sole member.

 “It was about the shortest straw you could ever draw at TWC,” he says. “You’re opposing Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s 800-pound gorilla, and his famous lawyer, David Boies.” The board was under no requirement to renew Weinstein; Maerov and Ben Ammar favored pushing him out, principally for what they regarded as the misuse of funds and all around poor management.

 For Ben Ammar and Maerov, the contract’s expiration offered a big opening. “It was clear that this opening was the only opportunity we would ever have of changing the governance of the company and creating protection against Harvey,” says Maerov. They recognized, however, that denying him a renewed employment agreement could still leave him with enormous influence over TWC. “Because of the operating agreement, Harvey’s “W” shares gave him the right to keep running the company even if he wasn’t an official employee,” says Maerov. As a result, he says, he and Ben Ammar needed to press the shareholders to amend the bylaws so that at the same time Weinstein was denied a new contract, he would also lose the operating control that went with the “W” shares.

 Ambra Battilana Gutierrez speaks to Italian media in 2013. In 2015, Battalina, a model, reported to New York City police that Harvey Weinstein had groped her at a meeting in his office. The case did not result in charges. Pier Marco Tacca Getty Images

 A new threat was shadowing the negotiations. Shortly after Weinstein repaid TWC, tabloid headlines trumpeted the first public accusations of sexual abuse leveled at Harvey Weinstein. On March 26, 2015, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, an 22-year old Italian model, reported to New York City police that Weinstein had groped her at a meeting in his office. “It appeared he was going to be arrested,” says Ben Ammar.” As it turned out, Batillana’s complaint did not result in criminal charges. “Tarak and I were still highly disturbed,” adds Maerov. “We pushed to get the facts.”

 According to Ben Ammar and Maerov, Weinstein told the board that the whole incident “was a setup by a shakedown artist.” The proof, he said, was that he wasn’t arrested, and that Gutierrez had signed an affidavit swearing that the alleged groping never occurred. Weinstein told the board that the reason Gutierrez had signed the affidavit was that he’d threatened a defamation suit, showing that her whole story was a sham, say the two directors. “The truth was that he’d paid a settlement to make her go away,” says Ben Ammar. “But neither he nor his lawyers told us.” (Weinstein’s settlement with Battilana has been reported elsewhere, including in the New York Times.)

 Maerov says that the Gutierrez bombshell aside, he’d been hearing anonymously from employees about complaints from both male and female employees. As part of due diligence in the contract negotiations, Maerov asked Weinstein to see his personnel file. “We requested the files from all the senior executives,” says Maerov. In Weinstein’s case, he wanted to ascertain if Harvey showed a pattern of sexual harassment of women, or had paid settlements to make harassment charges disappear. He was also concerned, he says, about possible settlements or workplace complaints from male or female employees who’d been threatened or bullied by Weinstein.

 Enter the lawyers

 It’s highly unusual for a board to have to ask permission to see an executive’s personnel file in the first place. But Weinstein refused to allow his company’s directors to see the file, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar, and he engaged Boies to support his position. (Some elements of the following account have previously been reported by the Financial Times [subscription required].)

 Maerov says that he specifically asked Boies if Weinstein had paid any settlements. Boies, Maerov recalls, said something along the lines of “Settlements may have been paid.” “But I wanted the specific information,” continues Maerov, “I believed it was crucial to see the file, but also asked Boies for specifics whether they were in the file or not. Through counsel, we asked Boies for full disclosure on the nature of the settlements.” He was able to ascertain from the finance people at TWC that no company funds had been spent on settlements for Weinstein.

 Maerov says he demanded detailed accounts on the number of settlements, the identities of the women or men who filed complaints, the amounts paid, and abuses alleged against TWC’s co-chairman. According to Maerov, Boies declined to provide any specifics. “We were fighting to get documentary evidence of his rumored misconduct, and Boies was fighting very hard to keep documentary evidence out of our hands,” Maerov asserts. “He just said no. He just kept hiding the ball, and creating chaos.”

 In a seven-page letter to Maerov reviewed by Fortune, Boies argued that Weinstein wanted to keep the file confidential because its contents could be leaked if made available to the directors, and especially Maerov. “Sensitive information provided to you has been repeatedly leaked, and I know you understand the undesirability of providing confidential personnel information to individuals who have proven themselves unable to maintain confidentiality,” wrote Boies. “That, of course, is particularly true where someone bears an obvious personal animus towards the person whose personal information is being requested.” Boies also condemns what he regards as a Maerov vendetta, stating Maerov’s “clear intention” was to “force Harvey Weinstein from the company.”

 In another letter, also seen by Fortune, Boies had recommended a compromise. An independent party, Rodgin Cohen, senior chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, would exclusively review the file to determine if TWC faced any liability for Weinstein’s past conduct. “If Mr. Cohen advises the board that the company does not face any such liability, there will be no further requests by the board or its representatives for Mr. Weinstein’s personnel file [and] any issues relating to Mr. Weinstein’s past conduct will be deemed resolved,” Boies wrote in the July 28 letter.

 Maerov bridled at the proposal. “Our counsel reviewed the files of all the other senior managers,” he says. “Having Cohen review his file amounted to special treatment for Harvey. And then once he reviewed it, we were blocked from asking any more questions,” But Maerov concluded that he had no choice but to accept Boies’ recommendation. “It was my job as head of the comp committee demand the file, but the effort failed,” he says. “My only option, after consulting with other board members, was to sue the company to for access to the file, which could have been very damaging to the company.”

 On September 4, Cohen issued a four-sentence letter. The entirety of the portion dealing with his review of the personnel file is the following: “Based on our review, there are no unresolved claims that could result in liability to TWC or its directors. Moreover, the file reveals no pending or threatened litigation. Furthermore, it is my understanding that Mr. Weinstein has agreed to hold TWC and its directors harmless from any claim, liability, loss, or expense resulting from any incident, resolved or unresolved, disclosed in his personnel file.”

 The Cohen letter didn’t satisfy Maerov and Ben Ammar. “I wanted to see if there was a pattern of misconduct, but the letter only addressed potential liability,” says Maerov. “Boies and Cohen obstructed our seeing what was in that personnel file, when we had a total right to see it.” Ben Ammar and Maerov insist that Boies and Weinstein denied them sensational information that could have influenced crucial shareholder decisions that in turn could have transformed TWC’s governance.

 For his part, Boies provided the following statement to Fortune: “The Board controlled the company and had access to whatever company records it chose to require. The Board did not review the file in 2015, deciding instead to have it reviewed by Mr. Cohen; that was the Board’s decision after listening to my articulation of Mr. Weinstein’s position and the advice of the Board’s own large law firm. The Board now has the file and has not identified anything in it of which the Board was not aware in 2015.”

 In a letter to the Financial Times on Oct. 24, Boies stated that “[The assertion] that Messrs. Maerov and Ben Ammar did not know about Mr. Weinstein’s settlements with women when they approved his 2015 contract…is simply false.”

 Says Ben Ammar, “David Boies quite clearly lost perspective in his dealings with Harvey Weinstein and TWC, and that the consequences of that are obvious.”

 Part Three: The Weinstein Co. Endgame

 Even after their defeat in the battle over the personnel file, Maerov and Ben Ammar kept pushing to remove Harvey Weinstein. They had growing ranks of allies among the company’s investors.

 Martin Sorrell, Maerov’s boss at WPP and a fierce opponent of squandering shareholder money, was especially incensed by Weinstein’s behavior. One person interviewed by Fortune recalls that Sorrell expressed disapproval and disbelief while attending Weinstein’s sumptuous annual pre-Oscars party, this one in February 2016. “Martin gets up from the dinner table and says, ‘What the hell is going on here? This is a joke! He shouldn’t be spending company money this way.” A second source familiar with the incident confirms the essentials of the account.

 In late 2014, the third “A” share seat was vacant, and the dissidents sought to fill it with an ally in an effort to shift the board’s balance in their favor. Maerov and Ben Ammar wanted to recruit Eugene I. Davis, head of Pirinate Consulting Group, a turnaround-specialist firm that had rescued the likes of Atlas Iron and U.S. Concrete. “Davis had been through many bruising proxy battles,” says Maerov. “If we’d gotten him onboard it would have changed the dynamics, and maybe the outcome. At best he would have been a constructive influence, at worst he would have been another witness to the madness.”

 In late September, Maerov and Ben Ammar launched the equivalent of a proxy contest. They arranged a meeting, via conference call, assembling TWC outside shareholders. Their goal: First, naming Davis to the open seat. And second, persuading the shareholders to both deny Weinstein a new contract, and also amend the bylaws so that his authority to continue running the company, granted under the “W” shares, would be terminated. “I argued, ‘Given the performance, to proceed under the old bylaws and expect a different result defied logic. We need to change this company’s governance,’” says Maerov. His campaign won support from Fidelity Investments, which had recommended Davis to the dissidents, as well as from other dissatisfied shareholders. (In an email, a Fidelity spokesperson wrote, “As a practice, we do not comment on individual companies.”)

 Weinstein adamantly opposed naming Davis. He lobbied investors to appoint his close friend Ziff instead—a choice that would bolster his position in the contract negotiations, according to the dissidents. “Because Harvey was endorsing him,” says Maerov, “clearly certain shareholders felt that they should appoint Ziff.” The dissidents’ campaign failed; when the investors voted, instead of Davis, it was Ziff who won the third “A” share seat. Around the same time, Weinstein named James Dolan to the chair vacated by Sackman.

 After that loss, it was clear to Ben Ammar and Maerov that they couldn’t rally the votes to deny Weinstein a new contract. He had the backing of his brother, of “W” shares director Koenigsberg, and Sarnoff and Dolan, plus support from the newly-appointed Ziff. That gave Weinstein an unbreakable majority.

 Maerov did succeed in rebuffing Weinstein’s demands for even richer terms. The mogul wanted to be paid a percentage of the company’s profits, from dollar one, before the payment of any dividends to the outside shareholders—who had never received any return on their investments over TWC’s history, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar, who occupied two of the three seats representing outside investors. “His demands were unconnected from reality,” says Maerov. “He even wanted TWC to repay his legal expenses for his own misuse of funds, legal fees for his defense when he got caught. That didn’t come close to flying even with his supporters.”

 The dissidents had a higher goal: Effectively foiling the new contract—which under the charter, had to be just as ironclad as the old one—by imposing new restrictions on Weinstein. Those conditions could get him fired in the future for things he’d done in the past. Although they’d lost their campaign to appoint Davis and change the bylaws, the dissidents now had newfound power on the board, because the controversies of 2015 had substantially weakened Weinstein’s standing. And his problems didn’t end with the alleged financial misdeeds and the groping scandal. The dissidents suspected that his behavior may have cost TWC an extremely lucrative deal.

 A deal falls through, and Weinstein stumbles

 In early 2014, Weinstein steered TWC into a successful new venture: television production. “He apologized to the board, saying that he recognized that he’d run the company poorly, that he didn’t deliver on his promises, and that the investors were disappointed,” says Ben Ammar. “Then he said that he was starting a venture that could get all our money back.”

 From the start, the new venture was so successful that it promised to revive TWC’s sagging fortunes. Late in 2014, the British network ITV was reportedly bidding to buy Weinstein’s TV unit for as much as $950 million, including an upfront payment of $300 million to $400 million. “The attitude of most of the directors was, ‘We need Harvey, he’s about to do this big fat deal with ITV,'” says Ben Ammar.

 But in 2015, just when Weinstein appeared close to clinching the deal, the Gutierrez headlines erupted. Shortly thereafter, ITV walked. It’s impossible to know for sure, but Maerov, Ben Ammar and other directors suspected that the scandal killed the sale. “A serious public company in the U.K. that’s facing a scandal in America that’s heavily in the press was not going to pursue conversations,” says Ben Ammar. (In an email to Fortune, an ITV spokesperson said, “We never comment on speculation relating to M&A.”)

 In late 2015, Maerov and Ben Ammar exploited Weinstein’s bungling as leverage to rein him in. Their brainchild was a “Code of Conduct and Ethics” that would apply to all senior officers and board members. Fortune has seen the five-page document, dated September 2, 2015. It lists a number of seemingly standard violations, including “sexual harassment,” “intimidating or threatening behavior,” and receiving “a personal benefit as a result of the employee’s position with TWC.” Neither Weinstein nor the company made public statements about the ITV negotiations at the time, though the talks were reported in the press.

 Weinstein hated the proposed code. “He wanted an exception created only for himself, stating that an accusation wasn’t enough, and that he could only be fired for a conviction, as under his old contract,” says Maerov. But Maerov prevailed. “Given what happened in 2015, none of the directors objected to the code, nor did anyone support giving Harvey special privileges,” he says.

 On October 21, the board voted to give Weinstein a new contract. “We didn’t win our Hail Mary pass to get a turnaround specialist on the board, and change the governance, but it was a big deal to get the code of conduct,” says Ben Ammar. Denying him a new deal was essentially meaningless, since they’d lost their campaign to change TWC’s bylaws. So, the dissidents say, the best remaining option was to attach the code to the new contract.

 TWC begins to implode

 After Weinstein secured his new contract, long-simmering tension between the co-founders escalated into a brother-to-brother war so ferocious that it threatened to destroy TWC, say Maerov and Ben Ammar.

 The Weinsteins specialized in different genres: Harvey made highbrow Oscar contenders and winners, while Bob focused on horror and action films through his Dimension division. “Bob and Harvey hated each other,” says a former director. “Bob would simply say, ‘Harvey is trying to screw me.’ Harvey was better at it, he would say, ‘Bob is trying to screw the company.’ Whenever we talked about financing a new movie, Bob would claim that Harvey’s project would lose tons of money, and Harvey would claim that Bob’s movie was a loser.” The board meetings, recall Ben Ammar and Maerov, frequently resembled combative therapy sessions. “Harvey and Bob would be screaming at each other,” says Ben Ammar. “It was like sitting through a dysfunctional family dinner.”

 Bob wasn’t the only director whom Harvey treated harshly. According to Maerov, Harvey Weinstein pelted the director with abusive language. “He’d say in front of his own lawyers, ‘I’m going to destroy you,’” recalls Maerov. “He’d make crazy statements about what famous people I’d never met were saying about me, all negative.” Ben Ammar recounts that Weinstein would harangue him in the morning, and send him flowers in the afternoon, attached with notes declaring something like, “I went to my therapist and he says I need to get over my anger issues.” Ben Ammar and another company insider told Fortune that Maerov told them about the threats at the time.

 The infighting was so destructive that in the months before the sexual assault scandal went public, the board weighed splitting TWC into two separate, independent studios, one run by Bob and the other by Harvey. “We wanted to do anything that meant they couldn’t interfere anymore with each others’ movies,” says Ben Ammar. He and Maerov thought it also made sense to sell off its two best assets, the 700-film library and the TV division that was forecast to earn $40 million a year, so that the shareholders could recoup some of their investment. Adds Ben Ammar, “Splitting into two studios would ALSO mean that we didn’t have to be Harvey’s head shrink.”

 It was the deluge following The New York Times story that drove one brother from the company, and left the other running an imperiled studio.

 A speedy collapse

 Since the 2015 contract vote, the roster of directors witnessing these battles had changed significantly. Two more billionaire friends of Harvey’s had joined the board. In December 2015, Harvey chose Paul Tudor Jones, like him a director of the Robin Hood Foundation, to fill an empty seat; he named Marc Lasry to replace Dolan in mid-2016.

 For Harvey, the end came during an emergency call on the evening of October 5, hours after the Times story appeared. All nine directors were on the line, including a combative Weinstein. According to several current and former directors, Harvey insisted that the charges in the Times piece weren’t true, and that the scandal would blow over. He stated that he’d send the directors friendly photos of himself with his accusers at awards events, taken long after they’d claimed he’d harassed them. Those festive shots, he maintained, would prove his innocence. He did, however, agree to temporary leave of absence.

 Most of all, he declared that the call didn’t qualify as an official board meeting under the company’s charter and that the directors therefore had no right to effectively sideline him. His brother, Harvey charged, was using the uproar as an excuse to mount a coup and take over TWC, a goal Harvey accused Bob of long harboring. According to Harvey, the board had no legal authority to remove him.

 Jones also expressed doubts on whether the board could legally act to remove Harvey at that juncture. According to a source familiar with his thinking, Jones told the other directors on the call that effectively firing Harvey, and handing control of the company to Bob, could be viewed by lenders as a “material event,” and trigger a crippling default on TWC’s debt.

 Paul Tudor Jones, who joined the Weinstein Company board after the 2015 contract battle. Jones condemned Harvey Weinstein's behavior, but expressed doubts that he and other directors had the authority to fire him. Patrick McMullan 2017 Patrick McMullan

 By the following day, Ziff, Lasry and Sarnoff had resigned from the board. That left just five directors, excluding Harvey. That evening, the board issued a scalding press release stating that Harvey Weinstein was taking “an indefinite leave of absence,” adding that “It’s important for him to get the professional help for the problems he has acknowledged.” The board announced an independent investigation headed by a team including two former prosecutors, one of whom had specialized in sex crimes.

 Jones was the only remaining director not to sign the release. According to the source familiar with his thinking, he supported the release’s condemnation of Weinstein’s alleged behavior, and advocated denouncing sexual misconduct in the strongest possible terms. But his misgivings on the legality of firing Weinstein put him at odds with his fellow directors.

 A source provided Fortune with this email, sent by Jones on Oct. 6 to Lance Maerov: “At this time I would prefer NOT to sign it as the last paragraph about Bob taking control implies levels of legality and board authority that I don’t fully comprehend or understand. Respectfully, Paul.”

 The official firing came at a board meeting that Sunday, Oct. 8. By then, Jones had also quit, leaving the four directors who’d signed the email condemning Harvey’s alleged behavior on Friday. Surprisingly, it was the code of conduct, not anything allowed under his contract, that provided the authority to terminate the mogul, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar. “Under the old contract, we couldn’t fire him until he was convicted of sexual assault,” says Ben Ammar.

 Film producer Harvey Weinstein boards a taxi boat during the 71st Venice Film Festival in 2014. GABRIEL BOUYS AFP/Getty Images

 Ben Ammar and Maerov both swear that if it hadn’t been for the code, Harvey Weinstein would still be running TWC today. “He was that crazy,” says Maerov. “Once he was out, the women he’d abused knew there was no way he could harm them professionally. Firing him was crucial to opening the floodgates. If the floodgates hadn’t opened, who knows how long this maniac would be scrambling to stay in power?”

 Still, it seems unlikely that Weinstein would have survived long given the sensational and horrifying allegations already crowding the headlines. It’s a measure of Harvey Weinstein’s immense power that it took one of the worst sexual-assault scandals in Hollywood or business history to repel his loyalists and end his reign. It was that scandal—not the alleged business abuses that could have skewered him long ago—that ultimately handed his opponents a sword. |||||