Carving up the Weinstein carcass

It is a source of sadness for me that Harvey Weinstein has been displaced in the news by 100+ lesser men (a partial list, but it doesn’t include, for example, the wheelchair-bound John Hockenberry). Harvey was truly a “whale of a story” for this blog.

Harvey apparently hasn’t skipped to Moscow (see “Where can Harvey Weinstein go for a peaceful retirement?”) so he has continued exposure to U.S. plaintiffs.

Assuming that he continues to stay in the U.S. in his new role as defendant, one question is how the various plaintiffs will carve up the Weinstein carcass (supposedly worth about $250 million).

His former assistant-turned-wife-turned-plaintiff Eve Chilton got a court order for $60 million in tax-free child support under New York law based on her ownership of three daughters. She is in court now trying to get the last $5 million prepaid in case other plaintiffs get to Harvey’s cash first (TMZ). Then there is wife-turned-plaintiff-number-2. Her 10th wedding anniversary was earlier this month and she had refrained from actually filing a divorce lawsuit (TMZ story on Plaintiff #2’s best legal options). After these two, there is a line of hundreds of women who are and will be suing in civil courts alleging that Harvey propositioned them, showered with them, etc.?

Readers here have commented that Harvey’s best strategy might be to give everything to the current wife as a settlement of her divorce lawsuit in hopes that she won’t spend it all and some will trickle down to his kids. However, this kind of action has been deemed a fraudulent conveyance in the past (source) and the line of current and future plaintiffs can potentially grab the money from the to-be-ex-wife.

Should there be a centralized process for dividing up the Weinstein carcass among the plaintiffs? The Hollywood Cleansing is supposed to be about justice, right? If so, why is it fair that plaintiffs suing in jurisdictions with speedy court systems, for example, are likely to recover money while those who must sue in places with slow-moving courts are likely to be left with nothing? And what is the fair division of cash between the women who were married to Harvey and the women who merely watched him shower? (and, to enlarge the pot available to victims, should some money be clawed back from women who had sex with Harvey and received lucrative roles in exchange?)

[Note that this is somewhat simplified when all of the plaintiffs are in family court in the same state. If Harvey had sex with four women in Los Angeles on the same night, and all became pregnant, the first woman to sue would get the full amount under the California child support guidelines, the second woman would get a child support award based on Harvey’s income after deduction of the money paid to Plaintiff #1, etc. Each child would have a different cash value to his or her respective mother depending on the order in which lawsuits were filed. One of the lawyers we interviewed on this subject for the California family law chapter said “Mom #5 has no standing to try to get Mom #1 reduced.” Note that a handful of states have rules requiring that the cash value of all of the children be equalized, but in almost every case it is easy to figure out how the money should be divided.]

Related:

• The Magnificent Century, a Turkish TV series that was made, apparently, without post-production sex-related litigation. The polygamous society of the Ottomans also featured women competing for a fixed bucket of resources represented by the man with whom they were involved sexually. Instead of using lawyers, though, the show portrays women competing by (a) trying to have more children than competitors, and (b) trying to poison competitors.
• “The Las Vegas Gunman Was Rich. Will His Wealth Go to the Victims?” (nytimes) regarding the challenge of parceling out $5 million (that’s rich?) without more than 100 percent of the funds being consumed by lawyers