“Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls” (New York Times):
The second power imbalance was around race — the fact that Harvey was white and I was a person of color
With approximately 1.5 billion Chinese people worldwide, doesn’t this make the “Person of Color” category rather crowded?
The old fat guy has more money than the young lithe woman:
Finally, the wealth — Harvey was a multimillionaire, with all the influence money could buy. I was a fresh graduate loaded with student debt. Even during the few months I worked with him, I saw firsthand the influence that money could buy. Later, I was to discover that it could even buy silence.
The two adults have a late-night meeting in a hotel room:
At the Venice Film Festival later that year, these four power imbalances collided in a late-night meeting with Harvey. I had expected to discuss potential film productions and scripts, and we did. But after hours of fending off his chitchat, flattery, requests for massages and a bath, ultimately I found myself pushed back against the bed. I’d worn two pairs of tights for protection, and tried to appease him by taking one of them off and letting him massage me, but it hadn’t worked.
The young trim person is able to escape from the old morbidly obese person:
In the end, I was able to wriggle off the bed and leave
The financial power imbalance is rectified to a small extent:
when I finally signed the nondisclosure document, accepting a settlement of £125,000 (about $213,000) and agreeing to stay silent forever, the trauma was not yet over.
(If all of this happened 20 years ago, that’s roughly $332,000 in 2019 dollars.)
Get ready for a bunch more articles about Harvey and his hotel room companions:
Then, in September 2018, I watched another woman, Christine Blasey Ford, speak up about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Coincidentally, only a few minutes from my house she was living the very existence I’d feared … In January, I had the privilege of sharing my story with Dr. Blasey and other survivors in a group interview conducted by Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey. … Since the story broke in October 2017, many actresses, from the relatively unknown to the superstars, have come out with stories about Harvey. Yet the stories of assistants have gotten relatively little attention by comparison, and tragically, even fewer of those voices have been of women of color.
Reading between the lines, it seems that the victim/author is living in Silicon Valley in a house with her four children. (i.e., depending on the house, she might well have reached the “multimillionaire” status with which she characterized the middle-aged Harvey Weinstein.)
Readers: Is it reasonable for a Chinese person to don the “person of color” victimhood mantle? Would the African Americans living in East St. Louis (murder rate 19X the U.S. average and exceeding that of Honduras, El Salvador, and other countries from which folks are seeking asylum due to violence) agree that they should be lumped together with the mom of four in a house in America’s most expensive neighborhood? Can my Chinese-American dermatologist and engineering Ph.D. friends also claim to be “of color”?
[If Asians are “of color,” why doesn’t Harvard want to admit them?]
Related:
“I had expected to discuss potential film productions and scripts”
Tragic when young woman learns her body is worth more than her ideas.
Weinstein is the ultimate arbiter of worth now? That’s a yikes from me.
It’s called “reality”. Ideas (especially the kind which amounts to regurgitated feel-good b.s.) are dime a dozen. What has value are either resources or productive labor. The girls who don’t have skills to be productive are unsurprisinhly seen as resources. The less brainwashed ones understand that and don’t give away their, ahem, resouces to bullshit artists like that Weinstein arsehole.
So reality is that all movie and T.V. production is not “real” work and has no value?
Yeah, its definitely this woman who needs to learn about reality and not yourself…
The reality is that most of these young girls have no talent whatsoever and nobody told that to them. The only thing going for them is their youth and their looks. A fashion model is basically a walking clothes hanger, painted on by professionals and being told by professionals what pose to strike or how to walk. They get as much respect as clothing hangers, too. Only very few are smart enough to either establish the right professional network and learn how to creatively work with the pros – or to convert their 15 minutes of fame into either a good hustle on a side (merchandizing, yey), or to snag a rich guy who’s not a jerk. Pretty much the same goes on in the movie industry.
The sad truth is that the whole industry is set up to exploit naive girls and toss them away without much of a future when they start losing their youthful looks (and meanwhile they learned no marketable skills). A lot are flushed out with drug addictions or serious eating disorders they acquired during their stint. And never mind that this industry is a magnet for sexual predators.
Practically all young models would be much better off if adults around them told them the truth – that only 0.01% of them have what it takes to become successful, and that they’d be much happier later on if they dropped the silly ideas and spent the time studying accounting instead.
Now, how do I know that? My g/f is a former top model – and she was smart enough to get out fast (instead of going with the flow) and acquire advanced degrees in STEM and business.
averros – Chiu was not hired to be a fashion model or an actress. She was supposed to be some sort of administrative assistant who was there for her mind, not her beauty.
Feminism has made these situations worse – Charlie Rose was surrounded by a gaggle of young female staffers with few or no men and until he was MeTooed, all he got for this was praise for hiring women.
> the fact that Harvey was white
Apparently if a Jew behaves badly enough, he’s considered white!
Admittedly, the question is a bit metaphysical, but I wonder who is the more white person of privilege — a Jew or a Chinese person? In terms of college admissions, I would say a Chinese person is more the white person of privilege and therefore punished more. But i could imagine that in other contexts the Jew is more the white person of privilege.
Jack, Jewish admissions to Ivys fell by factor of greater than 2 since glorious revolution began (actual since year 2010), without any known drastic shifts in Jewish and non-Jewish populations. I see how American – born second generation + kids do not pursue study of pure mathematics but law, business and medicine are as attractive as ever and bring large dividends to the Ivys
” Unable to find work elsewhere, I ended up in a role in Hong Kong that I suspected Harvey created to keep me in his orbit — dependent on Miramax and yet sidelined in Asia. I was miserable. And the worst was to come.
I was embarking upon almost two decades,,,”
The monster – not only does he pay a woman with BPD $200,000 for a massage , he employs her at Miramax for 20 more years when no one else things that she is worth hiring. Of course that now that Miramax is out of business, she has no choice but to come forward and tell the world about her horrible abuse.
The thing that I don’t get about these rich guys is why do they have these women sign NDA’s AFTER their roll in the hay, when they are in a position to extort hundreds of thousands if not millions, and not before? Not just Harvey, but Trump and others. I understand why men don’t always get pre-nups (spoil the romance) but there was nothing romantic about these relationships.
In Trump’s case, he and the women (the porn star, the Playboy model) started out with pretty much straight up arrangements for prostitution and he STILL ended up having to pay them for NDA’s afterward AND the NDA’s turned out to be worthless because we learned about the affairs anyway. For someone who is a master of the art of the deal, I would say that he got screwed by these women and not just literally.
I’m no supporter of Harvey, but when I read “I’d worn two pairs of tights for protection …” tells me she was fully aware of who Weinstein was and what he is up to.
And “when I finally signed the nondisclosure document, accepting a settlement of £125,000 …” tells me she did in fact “sold” her body — otherwise she should have gone to the authorities.
And if that wasn’t enough, she is now using the “women of color” as a way to drive her victimhood? Really?!
I had expected to discuss potential film productions and scripts, and we did… I’d worn two pairs of tights for protection
Hm.
It does seem like Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are approaching Jewish levels of whiteness and privilege. Certainly Brahminical level Hindustanis. Recall that even apartheid-era South Africa considered Japanese to be honorary whites. Yang Gang enthusiasms are further evidence. Eurasian Elite privilege should be the new watch phrase?