Book Excerpt: Inside The Harvey Weinstein Exposé – The Gwyneth Paltrow Story

Excerpted from She Said, Breaking The Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite A Movement, By Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey, with permission from Bloomsbury.

Still, in June 2017, [Ashley] Judd was not sure if she wanted to accuse Weinstein publicly. She had already tried to call out his behavior once. In 2015, she had given that account to Variety magazine, without naming Weinstein, Hayek, or Golino, hoping it would spark something, maybe a surge of others coming together.

Nothing much happened. The ensuing burst of attention was directed at Judd, not Weinstein, and it was brief and sensationalized. Judd had to scale back publicity for a film, Big Stone Gap, to avoid getting too many questions about the incident. To come forward again might repeat that experience.

This was a cautionary tale. Judd’s account in Variety had been gutsy, but it was a lone account without a perpetrator’s name or any supporting information. Impact in journalism came from specificity—names, dates, proof, and patterns. Jodi didn’t want Judd to decline to participate in what might be a much stronger story because a weaker one had gone nowhere.

Judd was also wary because just a few months before, she had paid a price for speaking out.

***

So Judd had reason to be cautious. But on the call, Jodi had used a word she had been waiting to hear: “pattern.” An important factor for her, Judd said, would be how many other stories the reporters were able to track down and whether other actresses were going on the record. True to her Harvard paper, she wanted to be one of many women standing up to Weinstein in unison.

The call ended with a plan: Judd was going to reach out to Salma Hayek. For additional advice, Jodi also spoke to Jill Kargman, lately the writer, producer, and star of the television show Odd Mom Out, and a contact who had provided guidance in unfamiliar worlds before. Kargman urged Jodi to talk to Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham’s producing partner on the television show Girls.

***

The response rate from the actresses was still low. But by the end of June, Konner had news: Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to talk.

At the outset, Paltrow had barely been on Jodi’s list of people to contact. She had been Weinstein’s golden girl, one of his top stars, and twenty years later, the memories of her acting career were still tied to him. They had been photographed together many times, a laughing father-daughter pair. In 1999, when Paltrow won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Shakespeare in Love, Weinstein stood next to her, radiating pride: He had made the movie, molded the star. Back then, Paltrow’s nickname had been First Lady of Miramax. She seemed unlikely to help the Times. She was hardly a rebel like McGowan or an activist like Judd. She had become a health-and-beauty entrepreneur, and for some people, a love- to- hate figure.

But once their phone call was scheduled, for the final weekend of June 2017, Paltrow cut a different figure: She was a dead-center source who might know more than anyone yet. On the telephone, Paltrow was polite and sounded a little jittery. After the ritual reassurances—yes, this was off the record; yes, Jodi understood the delicacy of the situation—Paltrow shared the unknown side of the story of her relationship with Weinstein. They had met by an elevator at the Toronto Film Festival in 1994 or ’95, when she was around twenty-two, Paltrow recalled. At that point, she barely had a career. Her parents, the actress Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow, a director and producer, were successful, and she had gotten encouraging reviews in a film called Flesh and Bone, but she was still auditioning for more parts.

Right there at the elevator, Weinstein gave her his vote of confidence. I saw you in that movie; you have to come work for us, she remembered him saying. You’re really talented. “I just remember feeling legitimized by his opinion,” she said.

Before too long, he offered her two films. If she would do a comedy called The Pallbearer, Weinstein said, she could also have the lead in his upcoming adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma—a dream job, a star-making role.

Paltrow joined the downtown Miramax fold, which at that time struck her as warm and creative. “I felt like I was home,” she said. She was dating Brad Pitt, who was far more famous than she at the time, and flying between New York and Los Angeles. On one of those trips, before shooting started for Emma, she got a fax from her representatives at Creative Artists Agency, telling her to meet Weinstein at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.

That was the same hotel as in Judd’s story. What Paltrow said next also felt familiar. The meeting seemed routine, held in a suite for privacy. “I bounced up there, I’m sort of like a golden retriever, all happy to see Harvey,” she said. They talked business. But Weinstein closed by placing his hands on her and asking to go into the bedroom and exchange massages. Paltrow could barely process what was happening, she said. She had thought of Weinstein as an uncle. The thought that he was interested in her sexually shocked her and made her feel queasy. He asked a second time to move into the bedroom, she said.

She excused herself, but “not so he would feel he had done something wrong,” she said. As soon as she left, she told Brad Pitt what had happened, then a few friends, family members, and her agent.

The next part of Paltrow’s story diverged from Judd’s and made it potentially more consequential. Weeks later, when Paltrow and Pitt attended the same theater premiere as Weinstein, Pitt confronted the producer and told him to keep his hands to himself. At the time, Paltrow felt relieved: Her boyfriend was her protector.

But when she returned to New York, Weinstein called and threatened her, berating her for telling Pitt what had happened. “He said some version of I’m going to ruin your career,” she said. She remembered standing in her old apartment on Prince Street in SoHo, fearful she would lose the two roles, especially the starring one in Emma. “I was nothing, I was a kid, I was signed up. I was petrified, I thought he was going to fire me,” she said.

She tried to put the relationship back on professional footing, explaining to Weinstein that telling her boyfriend had been natural, but that she wanted to put the episode behind them and move forward. “I always wanted peace, I never wanted any problem,” she said. For a time, their relationship was restored. “In this funny way, I was like, well, that’s behind us,” she said. The more successful her partnership with Weinstein became, the less she felt she could say about the ugly episode at the start of their collaboration. “I had this incredible career there, so I could never in a way traverse back over what happened,” she said. “I was expected to keep the secret.”

The ethos of Hollywood, she said, was to swallow complaints and to put up with exactly that kind of behavior. She didn’t think about the encounter as part of something larger or more systemic. During her years with Miramax, she heard the occasional disturbing rumor about Weinstein, but never with specifics attached. Weinstein was abusive in other ways that made the moment in the bedroom seem mild in comparison. He threw things. His tirades were beyond anything Paltrow or others had seen from a grown man. The Miramax employees she knew lived in fear of his volatility. “It’s the H- bomb, the H- bomb is coming,” they would warn before he approached.

After two Miramax movies starring Paltrow tanked—Bounce in 2000 and View from the Top in 2003—Weinstein’s treatment of her changed, she said. “I wasn’t the golden girl with the Midas touch,” she said. “My worth had diminished in his eyes.” By the time Paltrow was pregnant with her first child, she quietly distanced herself from the producer.

That remained the case until 2016, when Miriam Weinstein, the producer’s mother and a beloved figure at Miramax, passed away, and Paltrow wrote Weinstein a brief condolence email. To her shock, he read it aloud at the funeral and called her soon afterward—to thank her, Paltrow figured.

But after the niceties, he began to pressure her again. New York magazine was working on an exposé of his treatment of women. They have nothing, Weinstein told Paltrow. He wanted her to promise that she wouldn’t talk about the incident at the Peninsula all those years before. “I just really want to protect the people who did say yes,” he said, meaning women who had succumbed to his overtures. Paltrow declined the magazine’s interview request, but she avoided saying whether she would ever speak.

The story needed to come out, she said to Jodi. For a long time, she had assumed she would never disclose what had happened. But twenty years later, everything looked different, and that’s why she was on the phone now.

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey are investigative reporters at the New York Times. Kantor and Twohey share numerous honours for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, including a George Polk Award, and, along with colleagues, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

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