What kind of barbarous creature was Harvey Weinstein, who punctuated business meetings by hurling marble ashtrays at the wall, ripped out a smoke alarm in a toilet on Concorde so he could enjoy a cigarette mid-Atlantic, ordered unsatisfactory employees to jump to their deaths from a high window, and regarded sexual abuse or rape as the equivalent of a job interview for young women anxious to appear in the movies he produced?
In Ken Auletta’s meticulously reported account of his downfall, people assign Weinstein to one of several alien species. Everyone agrees that he was a pest and a predator; survivors also call him an ogre, a monster, even a fiend. Odd glimpses of his flame-haired, acid-tongued mother suggest that he was “raised by wolves”. A studio executive whom he threatened to topple from a terrace into the sea at Cannes describes him as “this gorilla person”, like King Kong in an ill-fitting tux. Exhausting all options, Weinstein’s estranged brother, Bob, formerly his partner at Miramax, concludes: “There is no real human being there.” Perhaps Harvey was a humanoid, programmed with technical skills but bereft of emotion. His tantrums in the cutting rooms where he savagely re-edited films over the protests of their directors led to his being dubbed Harvey Scissorhands, a less endearing twin for the unfinished mutant played by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s fantasy.
