Julia Ormond, the English actor best known for films such as Legends of the Fall, First Night and Sabrina, has accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual battery in a lawsuit that also names Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the Walt Disney Company and Miramax.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the New York supreme court, first reported by Variety, Ormond claims that the disgraced movie producer sexually assaulted her after a business dinner in December 1995, when he lured her into giving him a massage, climbed on top of her, masturbated and forced her to give him oral sex.
Ormond claims in the suit she told her agents at the time, Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane, about Weinstein’s assault, and that the CAA agents cautioned her about speaking out. Lourd and Huvane, the now co-chairman of CAA, one of Hollywood’s heavyweight agencies, are mentioned several times in the lawsuit as Ormond’s agents but not personally named as defendants; Ormond is suing CAA for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.
Though Weinstein has been named in several lawsuits since the New York Times and the New Yorker first published investigations into his predatory behavior in 2017, it is rare for a lawsuit to name Weinstein’s business partners for allegedly enabling him. The 71-year-old former film producer is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence for sexual assault in New York, and in February was sentenced to 16 more years in Los Angeles.
Ormond’s suit also accuses Miramax, the company Weinstein founded with his brother Bob, and Disney, which owned Miramax in the 1990s, of negligent supervision and retention. The suit cites numerous former Miramax and Disney executives, including Disney’s former CEO Michael Eisner and former chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg; neither are defendants.
In an interview with Variety, Ormond said she was speaking out to incite systemic change in Hollywood. “I am coming forward with my story now publicly because I feel as if we still need systemic change, and I feel that we need accountability from enablers, in order to get there,” she said. “I feel that this is what happened with me.”
“Obviously, Harvey Weinstein is in jail and is going to be in jail for a very long time,” she added. “I personally don’t believe that Harvey could have done this without enablers. And for me, that is the layer that you have to get down to, in terms of the root cause.”
Ormond filed her suit under the Adult Survivors Act, which New York passed in 2022 on the heels of the #MeToo movement. The measure created a one-year look-back period for survivors of sexual assault when they were over the age of 18 to sue their abusers, regardless of when the assault occurred.
At the time of the alleged assault in December 1995, Ormond’s career was riding high – she was the female lead in such hits as Legends of the Fall, opposite Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, and co-starred with Richard Gere and Sean Connery in First Knight. She had entered a production deal with Weinstein in 1995. The alleged assault occurred after a dinner in which Ormond and Weinstein were supposed to discuss their business matters.
The suit claims the assault could have been prevented by Disney, Miramax and CAA, and that it inflicted “catastrophic” damage on her career and relationships. The suit notes that in the years after the assault she “nearly disappeared from the public eye”.
Ormond told Variety that friends had checked in on her over the years and journalists have frequently asked her: “What happened to you?”
“I don’t presume that this happened because people wanted it to happen. But it happened, nevertheless. And it wasn’t stopped,” she said. “There should have been structures in place.”
Ormond’s lawyers said in a statement that they look forward to their client’s day in court.
“Our client has suffered tremendously both personally and professionally due to the assault by Harvey Weinstein, and the failure from Disney, Miramax and CAA to prevent it and to appropriately respond when she reported what happened,” Douglas H Wigdor and Effie Blassberger told Variety. “She feels completely betrayed by CAA for its knowing disregard for her safety and well-being, and looks forward to holding accountable the people and institutions that enabled Harvey Weinstein’s horrific and predatory behavior.”
“CAA, Miramax and Disney continued to handsomely profit from their close association with Harvey Weinstein for many years after Ormond was assaulted by him and then cast aside by Hollywood,” the lawsuit states. “But the damage to Ormond – and so many other women Harvey Weinstein went on to rape, assault and harass – has yet to be fully understood.”
