2 More Women Accuse Harvey Weinstein of Rape
The list of women coming forward to report being attacked by sexual predator and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein continues to grow. This weekend, British actress Lysette Anthony and a former Miramax employee in London told local media that Weinstein had raped them.
Anthony, who acts on the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks and appeared in Woody Allen’s 1992 film Husbands and Wives, told The Sunday Times that Weinstein stalked and then raped her in the late 1980s at her London home. Anthony said that last week, she finally came forward and reported the attack to the Metropolitan Police.
Anthony, 54, first met Weinstein, who is now 65, in 1982 when she appeared in the science fiction film Krull, the newspaper reported.
According to the Times:
In her account, published for the first time today by The Sunday Times, she claims that she became friendly with Weinstein after meeting him in New York. But everything changed when she met him for a drink at his rented home in Chelsea a few years later. “The next thing I knew he was half undressed and he grabbed me,” she said.
“It was the last thing I expected and I fled. That was when the predatory stalking began.”
One day he turned up at her flat at about 10am: “He pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack . . . He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me.” She pushed him away but he was too heavy: “Finally I just gave up.”
A spokesman for the Scotland Yard told the Daily Mail that, “The allegation has been assessed and will be investigated by officers from the Met’s Child Abuse and Sexual Offences Command.”
Another woman who worked for Weinstein at Miramax in London told the Daily Mail that she had “broken a 25–year silence” to report that the disgraced Hollywood executive raped her in the basement of the company’s London offices.
“I just felt mortified and shamed—and that no one would believe me,” the woman, now in her 50s and whose identity remained anonymous in the report, told the newspaper. “He was incredibly well–connected, powerful and important—and I was just a nobody.”
She said the attack happened at Miramax’s mansion flat in Fulham, West London:
He went down to the basement [containing a bedroom for visiting employees from the US] and he called my name. I went down – he was standing there with nothing on. I started to back away.
He grabbed me and he was so big and powerful. He just ripped my clothes away and pushed me, threw me down.
Then… I kept shouting, ‘No! Stop!’ and tried to push him off. But he forced himself on me.
At least four women have accused Weinstein of rape, and over a dozen more have come forward to recount other incidents of sexual harassment and assault, including some of the biggest names in Hollywood. And the list of women accusing Weinstein of attacks continues to grow.
Weinstein has maintained that he has never engaged in non-consensual sex.
On Saturday, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences voted to expel Weinstein during an emergency meeting. Its 54–member board of governors then issued a statement saying, “We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues but also to send a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over.”