50 years ago first as a correspondent for the New York Post and a staff writer a weekly columnist for the Village Voice in a contributing editor. For a decade and a half from late to early 90s, he wrote a weekly political column for the new york daily news. Also during that period started writing for the new yorker. And in 1992 he began doing annals of communication profile or the magazine. Over the years ken has profiled many of the leading figures of the information age. He is on for many important developments in the a media business. Ts he has also authored a dozen previous books ranging in subjects network television, to the ad business, for microsoft oto google. Five of those works reach the National Bestseller list. In a hollywood ending, can chronicles harvey wall seems volatile and tragic career, his life to becoming one of the biggest powerbrokers for the pioneering producer distributor great movies with highly publicized default to school some women came forward with their stories of sexual abuse by wednesday watershed truck two years ago weinstein was convicted of a great rape in new york an sentenced to 23 years in prison. Hes awaiting awaiting trial on further charges in california. Can profiled pointing in the number 20 years ago to train him then as bullying, even violent at times toward employees and collaborators. He was unable at that time to confirm the darker rumors of weinsteins behavior as a sexual predator. That truth finally emerged in 2017 stories by jodi kantor, and megan and the New York Times. Now, we sought to disperse a comprehensive biography and revealing detailed and. Insightful context. He examines the abrasionn impulses to dominate that worked weinstein actions which forced of science entrance and checked forei so long. He glinted coming from weinsteins also a larger story about hollywood and about power. So i think we are very interesting discussion this evening. Please join me in welcoming ken. [applause] s thank you. I thought i would begin picking up something bradley said. I did not know Harvey Weinstein very wellin 2000 to 1 pint agreed to profile him for theer new yorker. During that profile. We spent many hours together including about 12 hours of taped interviewsoo some of whici use in the book. And at one point, the people i talked to alled would say who works for him and were in hollywood we know harvey cheats on his wife. Very few people said they knew he was a rapist. So that was not out there the way we now assume it was. But woman a producer of an incident placed at the Venice Film Festival in 19 rowena the other zelda they were his assistants. The story was that harvey attempted to rape rowena and zelda that you prosecute him, to bring into the police police. No one can ever know the sears we tried to threaten him when he signed disclosure. Which he did later on. What happened was they threatened him he got nervous. He flew over too london with his Business Affairs versus steve who was an enabler if you read the nondisclosure agreement is quite obvious what was going on. Nondisclosure agreements. I went to the courts in london and the courts in new york, and i said, why cant i find any evidence of criminal trial evidence or file filings, lawsuit, etc. , about this case . And then i learned why. And the answer was that what harvey would do when someone brought a claim against him privately, usually he would say he was to have his lawyer meet them and say, heres x number of dollars in this case, it was almost 500,000 to 50 each. And in return and you have to sign this nondisclosure agreement, the nondisclosure agreement means you cant tell anyone, you cant tell your parents, you cant tell you your husband, you cant tell you a you cant tell your husband or psychiatrist and if you break the nondisclosure agreement you have to give the money back and its going to be more expensive. So, i had that information but i couldnt get either woman to speak to me and my source i tell in the book was an Academy Awardwinning producer. She refused to speak unless the women could speak and they wouldnt. I could figure out a way of showing that disney, the corporate parent or the companye paid for the nondisclosure agreement someone is going to jail, ive got my story. I dont need to the woman to talk to me so in a small Conference Room there ensued one of the most amazing experiences ive had as a journalist. I said tell me about them and he said what do you want to know. I said i want to know did you intend to rape her i was told he actually raped her which was alinaccurate if i published it t woulded have been false. He attempted to but she escaped. He got up from the small conference table, he was on the end where bradley would be and i was here. He came over here and stood above me and clenched his fist and his lip trembled and he said if you l publish that it will destroy the lives of my three teenage daughters and my marriage. You cant do that. I said im not going to sit down and let this guy take a poke at me. Im going to stand up and face him face to face. As soon as possible did, he started to cry and i dont mean small tears rolling down his cheek. I mean, he was sobbing, out of control sobbing which was extraordinary because he was really afraid that this was going to finally expose him. No one had ever exposed him before but i couldnt expose him because i didnt have any a womn on the record and the new york wasnt the national enquirer. We couldnt publish rumors. So, next but i kept in mind harvey and knew he was a predator. In 2015 when the italian model, this is the first time it was ever public. It was in the press that harvey abused women, literally hed been doing it for four decades. At the police while youre her, she had a tape acknowledging he grabbed her breasts but the da thinking she mightse not be a credible witness because there were questions about her, decided not to file charges. She then got a Million Dollar nondisclosure agreement and changed her testimony basically exonerating but she did something really clever. Before i got towi the reportersi said i believe this is accurate. I believe she was telling me the truth the first time, the model. But i saw in variety that ashley judd claimed that some studio executive asked her for a massage. Second person was Angelina Jolie. The first movie she did he tried to assault her. And the third was a woman, an aspiring actress that wrote a column for the new york observer. D Angelina Jolie wouldnt talk, ashley judd wouldnt talk. This woman who claimed and described in great detail and e was anonymous she wouldnt gon the record is so i didnt have. Story. A switch to 2015, he calls me up and i didnt know ron. All he knew about him is the woody allen stuff. I had a question in my mind was he a zealot or journalist. Was he trying to square things out with someone. He called me up and after talking to me, i asked him for more information where he was at. I was confident that he was really careful, judicious is the word i would later use. But he said cane i have accesso your papers of the new york public library. So i gave him access to them, which is my tapes and my notebooks, et cetera. But for anything off the record, he couldnt use. The women i mentioned. He said can i interview you. Iou said im finishing a book. He said i have three women on camera who acknowledge that harvey attempted or did rape them. I have five womenra on camera bt shielded and the names are not disclosed saying the same thingt and i have the audiotape of the italian model. I said great, you broke the case. Whats the next step . He said i meet with the president of nbc news on august 8th. Great. August 9th, i call rhonda farrow and i said how did you do . He said can i call you on a secure line and to me i think what is that all about. What we later learned as he was being tailed and in some ways being tapped. So he calls me and says nbc has basically n fired him. He didnt ask it as a question but more as a statement. Give me a number and let me call you back. I didnt tell him why. I called david, the editor of the new yorker who was a friend and lion in the world of journalism. And i said david, this kid has finally broken the case. Its unbelievable. Hes judicious and careful. He says have him call me on monday morning. I had one initial meeting with ronan farrow but essentially it was all ronan farrow. Nbc then claimed that ronan only had the goods after he went to new yorker which is baloney. He had the goods at that time. In any case, two sets of reporters do an amazing job. They got the women comfortable enough to talk. Im talking about jodi kantor at the times, broke the story in early october and a week later ronan farrow broke the story in the new yorker. And what they did. To talk not with fellow victims, so they would feel comfortable. But getting women who were really assaulted and afraid to come out and speak against harveyar weinstein is an extraordinary thing. There are people that said [inaudible] into the culture was changing. It did in some ways that we shouldnt minimize what these reporters did. Its extraordinary. Anyway, i then say how did i come to write a book. I said what they did, ronan and maggie and jodi, they were looking at harvey from the right side. Writing the book from the inside looking out, what he went through and experienced in his whole career. So i said one question i wanted to address is what made harvey the monster that he became. And in reporting, i found some interesting things. I found for instance that in flushing queens where he grew up, his mother was a veryli volatile personality, nothing like harvey as an adult yelling all the time, yelling so much that his friends who i interviewed, they played poker on the weekends. I also learned. Harvey did not to my knowledge. He started a rock Promotion Company that was wildly successful. They got a sinatra, the stones, they had all these top performers, the eagles, to come perform at the Buffalo Stadium and other places. So, he was a really powerful guy and he had a woman work there by the name of hope do more who i interviewed and now lives in san antonio. I think, and i have her picture infi the book, i think that she was the first woman he raped. She was an assistant. But he raped many other women and the more power he got, the more it escalated throughout his life. So that is one thing i wanted to explore is what made harvey who he was named one of the things that made him who he was was power. His brother wasnt raping women. You cant blame Miriam Weinstein for that. Itss as simple. I also came to feel harvey was a hasociopath and even thats contextual. How did this guy get away with this for four decades without anyone blowing the whistle. It was reporters who got the benefits of the tips and came to the screening or go to book contracts. It was quite extraordinary his use of power to keep the secret. When people say to me we knew he cheated on his wife but we didnt know he raped women. Let me tell you the story. I interviewed a woman by the name of hilary who was an agent who was going to move back to new york. Very attractive young woman. She came up for a Job Interview at miramax. She gets on the elevator and who was on the elevator about Harvey Weinstein. He looks her up and down and says what are you doing here. She says i have an interview with Human Resources. He says, and see me when youre done. So hilary goes to Human Resources,s has the interview ad the Human Resources head walks her back to harveys office. They walked in together and the first thing he says, he points his finger and says youre hired. He didnt consult with the Human Resources. He hired her and she had to go off on a trip to europe on vacation and she was coming back in threeni or four weeks. The day before she was to start work, for executives reached out to her and said we would love to take you for drinks. She said with a great place this is, what a great culture. What they said to her over drinks was hillary, you dont want to come to work here. Youre an attractive woman. He will assaulted you i promise and she didnt go to work. She basically didnt take the job. So that level of people knew how many others knew or should have known. The agents that send their actresses to hotel suites and young actors came backth and in some cases didnt come back. In some cases it was a Career Advancement for them but many came back wounded, hurt, abused by this monster. And they tell the agency and what didg. They do, nothing. They issued a statement at one point after he was exposed in the fall of 2017 saying we should have done more, the top agency. So i was interested in the culture of silence and tried in the book to identify how that happened and who some of the culprits were. I covered the trial every day and one of the things you get a treasureem trove of all these emails that are submitted. If you go up to the office at the end of the day and read these emails, many of them are incriminating to people that covered up for harvey. It was extraordinary. The third thing i was interested in, power. How did harvey, who had amazing power at one point. He published a magazine and top books. He was making movies is a serious director, actor unlike the studio, he was a magnet in hollywood and when disney acquired him in 93 they gave him money tono produce movies and nt just to distribute them. He was producing more than any other studio, miramax. So he was really of power. And at one point, when he took a reporter for the observer down in a headlock outside and screamed, and we know he did this because he had his tape recorder going, im the effingham sheriff of this town and dont you forget it. He felt that he was this powerful figure. So i was interested in exploring the power, giving money to obama and the clintons and the governor, the republican governor of new york and michael bloomberg, the republican and independent mayor. So he was basically parceling out roles. The other thing that interested me was the relationship between the brothers and harvey and bob started this business together. They were equal partners. In many ways he was more successful in those horror movies they were partners and worked together you knew the onlyly decisionmakers were the two brothers. He was complaining incessantly that harvey was spending like crazy. When he was divorced disney basically chased him out of saying he is too difficult to work with, and he was. He starts the company and got a billion dollars of investment money and he lost all of it. He is a terrible n businessman d his movies are not as successful as they were in the 90s and early 2,000s. So, he would complain stop prspending money and flying on private planes all the time and stopwn buying gowns. Then one day they are in a meeting in 2015 and he sucker punches his brother and breaks his nose and blood is flowing all over. Everyone says my god what is going on. This is awful. And on june the second, 2015, several members of the board the phoneharvey on and i have a tape of this that i transcribe and share the transcription in the book. He starts screaming at the Board Members i want you to fire my brother. We cant fire your brother. You have to do that. Youre the ceo of the company. Weem are just Board Members. You should fire him, hes losing all this money. He wasnt, harvey was losing the money. In any case, i was able to get weinstein to cooperate with me and tell me his story and we vprobably did 20, 25 interview. It was hard to get him to talk and it took a while but eventually, he did and he was candidyo with me. One ofth the things you learn is that after he was exposed in 2017, he couldnt be fired unless the board voted him off but the board was his board. He could be fired if a couple of antiharvey Board Members joined with bob who like harvey had waited. He said i think you are a sex addict and you should go to this place in arizona and get help. He listened to his brother and went there but he didnt seek help. He didnt stayor in the dormitoy with the other patients where Rush Limbaugh went and some other famous tiger woods went there. He spent all this time hanging out at a diner and from that point on he h stopped talking to his brother and has not talked to him since from 2017 through today. So, he then into the early 18 is in danger of getting indicted. He needs a criminal lawyer and i want to end with this story because i think that this hencapsulates something fundamental. He w meets with arguably the bet criminal attorney in new york ancity. They meet at the club and hes sitting looking and sees this guy walk in with that huge stomach but he had on a beautiful crisp linen he comes over and sits down and orders a cheeseburger and extra large portion of french fries and i would like a big bowl of ketchup, please. He then orders a Little Caesar salad. Before the caesar salad comes, harvey starts and the oil or the grease from the hamburger starts slipping down but then he reaches, he doesnt use a knife ortc fork, he reaches into the ketchup bowl with a handful of french fries and goes like this and shovels it in his mouth orrepeatedly. Suddenly there are what looked like bloodstains on his white shirt. Then a french fry falls down the front of his shirt and harvey starts to reach in to grab it out. He says what are you doing, stop that. Stand up and it will fall out, but he couldnt stop because he has impulse control issues. If you gave him a pack of cigarettes he would rip off the top because he doesnt have the patience to open up the top of the box. Diet cokes he had them lined up. He ate just shoveling food ins his mouth and talking while he chewed fast and people were woue created to sit across from him. But the harvey that abused women was the same that he was sitting across. He couldnt control himself and he couldnt breathe his temper, his sex drive, he had a severe diabetes, yet he always insisted that a bowl of peanut covered, chocolatee covered m ms be in hs hotel suite or his office and he would just, again, with diabetes, eating chocolate. Anyway, thats the odyssey of my experience with this guy. The interesting thing for me was to spend so much time reporting on the monster, and yet being able hopefully to step back and describe the movies he made and the talent he had to make the movies without negating