What I’m Hearing: Harvey’s Biographer Tells All

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Discussed in this issue: Ken Auletta, the Weinsteins, Modi Wiczyk, Harrison Ford, Adam Stotsky, Ken Sunshine, Amber Heard, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Barbara Schneeweiss, Roman Abramovich, and a guy who’s NOT running for president.

But first…

Who Won the Week: The Duffers

Long overdue: The Stranger Things Season 4 numbers are insane: the show now holds three of Nielsen’s top five streaming weeks ever, and the creators just announced a spinoff series and stage play.

And a bit of awards show news…

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Harvey’s Biographer Tells All

In advance of his new book, Ken Auletta discusses Weinstein’s origins and depravity, whether he got a fair trial, who enabled what behavior, and how the convicted mogul/rapist changed Hollywood forever.

MATTHEW BELLONI

The moment I heard that Ken Auletta was attending every day of the Harvey Weinstein rape trial for a book on the mogul, I started looking forward to Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence (out July 12). Ken, the longtime New Yorker writer, conducted several hundred interviews, including dozens of chats with Bob Weinstein, former Miramax and Weinstein Co. employees, and longtime advisors, like Joe Ravitch, Bert Fields and David Boies. And he exchanged emails with Harvey himself from prison. The result is the opposite of She Said or Catch and Kill, which both read like detective stories. Auletta tells the Harvey story from the inside, naming names of the enablers, and revealing Hollywood’s “architecture of collusion” along the way. I interviewed Ken and followed up with a couple emails; an edited version of our conversation is below.

Matt Belloni: You wrote a famous profile of Harvey for The New Yorker in 2002 that exposed a lot of abusive behavior but didn't go into sexual depravity. I know when I saw the initial Times story in 2017, I felt guilt at not having exposed Weinstein earlier. Did you write this book in part because you also weren't able to expose him previously?

Ken Auletta: Yes. But guilt is not the overwhelming emotion I felt. In 2002… the women wouldn’t talk to me, so how do you publish it? It’s the same problem you had at Hollywood Reporter. When the Times stories came out [in 2017], and the Ronan Farrow stories, my overwhelming emotion was pleasure. It was applause...

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