Accused rapist Harvey Weinstein extremely offended by all these claims that he had people blacklisted
Having apparently decided, against all odds, that this is the hill he wants to die on, multiply accused alleged sexual harasser and assaulter Harvey Weinstein has doubled down on his assertions that he never tried to have any women blacklisted from his films. After responding yesterday to claims from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh—who said Weinstein and his brother Bob did everything in their power to discourage them from casting actresses Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino in The Lord Of The Rings—Weinstein has now issued two more statements on the topic today.
First, he fired back at Jackson; speaking through a representative, Weinstein claimed that, fresh off an Oscar win for Mighty Aphrodite, Mira Sorvino was too powerful for him to somehow derail her career, and further claimed, truthfully, that she was in the Miramax film Mimic during that same period. (He also noted that Sorvino was dating Quentin Tarantino at the time, as though that especially matters.) Weinstein went on to question why, if they suddenly cared about Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino so much, Jackson and Walsh didn’t use their LOTR clout to cast either actress in The Hobbit films, as though it was their personal mission in life to combat the petty vendettas of Harvey Weinstein at every turn.
In a (slightly) less petulant message later this afternoon, Weinstein also denied any involvement in blocking Sorvino from appearing in Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa; as he noted, that film was exclusively a Dimension Films product, and thus under the aegis of his brother, Bob. Indeed—and trust us, it does us no pleasure to give Harvey Fucking Weinstein even the most modest of leeway on anything, ever—Zwigoff never actually named Harvey specifically in the tweet giving his account of the process, instead attributing it to “the Weinsteins.” So there you have it: Harvey Weinstein might, hypothetically, not have done a single one of the less viscerally terrible of the dozens of awful things he’s been accused of doing. Let the rehabilitation commence!
[via The Hollywood Reporter and Variety]