Weinstein victim gives LBC remarkable account of how he attempted to rape her

25 February 2020, 23:00 | Updated: 25 February 2020, 23:01

One of the victims of Harvey Weinstein told Nick Ferrari of the moment the movie mogul attempted to rape her in a hotel room.

Rowena Chiu was a former personal assistant to Weinstein and was coerced into signing an NDA after complaining about his actions.

Weinstein was convicted by jurors on two of the five charges he faced - a criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape of the third-degree.

Speaking to Nick Ferrari, MS Chiu revealed what he put her through. She said: "He made a number of unsavoury remarks about both my education and my ethnicity. He alluded to both in terms of describing reasons why he should engage in sexual activity with me."

Ms Chiu told of how the producer attacked her at the Venice Film Festival in 1998.

She revealed: "It was only the second time I was alone with him. Typically Miramax Films would have run its office out of a hotel room when it was at a film festival and the task of the second assistant is to read scripts whilst the first assistant was out at dinner and I would be required to discuss them with Harvey when he came back at night.

"He asked me my opinion about the scripts and we began talking. Then very rapidly, the talk would begin to turn personal.

"After a number of unsavoury requests for massages and asking me to take off my clothes, he pushed me against the bed and attempted to rape me."

Ms Chiu said she managed to fight him off, but said as a young assistant, her primary objective was to ensure she didn't anger Weinstein, adding that "quite terrible things would happen if I did so".

She continued: "I made excuses. I said whatever came to the top of my head at the time. I said I had a boyfriend. I said the first assistant would be worried about me. Eventually I was allowed to leave the room, but he said very clearly we'd pick this up the following night.

"But there wasn't a following night because I reported him the following morning to my colleague Zelda Perkins and from there, the rest is history. Zelda confronted him, we returned to London, we hired some lawyers. We invoked constructed dismissal and we were very quickly coerced into signing an NDA that would silence both of us for over 20 years."

She revealed she thought the NDA would act either as a wake-up call or put the brakes on his behaviour as it contained a number of clauses that would legally oblige him to turn himself in if he kept assaulting young women.

It's a remarkable account - listen to her extended interview at the top of the page.