NewYorker | Weinstein’s employees were, and are, bound by confidentiality agreements
included in their employment contracts with Miramax and the Weinstein
Company. While nondisclosure agreements are a standard feature of
employment contracts, the clauses in Weinstein’s included a special
provision about information “concerning the personal, social or business
activities” of “the co-Chairmen”—namely, Harvey and Bob Weinstein.
Estreicher, the expert on employment law, told me that the nondisclosure
clause regarding the personal lives of both Weinstein brothers was
unusual.
“That’s not generally found, the personal conduct of an
individual being part of a contract like that.”
Many
employees I spoke with said that these contractual provisions made
it impossible to talk about suspicious behavior they witnessed at the
company. Irwin Reiter, who worked for Weinstein for nearly three decades
and is currently the Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for
accounting and financial reporting, had previously declined requests to
participate in stories.
“I hope there’s no reprisal,” he told me, referring to legal action
against employees. He said that he was nevertheless going public because
he
felt the culture of silence at the company deserved further scrutiny.
Weinstein, he told me, “was so dominant that I think a lot of people
were afraid of him, afraid to confront him, or question him, and that
was the environment.” Reiter also raised doubts about the fairness of
lifetime nondisclosure agreements. “A forever N.D.A. should not be
legal,” he told me. “People should not be made to live with that. He’s
created so many victims that have been burdened for so many years, and
it’s just not right.”
These contractual constraints are perfectly legal. Allred, the
victim’s-rights attorney, said that courts usually enforce them and view
efforts to break them as “buyer’s remorse.” But in recent weeks
lawmakers and legal experts have called for reforms to this system.
Estreicher has proposed that the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, the government body that oversees workplace discrimination,
track sexual-misconduct-related settlements and investigate employers
who use them repeatedly. In addition to Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s
legislation regarding congressional employees, state lawmakers in New
York and California are pushing legislation to curtail the use of
nondisclosure agreements in sexual-abuse cases. “These secret
settlements perpetuate the problem. They allow rich men to continue to
be sexual predators,” Connie Leyva, the California state senator who has
announced legislation in that state, told me. “I hope that we can get
this done in California, and that it will spread like wildfire around
the country.”
Allred raised concerns about the potential reforms, which she feared
could limit victims’ options. She noted that “anyone who agrees to enter
into a settlement has a choice” and accepts both the costs and the—sometimes considerable—benefits. Good attorneys, she argued, explain
the full implications of such agreements. “And then the client makes an
informed choice.”
Gutierrez, Perkins, and other women who signed agreements with Weinstein
told me that they felt their consent was far from informed. Gutierrez
said that she wished she had been aware that Weinstein had faced similar
allegations in the past. When, after the fact, she learned that his
behavior with her was part of a pattern, she was filled with guilt. “I
couldn’t even think of that person touching someone else,” she told me.
“It made me have chills.” Gutierrez said that she wants to warn people of the
risks of silence. “People need to really change right now,” she said.
“To listen and speak. That was the worst thing—people not speaking.”
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