Harvey Weinstein

Weinstein’s Former Assistant Rowena Chiu Details How She Broke Two Decades of Silence

From NDAs to settlements and a support group with Christine Blasey Ford, Chiu opened up about her decision to come forward.

By Kevin Fitzpatrick

October 6, 2019

Rowena Chiu appearing on Good Morning America on Monday September 9 2019.

As Harvey Weinstein awaits trial for charges of predatory sexual assault, a criminal sexual act, rape in the first degree, and rape in the third degree (he has pleaded not guilty to all), one of the disgraced mogul’s many accusers is shedding new light on the mechanism that helped keep women silent for decades. Rowena Chiu, a former assistant to Weinstein who first shared her story on Good Morning America last month, revealed details of an NDA signed over an 1998 incident in a The New York Times op-ed Saturday.

Chiu claims that she shared her experience—an alleged hotel-room assault by the producer at the 1998 Venice Film Festival—with fellow assistant Zelda Perkins at the time, and the pair repeatedly attempted to report Weinstein’s pattern of abusive behavior to superiors and police alike. Ignored and dismissed, Chiu and Perkins were eventually pressured by Weinstein’s legal team to sign 30-page non-disclosure agreements. This story was first reported in the pages of last month’s She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, a book documenting the #MeToo movement by Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor. (Through a lawyer, Weinstein claimed to the Associated Press that Chiu’s account and others in the book are false.)

“The negotiations were conducted under conditions of extreme duress: We were once kept at the office overnight, from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., escorted to the bathroom, provided with the barest minimum of food and drink and not permitted pen and paper to keep notes,” Chiu wrote in the op-ed. “We were not even allowed to keep a copy of this most egregious of agreements: We had signed our lives away in a complex 30-page document that we could not refer to.” Chiu and Perkins subsequently kept their distance from one another, “lest we slip up and accidentally discuss these events.”

In the op-ed, her Good Morning America interview, and She Said,__ Chiu shared the difficulty she had finding work outside Miramax. She also spoke about suicide attempts and depression that followed her ordeal. Twenty-one years after the experience, Kantor tracked her down, and Chiu opted to speak out against Weinstein. “My four children were young, and I was terrified that journalists would surround the house and that my children would be followed to school,” she wrote. “Remaining silent had become integral to my identity, both as a woman and a person of color.”

Chiu pointed toward the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh as inspiration. Kantor and Twohey even put together a support group with Blasey Ford and other survivors of abuse to encourage women to speak up. It nonetheless took several months before Chiu agreed to share her story for the book. She pointed toward the few women of color being recognized among Weinstein’s accusers, adding “It is important to me now that I speak up, that I allow my voice, an Asian voice, an assistant’s voice, to join the array of voices in the #MeToo movement.”

Approximately 70 women have come forth alleging patterns of abuse and sexual misconduct from Weinstein over the years—some of whom, like actresses Lupita Nyong’o, Uma Thurman and Salma Hayek, likewise shared their story in op-eds for the Times. Weinstein is currently awaiting a January 2020 trial in Manhattan, after a New York state appeals court denied his legal team’s petition to move the trial for fear of an unfair jury and “circuslike atmosphere.”