Have you followed the trial, day in and day out?
I didn’t follow it day in and day out. I knew what was going to be said. I mean, it still filters in, and you hear horrible stuff, but I didn’t. Thank God, Annabella, and thank God, Mimi and Jessica. And, you know, thank God, because it’s hard as hell doing it from behind a keyboard every day, but to do it face to face—that’s a whole ’nother ball game.
Have you spoken to any other survivors during the trial?
Yeah, we’ve been on an e-mail chain.
What have those conversations been like?
I would summarize it by probably most of the women just being so used to—and I think this is not even native to Harvey Weinstein victims—just so used to being shit on by justice and having none. Even in the most, like—let’s go to Brock Turner, right? The Stanford case where he was caught red-handed, literally, and still. We were, like, a hundred of us, but it didn’t matter. What more does it take? You feel like a hundred women went to the police precinct and said, This man stole our purse. I think, likely, he’d be arrested for that. So that’s easier to believe.
Harvey Weinstein was convicted of two sex crimes, but not of the more serious predatory sexual-assault charge that would have flowed from the jury buying into the idea that he had committed more than one sex crime in the first degree and this was a pattern. Those results are complicated for a lot of people. How do you feel about it?
The ones where the relationship goes on afterward, there’s just not a history of that winning. So that’s why I was kind of, like, Why were those specific ones brought? It’s extremely difficult.
It’s extremely significant that a jury acknowledged that you can have an act of sexual violence of some kind—rape in the third degree is what they found him guilty of, which is without physical compulsion, but it is a sex crime—and also have an ongoing relationship.
For the American jury system, it’s pretty revolutionary in a lot of ways.You know that women can be married and get raped. You know you can be in a relationship and get raped by your partner—same-sex, anything, again, you know, and that is huge, actually, and I think it will be significant. . . . I was expecting him to totally walk, to be honest with you. But the good thing is that it becomes an ongoing conversation, and the legal system needs to do more and get smarter when it comes to sexual-assault cases, for sure, and how they prosecute them and how they treat the victims and what is tolerated. And the kind of defense that Donna Rotunno, his attorney, was running, you know, we’ve heard all those kinds of things forever, forever. And they’re so boring.
She’s a real throwback.
Yes, Donna Rotunno was kind of a throwback. She said this really gross thing in her closing argument—this really bothered me—it was basically, like, Oh, yeah, women have to take responsibility for their own actions.
They are. That’s why they’re here testifying. This is their action, and they’re taking responsibility and then running their lives the best they can, in a horrible situation with the choices they’re given. So they are. Not in the way you would think. But it is layered. And I hope the charges in [Los Angeles] still go through. I hope that. I’m talking to the D.A. there.
I got an on-the-record quote from Paul Thompson, the assistant district attorney, and they are proceeding with the case. If you were asked to testify in that case, would you?
Yes. I’ll see this through. I just want to take out the trash.
The most serious charge Harvey Weinstein was convicted of today, the one involving Mimi Haleyi, is about a fact pattern that is strikingly similar to your own allegation and those of several other women who say Weinstein forced oral sex on them. What was it like reading or hearing her testimony? Did you read it? I could see that being painful.
And that one is almost verbatim. Except for the structure of the room. They could say to Mimi, like, Oh, that was just oral sex. To have someone’s face where you don’t want it, in the most vulnerable place—and that face, specifically—it’s a horror show. What she had to go through, I know what she went through and what those other women went through. I know what they went through. There’s pain here. There’s trauma, there’s consequence.
But I do hope that, for Mimi, for me, for all of us, and for all the women that won’t come forward because they saw what happened to us, I hope their bodies rest a little easier tonight. I had a nightmare last night. I woke up sweating again, you know, like, I had to change my pajamas. I get night terrors still, and it’s, like, damn, man. Come on. And I’m sure the trials set stuff up, you know, the stress of it. But I’m really curious to see what will happen to the P.T.S.D. now. I don’t know; I’ve never been on this side of it. It’s a whole new world.
The term “justice” is also getting used a lot today. What does justice mean to you?
That’s a good question. Justice to me, it’s the stopping of him being able to do what he wants to do. What he wants to do is make money, be famous, and rape. So that’s some justice, yes.
This obviously is a story that’s much bigger than Hollywood. There are clearly Harvey Weinsteins in industry after industry, but it also does seem to have shaken the entertainment industry, or at least produced a lot of talk in the entertainment industry, about change. Has that happened? Do you believe it’s changed?
Do I think that all of a sudden the people out there are good people? No, but I think that they now know they’re on notice, and they have to have at least the perception of looking like good people. I think there are more people now who would be a lot less willing to go along with things, and I also, and this is kind of weird, but I’ll watch a show on Netflix or a movie, and I think, Oh, that young actress. He would have attacked her. He would have gotten her. So I’m watching people’s work and thinking, Oh, hopefully their career gets to take the natural course of what it’s meant to be for them. You know, without being interrupted by a monster who’s a trash compactor and eating every piece of thing around that he can swallow.
What do you think this trial, this verdict means for broader efforts to hold powerful people accused of terrible crimes accountable?
I think it shows that it can be done. And you know who that showed it to? Me. Because I didn’t know that. Because I had no evidence. No reason to, no hope. But there’s millions and millions and millions of people like me who are holding out hope. And maybe if this gave them one little feeling of, like, a David and Goliath kind of thing, like, I can matter. I can stand. I can count. I can point and say, “It was you, and you stole something from me, and you really shouldn’t have. You didn’t have to. This could have all gone very differently.”
