Palo Alto woman recalls Weinstein nightmare in ‘She Said’
With a best-selling powder keg of a book, numerous articles, an ongoing criminal trial featuring anguished testimony from filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, can a new film about Harvey Weinstein offer anything new on his downfall and its aftermath?
For Palo Alto resident Rowena Chiu, who is featured in the film, the answer is a qualified, but important, yes. She was an assistant to Weinstein at Miramax Films who was assaulted by the mogul in 1998 and then was forced to endure a suffocating cloak of silence for about 20 years because of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) she signed.
Her story is one of many shared in “She Said,” an R-rated feature film by Maria Schrader opening Friday in area theaters. It recounts the investigation by New York Times reporters Megan Twohey (played by Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) that led to Weinstein’s downfall and criminal charges, as well as the birth of the #MeToo movement.
Chiu was initially skeptical that “She Said” could add anything “to the mountain of responses and documentation on the Weinstein scandal,” she said in a phone interview from her Palo Alto residence.
“But,” she added. “I think the movie has an emotional impact that I realize other forms of documentation don’t have.”
She noticed that while watching the film with friends and family — people she couldn’t talk to about the attack due to the NDA she signed. She technically violates it every time she speaks publicly about her time at Miramax and assault, although the flood of coverage about Weinstein and is criminal charges have changed things.
“I realized that even for them … the movie had a very strong emotional impact,” Chiu says. “I realized that no matter how many news interviews I do, no matter how many documentaries I take part in, and how many very candid New York Times op-eds that I write, the movie will have the impact that often the other material won’t have.”
Angela Yeoh, a former journalist (BBC World Service and the Wall Street Journal), who plays Chiu in “She Said,” says the film also illustrates the ordeals endured by the women who stepped forward to tell their stories to Twohey and Kantor.
“(That’s) harder to convey on a page,” she said. “Something we as humans really respond to is having an emotional moment, and connecting to that truthfully and on a deeper level. It does help with creating more empathy, I hope, for the people who are represented in this film.”
She also hopes viewers realize how important vetted work by trustworthy journalists needs to be protected and supported.
Chiu in 2019 published an op-ed in the New York Times about her attack and and the toll it took on her.
The article details how Chiu, who went to work for Miramax soon after graduating from Oxford University, was assaulted by him during business trip to the Venice Film Festival, and eventually pressured to sign an NDA with Weinstein, part of $213,000 settlement. Weinstein has maintained that the allegations by Chiu and dozens of others against him are false or misrepresentations of a consensual affair.
The NDA forbade Chiu from talking about the incident with a therapist, a lawyer, her friends and relatives, even her eventual husband. For 20 years, she lived in silence and in fear of recrimination. She attempted suicide twice before leaving Miramax, she said.
“The hardest thing (about the NDA) was the isolation from friends and family that would have been an emotional support network,” she says.
While she agrees that NDAs do serve important purposes, laws are needed to prevent their use to cover up workplace crimes and harassment. A nonprofit, Can’t Buy My Silence, is advocates for that change.
When reporter Kantor came to interview Chiu in Mountain View, she recalls thinking, “The story’s never going to get published and if it gets published no one’s going to pay attention because we all know what Harvey is like any way.”
Then it came out, in 2017, and things took off from there.
“To watch the tsunami of women who could come forward with stories about Harvey Weinstein was phenomenal,” she says. “It was the domino effect of toxic men experiencing a fall from grace — Harvey, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, and then, of course it extended beyond entertainment and other industries.”
Many of the initial articles and news stories, though, highlighted White narratives, she said. Chiu is glad to be representing women of color who are, as she states, “members of the global majority” and she’s encouraged that the founder of the MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, is Black.
And she hopes more women of color will feel empowered to step forward, since she knows that many haven’t.
“I get an incredible amount of correspondence from women who are survivors but aren’t in any way public,” she says. “Many women write to me and say ‘you’re the first person that I’ve told about this thing that happened to me, often a thing that happened many years ago.
“So I think the really propels me to continue this kind of work because to raise awareness about toxic masculinity, sexual harassment in the workplace is incredibly important.”
While Chiu feels “She Said” is mostly accurate in its portrayal of investigation, she notes that filmmakers fudged one detail. The supposed Mountain View home depicted as where her interview with Kantor took place is actually a house in New Jersey.
“It does not look like my house at all,” she said. “My actual house in Mountain View is more of a Spanish style villa and less the Eichler style of housing. But they picked a house that’s very much like the style of the Bay Area.”
With a best-selling powder keg of a book, numerous articles, an ongoing criminal trial featuring anguished testimony from filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, can a new film about Harvey Weinstein offer anything new on his downfall and its aftermath?
For Palo Alto resident Rowena Chiu, who is featured in the film, the answer is a qualified, but important, yes. She was an assistant to Weinstein at Miramax Films who was assaulted by the mogul in 1998 and then was forced to endure a suffocating cloak of silence for about 20 years because of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) she signed.
Her story is one of many shared in “She Said,” an R-rated feature film by Maria Schrader opening Friday in area theaters. It recounts the investigation by New York Times reporters Megan Twohey (played by Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) that led to Weinstein’s downfall and criminal charges, as well as the birth of the #MeToo movement.
Chiu was initially skeptical that “She Said” could add anything “to the mountain of responses and documentation on the Weinstein scandal,” she said in a phone interview from her Palo Alto residence.
“But,” she added. “I think the movie has an emotional impact that I realize other forms of documentation don’t have.”
She noticed that while watching the film with friends and family — people she couldn’t talk to about the attack due to the NDA she signed. She technically violates it every time she speaks publicly about her time at Miramax and assault, although the flood of coverage about Weinstein and is criminal charges have changed things.
“I realized that even for them … the movie had a very strong emotional impact,” Chiu says. “I realized that no matter how many news interviews I do, no matter how many documentaries I take part in, and how many very candid New York Times op-eds that I write, the movie will have the impact that often the other material won’t have.”
Angela Yeoh, a former journalist (BBC World Service and the Wall Street Journal), who plays Chiu in “She Said,” says the film also illustrates the ordeals endured by the women who stepped forward to tell their stories to Twohey and Kantor.
“(That’s) harder to convey on a page,” she said. “Something we as humans really respond to is having an emotional moment, and connecting to that truthfully and on a deeper level. It does help with creating more empathy, I hope, for the people who are represented in this film.”
She also hopes viewers realize how important vetted work by trustworthy journalists needs to be protected and supported.
Chiu in 2019 published an op-ed in the New York Times about her attack and and the toll it took on her.
The article details how Chiu, who went to work for Miramax soon after graduating from Oxford University, was assaulted by him during business trip to the Venice Film Festival, and eventually pressured to sign an NDA with Weinstein, part of $213,000 settlement. Weinstein has maintained that the allegations by Chiu and dozens of others against him are false or misrepresentations of a consensual affair.
The NDA forbade Chiu from talking about the incident with a therapist, a lawyer, her friends and relatives, even her eventual husband. For 20 years, she lived in silence and in fear of recrimination. She attempted suicide twice before leaving Miramax, she said.
“The hardest thing (about the NDA) was the isolation from friends and family that would have been an emotional support network,” she says.
While she agrees that NDAs do serve important purposes, laws are needed to prevent their use to cover up workplace crimes and harassment. A nonprofit, Can’t Buy My Silence, is advocates for that change.
When reporter Kantor came to interview Chiu in Mountain View, she recalls thinking, “The story’s never going to get published and if it gets published no one’s going to pay attention because we all know what Harvey is like any way.”
Then it came out, in 2017, and things took off from there.
“To watch the tsunami of women who could come forward with stories about Harvey Weinstein was phenomenal,” she says. “It was the domino effect of toxic men experiencing a fall from grace — Harvey, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, and then, of course it extended beyond entertainment and other industries.”
Many of the initial articles and news stories, though, highlighted White narratives, she said. Chiu is glad to be representing women of color who are, as she states, “members of the global majority” and she’s encouraged that the founder of the MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, is Black.
And she hopes more women of color will feel empowered to step forward, since she knows that many haven’t.
“I get an incredible amount of correspondence from women who are survivors but aren’t in any way public,” she says. “Many women write to me and say ‘you’re the first person that I’ve told about this thing that happened to me, often a thing that happened many years ago.
“So I think the really propels me to continue this kind of work because to raise awareness about toxic masculinity, sexual harassment in the workplace is incredibly important.”
While Chiu feels “She Said” is mostly accurate in its portrayal of investigation, she notes that filmmakers fudged one detail. The supposed Mountain View home depicted as where her interview with Kantor took place is actually a house in New Jersey.
“It does not look like my house at all,” she said. “My actual house in Mountain View is more of a Spanish style villa and less the Eichler style of housing. But they picked a house that’s very much like the style of the Bay Area.”
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