A piece by Richard Brooks, Arts Editor, in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
The award-winning British screenwriter Abi Morgan has described Harvey Weinstein’s “incredibly corrupting and seductive” parties in a recording for today’s Desert Island Discs.
Morgan got to know the now disgraced Hollywood mogul in 2011 when he was the US distributor of The Iron Lady, a film she wrote about Margaret Thatcher. She met Weinstein again in 2016, the year before he became engulfed by allegations of non-consensual sex.
“What did I think about him?” asks Morgan on the BBC Radio 4 programme. “He threw great parties and I think that was incredibly corrupting and seductive. I had heard he’d been called a rapist and I look back now and think: why did I never challenge that?”
She says Weinstein seemed interested in female, feminist work: “You think: OK, this is good. He must have an appreciation and a respect for women — and you realise how deceptive that is.”
Morgan says she does not want to excuse her behaviour “because I have shocked myself in . . . the way you don’t listen to yourself and go: this doesn’t feel entirely right.” The writer, whose series about divorce lawyers, The Split, is now on BBC1, often works with female producers and directors. But she tells the presenter, Kirsty Young: “I also recognise that at 50 and as a feminist . . . I need to . . . maybe think more like a man.”
Weinstein denies claims of non-consensual sex.
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