Turns Out That the New York Times Buried the Weinstein Story 13 Years Ago

It turns out that Sharon Waxman wrote just such a story, and it was edited to irrelevance by New York Times senior staff in 2004:

A whole lot of fur has been flying since last Thursday, when The New York Times published a game-changing investigative story about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct that in lightning speed brought the mogul to his knees.

He apologized and took an immediate leave of absence from the company he co-founded, but that wasn’t enough. His board members and legal advisers have been resigning en masse. And as new, ugly details emerge of three decades of settlements for sex-related offenses, he’s quickly becoming a national pariah.

I applaud The New York Times and writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for getting the story in print. I’m sure it was a long and difficult road.

But I simply gagged when I read Jim Rutenberg’s sanctimonious piece on Saturday about the “media enablers” who kept this story from the public for decades.

………

The story I reported never ran.

After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.

was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.

But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right?

Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian executive. Who cared?

The only question I have is, "Why Now?"

There has to be some sort of back-story which we have not yet heard.

This has been an open secret for years.

A friend of my father's has been deep in Oregon politics for years, and she said that it was generally known that Bob Packwood was a sexually abusive drunk for at least a decade before this became public.

Why does this sort of crap stay covered up and then suddenly come out?

I can understand a few years, but why a few decades?

Why does it take so f%$#ing long?