A crucial part of the Harvey Weinstein story: his alleged enablers

Ronan Farrow’s report on the allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, published in the New Yorker Tuesday, includes a number of disturbing revelations. One of them isn’t about Weinstein — it’s about what all the people around him did to allow his alleged behavior to continue.

According to Farrow, Weinstein didn’t operate in a vacuum. Rather, he writes, “employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout the companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way.”

Ultimately, Weinstein would bear the blame for any harassment, assault, or rape he is accused of committing. But if Farrow’s account is accurate, then he could not have gotten away with so much for so long without the help of a succession of enablers. The allegations against him are part of a larger pattern: Few powerful men are entirely alone in their mistreatment of women. Often, they rely on others to help them attract new targets and clean up their messes. And stopping men in power from abusing women may require dismantling the “cultures of complicity” they build up around themselves.

One female executive at the Weinstein Company told Farrow that Weinstein would routinely set up meetings with women “late at night, usually at hotel bars or in hotel rooms. And, in order to make these women feel more comfortable, he would ask a female executive or assistant to start those meetings with him.”

“It almost felt like the executive or assistant was made to be a honeypot to lure these women in, to make them feel safe,” she said.

Another woman told Farrow that she was asked to serve as such a “honeypot,” joining the beginning of meetings between Weinstein and the women. At one such meeting, Weinstein asked her to tell the other woman present “how good of a boyfriend I am.” She said the meetings stopped briefly after Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a model, accused Weinstein of groping her. But, she said, “he couldn’t help himself. A few months later, he was back at it.”

A male former employee who helped set up meetings between Weinstein and women said many of the women were scared and unaware of the nature of the meetings. One woman especially troubled him, he told Farrow: “You just feel terrible because you could tell this girl, very young, not from our country, was now in a room waiting for him to come up there in the middle of the day, and we were not to bother them.”

Then there are the damage-control teams. Many people who talked to Farrow “said that they had seen Weinstein’s associates confront and intimidate those who crossed him, and feared that they would be similarly targeted,” Farrow writes. “Weinstein and his legal and public-relations teams have conducted a decades-long campaign to suppress these stories,” he continues. That campaign allegedly included settlement negotiations that felt to one employee like “David versus Goliath.”

The New Yorker story paints a picture of a web of enablers around Weinstein, helping him lure women into what Farrow calls “professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances,” and then helping him pay them off or intimidate them into silence if they complained. It’s an old story: the powerful man insulated from the repercussions of his behavior by those around him.

Lawsuits and complaints against Fox News have offered numerous apparent instances of this phenomenon: Andrea Tantaros, a former Fox News host, said that when she complained about sexual harassment by Roger Ailes, then the CEO of Fox News, she was told by another executive at the network that “Roger is a very powerful man” and she “should not fight this.” A former Fox News booker “said she was expected to hire attractive staffers and send them to Ailes,” Emily Crockett wrote at Vox, “or ‘find me whores,’ as she said Ailes put it.” A former field adviser for the Republican National Committee told Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine that after she refused Ailes’s advances, a job she had been expecting fell through — a friend told her, “Word went out you weren’t to be hired.”

More recently, Scottie Nell Hughes accused Charles Payne, a Fox News anchor, of raping her. She also said two female Fox executives tried to discredit her allegations by feeding a story about her to the National Enquirer.

A highly placed executive who smears a whistleblower to cover for a star certainly deserves his or her share of the blame. It’s a little harder to know what to think about some of the people who worked for Weinstein, especially those lower in the company hierarchy. Quitting a job in protest isn’t an option for everyone, and employees may have feared the Goliath treatment from Weinstein’s legal team. The female executive who spoke to Farrow told him she could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits for violating the nondisclosure agreement in her contract.

What is clear is that powerful men who abuse women are often protected by the silence of those around them, and that silence needs to be broken for justice to be done. In a post on Patreon titled “What Comes After Whisper Networks,” Alex Press, an assistant editor at Jacobin, offers some ideas for helping women share their knowledge of predatory men. She argues that unions are the best way to stop harassment within a workplace. But, she notes, many abusers prey on women across several workplaces. Perhaps, she writes, what’s needed is “a hotline for women to report abuse, one that guarantees anonymity and connects the victim with a woman in her field who is willing to guide her through the possible steps she can pursue to take action against her abuser.”

Ultimately, stopping sexual harassment, assault, and rape in workplaces around the country isn’t just about denouncing Harvey Weinstein or other men accused of abuse, as many in Hollywood have already done. It’s also about dismantling the networks of silence that can keep abusers safe from consequences for decades. And to do that, those who have witnessed or survived abuse will need networks of their own.