‘It was a brutal experience to work for Harvey Weinstein' | Tina Brown | Big Think

Well, in 1998, I left the New Yorker to go and work with Harvey Weinstein as a partner to launch a new magazine called Talk magazine. Of course, looking back, could I have chosen a worse partner than Harvey Weinstein? But what one forgets, it's easy to forget, is that the Harvey Weinstein I went to work with was the Harvey Weinstein who had just done The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, you know, My Beautiful Laundrette, all of these wonderful movies where he had done something that I much admired, which is to take quality and actually make it—force it to have the kind of commercial attention that normally quality just simply cannot win for itself.

And that I thought was a very exciting idea because having edited The New Yorker and turned it around, I knew how difficult it is to make quality commercial. So I thought was the appeal going to work for Harvey. And, of course, the Harvey who asked me to go and work for him again was super charming, super persuasive, super, you know, full of promises.

But within days of going to work with him, I knew I'd made a most colossal mistake because the Harvey that you saw back at that seedy office in Tribeca was just a completely different human being to the one that was out there being charming and offering you the world. He was such a gross bully. I had never seen people treated like the way Harvey treated people. I just have never seen it, you know, because in the end, publishing is quite a gentlemanly profession compared to what I was seeing with Harvey Weinstein.

I mean, you know, people could get angry or could get, you know, irritated, whatever. I've never seen people balled up, profanity shouted, humiliating. I just had never seen it. So, I was sort of shell-shocked when I went to some first meetings with Harvey and I saw the way he treated his staff. Now, he didn't ever sexually harass me; I was not the kind of target that he was interested in.

I mean, he likes 22-year-old actresses and so on, and so I was just not ever a target. But he did increasingly bully me, and it was very, very unsettling because I found it, you know, both wounding and also just destabilizing. He knocked me off my game in a sense by being so volatile that I never knew what he was going to say when I picked up the phone.

And of course, in the end, he just pulled the plug on it as well, which was very, very unsettling and upsetting to me at the time. You know, it was a brutal experience, quite honestly, to work for Harvey Weinstein. Not that I didn't learn things because I did; he is the master promoter, and I saw how good he was at that, but it was at a price that everybody paid that was of course not worth it.

Well, what I learned from working with Harvey was, first of all, you had to be very careful who you work for or work with. Honestly, I didn't do enough due diligence at all on the real Harvey. I think if I'd made six phone calls to people who actually had worked with him inside his business, I would have not taken that job. Unfortunately, I didn't; I believed the hype, if you like. Oh, perhaps I wanted to believe that; I don't know.

So, first of all, you have to be extremely careful who you go to work with. Secondly, I think that you have to set such strong parameters of what you will and won't take. I mean, if I regret one thing about going to work with Harvey, it was that I just didn't immediately walk out. I saw what it was like, but I'd given up my big job as a New Yorker; I had staked my claim. I was going to start a new company; it was a very hard thing to do.

But that is something that I think you have to do. I think you have to say, "I made a colossal mistake coming to work here, and I'm going to just right now draw a line in the sand and say that I simply can't take that." But you know, to do that, you have to have the financial security to be willing to do that, and it's an easier said than done thing to do.

So, most of it is about taking care and being very careful who you work with, really checking out people's reputation and asking the right questions. It's like: what is he like when things go wrong? You know, does he have a temper? What is he like about meetings?

For instance, one of the things that was so awful, as a young mother—which I was at the time—was that he scheduled a meeting for five o'clock, and then he wouldn't; he'd have you sit there outside his door till 6:30, and then the meeting would go on until 8:00. I just refused. That is an area where I just drew a line in the sand, and I did. I said, "I have children; I get home to have dinner with them. I am NOT going to take these meetings."

And one area where I won was I said, "I don't ever take a meeting with Harvey until after 3:30." After 3:30, because he's just so incredibly selfish about just making you sit there, which is part of his power play. I wasn't going to do it anymore because my children were that was a non-negotiable for me.

And I think if I'd done more of that, it might have been better.