"I wanted to die. It was disgusting. It was humiliating, miserable. I didn't fight. I remember how he was looking in the mirror and he was telling me to look at him."
-- Jane Doe No. 1, testifying against Harvey Weinstein in October
Juda Engelmayer has a tough job.
He's president of HeraldPR, a New York-based public relations and crisis communications firm. If you go on its website, you'll see they described themselves as a "a full-service ... agency" that will "go above and beyond to think outside of the box and deliver targeted results to bolster your brand awareness and increase your bottom line" so long as you're willing to pay them up to $30,000 a month.
A lot of what Engelmayer does is represent disgraced celebrities, to try to help them rehabilitate their reputations and to regain the ability to make a living. If you've seen the British television series "Flack"--which is available on Amazon Prime stateside--you have a cartoonishly rough idea of what the job entails.
One of HeraldPR's clients is Anna "Delvey" Sorokin, the Russian-born fraudster who posed as a wealthy heiress with a $60 million trust fund to infiltrate the upper echelons of Manhattan's social and art scenes from 2013 to 2017.
Sorokin spent three years in prison on larceny and theft charges stemming from her hoax; when she was released earlier this year she was taken into custody by immigration authorities intending to deport her.
In October, a judge allowed her home confinement while she fights to stay in this country on the condition that she not access any of her once-vibrant social media accounts. She now apparently regards herself as an artist, and while she was being detained by ICE her drawings--made with "dull rubber objects" allowed to prisoners in the Upstate New York detention center where she was held--went on sale for $10,000 a pop. (The little people could buy prints for $250.)
Defending Sorokin might not be so tough. A lot of people see her more as a mischievous go-getter faking it until she made it than as a hardened criminal. They think a lot of the people she swindled could afford it, and probably should have been more diligent. (Americans are very forgiving of con artists; it's one of the traditional paths to fame and power in this country.)
It might be relatively easy to turn Anna Sorokin into America's Sweetheart. It might be fun to work for her, provided she pays in advance.
Other clients pose bigger challenges. Another one of Engelmayer's clients is Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein is the former powerful Hollywood producer who was convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York City in 2020, and sentenced to 23 years in prison. His California trial on similar charges--Weinstein is charged with two counts each of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, and sexual battery, as well as a count of sexual penetration by a foreign object--went to the jury last week. If convicted, Weinstein would face what amounts to a life sentence in California.
And after they get through with him in California, the British courts would like a word with Mr. Weinstein.
You may have read the reporting by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in The New York Times or by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker, or you may have seen other print or TV stories that digested this reporting. Maybe you think you know about it.
Most people might have read a paragraph or two or simply heard about Weinstein's legal troubles. They're still entitled to have opinions about it. Americans have a right to form strong opinions about things they know very little about, and to fly from flagpoles if that's what they want to do.
But if you want to do your own research, one not-too-taxing way to start is with the recently released movie "She Said," directed by Maria Schrader and based on Kantor and Twohey's efforts to report the story.
While it's not a documentary, it seems scrupulous with the facts, and gets a lot of the procedural stuff right. (The liberties the filmmakers take are minor; there's a scene where an editor played by Patricia Clarkson sits typing on her glowing laptop in a darkened New York Times office late at night; it works visually, but she would have turned on a light.)
As Kantor, Zoe Kazan holds just the right kind of empathetic listening face when she interviews sources, and Carey Mulligan's Twohey flashes a fierceness that feels authentic. It's been a while, but I've worked on projects that took months to report, and when you're caught up in that sort of work you invariably cycle through emotional seasons of fear and doubt and dread and elation. And even when you've got the story, you wonder if anyone will care.
It's a really good movie, but for reasons that have more to do with audience expectations and the reluctance of older audiences to return to theaters post-covid 19, it's not doing well at the box office.
"The film 'She Said' bombing isn't a surprise," a statement Engelmayer provided to Variety stated. "Movie watchers want to be entertained, especially now. Details of the investigation, the #MeToo movement, the story of Weinstein and the accusers, has been told over and over again these past five years, and it is clear that there was little worth paying to see it here. Harvey, the film producer and distributor, would have known that."
He's not wrong. We get bored quickly and move on in this country. Harvey Weinstein is old news.
There is shame enough to spread around. I'm about as peripheral to the Hollywood scene as anyone can possibly be, but I clearly remember having conversations about Weinstein's "rapey" vibe in the early 2000s. It's simply not credible that someone in business with him could not have at least heard about his piggish proclivities.
But being a pig isn't the same thing as being a criminal. When crimes are committed behind closed doors with only the perpetrator and victim present, it's easy for all of us to pretend that whatever happened was some sort of misunderstanding. It's easy to normalize the casting couch, to compartmentalize the movie business as a sleazy trade where everyone prostitutes themselves, where sex is always transactional and would-be stars throw themselves at powerful producers.
The sex was consensual, a proffered quid pro quo. Or it never happened, and the disappointed party is defaming an innocent man. Weinstein is the real victim, a sacrifice on the altar of #MeToo. If you're defending Weinstein, that's what you've got to say.
Which is why I wouldn't want to be Juda Engelmayer.
Not even for $30,000 a month.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].