She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement

From this 2019 book by two New York Times reporters: During Bob [Weinstein]’s divorce from his first wife in the early ’90s, he began to drink himself to sleep every night, he told Megan. Only with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon had he been able to recover from alcohol addiction, and now he saw almost all human behavior through the insights he had gained while fighting substance abuse. He believed the bedrock 12-step principles: No one can change anyone else. People have to want to change.
Bob convinced himself that his brother’s problem was sex addiction, and that no one could stop Harvey Weinstein other than Harvey Weinstein. It was a convenient, and arguably disastrous, moral choice, by which Bob justified his failure to do more. He stayed in business with his brother but excused himself from intervening in his brother’s actions. He refused to take responsibility or even help employees who came to him upset about his brother’s belittling language or lacerating tactics.
“People would come into my office and say, ‘Your brother’s screaming and yelling at me,’” he said. “I said, ‘Quit. You’re talented.’”
That was what passed for his management credo. “Send a note to HR,” he would sometimes say to his employees, even though the human resources operation at the company was weak and offered little recourse. “Write a letter.”
But in the weeks after the public accusation from Gutierrez, Bob finally felt compelled to act. The deal to sell the television division was now dead, a major business blow. He feared that without intervention, his brother could do something else even more destructive to the company. Thanks to an accident of timing, he thought he had just the right opening: The contracts for the Weinstein brothers and other top executives were expiring at the end of 2015. Bob would seize the chance to ensure his brother underwent in-depth professional treatment for his sexual behavior.