1998 Miramax settlement agreement

The 1998 Miramax settlement agreement was the written instrument through which Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu’s attempt to obtain accountability and institutional safeguards became a confidential financial settlement. Each woman received £125,000, but the agreements imposed extensive restrictions on speech and access to their own records. When Zelda Perkins later showed fragments of the paperwork to Jodi Kantor, the documents made tangible how a settlement could compensate individuals while also keeping information about alleged misconduct from colleagues, journalists, and the public.

From proposed safeguards to settlement

After the events in Venice, Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu found a London lawyer at Simons Muirhead & Burton. They had expected criminal proceedings, but their lawyers told them they lacked physical evidence, had not contacted police in Venice, and were confronting Harvey Weinstein and potentially Disney, which then owned Miramax. The lawyers presented a settlement as the customary route, initially suggesting roughly a year’s salary, or about £20,000.

The women objected to receiving money for themselves and wanted any payment donated to charity, hoping the gesture would create a public signal. They were told that Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers were unlikely to negotiate without a financial demand. Zelda Perkins then named a higher figure and tried to use the negotiations to secure measures directed at preventing a recurrence. She sought therapy for Harvey Weinstein, with permission for her to attend his first session; a Miramax sexual-harassment policy, training, and a three-person complaint-review group that included a lawyer; and a rule that a further similar allegation within two years, if settled for at least £35,000 or six months’ salary, would be reported to Disney or result in Harvey Weinstein’s dismissal.

The response involved lawyers for both sides. Allen & Overy represented Harvey Weinstein, and Miramax attorney Steve Hutensky came to London from the New York office. Hutensky later said he knew of no other sexual-assault claim against Harvey Weinstein, that the producer had told him the encounter was consensual, and that the settlement was intended to protect Harvey Weinstein’s marriage. One negotiating session lasted until five in the morning. The final reported payment was £125,000 to each woman, alongside what the account describes as extraordinary restrictions. The evidence does not establish that the requested therapy, policy, training, review group, or reporting and dismissal conditions became operative terms.

Restrictions on speech and disclosure

The surviving papers show that the agreement’s controls extended into ordinary private and professional life. Zelda Perkins was barred from speaking to anyone about her time working at Miramax. Even a medical professional she consulted about what had happened would have to sign a confidentiality agreement. She could not be truthful with her own accountant about the money she received.

The paperwork also required her to account for people she had already told about the Venice events. She resisted identifying them by name; instead, the agreement recorded an anonymous inventory of disclosures. It noted that she had told three employees and her boyfriend she had left Miramax because of an act and for moral reasons, and had told her two closest friends the precise nature of what happened. The inventory therefore turned even the history of speaking to confidants into part of the settlement’s documented restrictions.

The prohibition extended to any media, whether then existing or established later. The agreement also contemplated what should happen if disclosure occurred: Zelda Perkins would have to provide reasonable assistance in taking prudent steps to prevent further disclosure or mitigate its effects. The obligation was not limited to keeping quiet; it required cooperation in containing information if it escaped the agreement’s boundaries.

Access to the document and the cost of compliance

Although the agreement governed a major part of Zelda Perkins’s life, she was not allowed to retain a complete copy. She had only limited rights to view the paperwork at her lawyer’s office. When she asked how she could comply with an agreement she could not consult, her lawyer supplied excerpts. The pages later brought to lunch with Jodi Kantor were incomplete, assembled from fragments rather than a full document.

The restrictions also constrained the two women’s ability to speak with each other. After intense pressure from Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers, Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu accepted matching confidentiality provisions that implied they could never discuss the matter again. Rowena Chiu gave Zelda Perkins a Filofax planner as a thank-you gift and then disappeared from her view. The documents were dated October 23, 1998, only weeks after the events in Venice had been turned into a settlement.

For Zelda Perkins, the consequences continued beyond the signing. She felt broken and disillusioned, and found it uncomfortable to explain to prospective employers why she had abruptly left a leading company. She concluded that her film career was over and went to Guatemala to train horses. Although she had fought for the right to attend therapy with Harvey Weinstein and had selected a therapist for him, she struggled to make the sessions happen and eventually gave up. The agreement’s proposed remedial purpose and its practical limits thus existed alongside a professional rupture that the confidentiality terms made harder to explain.

Documentary evidence and wider significance

Years later, the fragments helped Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey move from knowing that Harvey Weinstein settlements existed to examining the terms of one. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey knew about Rose McGowan’s settlement and suspected that another had been made with a former assistant, but they had not previously seen Weinstein settlement papers. Zelda Perkins hesitated before taking the battered pages, bearing the old Miramax logo, from her bag and reading from them. The distinction mattered to the investigation: a report of a settlement was not the same as documentary access to the clauses that governed it.

The agreement belongs to a broader pattern described in the reporting. Sexual-harassment settlements could give women urgently needed money, privacy, or a way to move on, particularly when lawsuits were costly, legal protections incomplete, and time limits short. At the same time, confidentiality could prevent women from discussing their experiences, restrict cooperation with others, and keep information about an employer’s record from prospective workers and the public. The separate agreements described in reporting on Bill O’Reilly and Fox News included other restrictive terms and large payments; those provisions should not be confused with the specific clauses in the Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu agreements. Together, however, the cases show how private settlements could make recurring allegations difficult to recognize beyond the people who signed them.

The document’s importance is therefore both personal and evidentiary. It captures Zelda Perkins’s unsuccessful effort to attach preventive conditions to a negotiated settlement, the breadth of the secrecy provisions she and Rowena Chiu accepted, and the limits placed on their access to the very terms they were required to obey. Its later appearance in fragments gave investigators a concrete record of how confidentiality could shape not only what was said, but who could know enough to see a pattern.