London

London is a recurring setting in the account of Miramax and The Weinstein Company: a base for assistants and film professionals, a place where workplace complaints met few formal safeguards, and, years later, the location of a consequential interview between Jodi Kantor and Zelda Perkins. The city’s significance lies less in a single episode than in the way its offices and professional networks connect a 1990s account of alleged harassment to later reporting and renewed public attention.

A base for film work

Perkins began working for Harvey Weinstein in 1995, when she was twenty-two. She had found the job through a chance encounter and did not initially understand how unusual the position was. Based in a tiny London office, she worked in an environment where, she said, Weinstein’s conduct began almost immediately. There was no human-resources operation and no established policy or procedure to which she could turn. The office’s small scale therefore mattered: the person alleged to be behaving improperly was also the powerful figure at the center of the business, while the ordinary institutional route for raising a complaint was absent.

The job combined professional access with conditions Perkins described as difficult to navigate. A female colleague advised her to use armchairs rather than sofas in Weinstein’s presence and to wear a winter parka as a form of protection. Perkins said she refused his advances. At the same time, work brought her on trips to Paris and Rome, where Weinstein sometimes gave employees cash or offered them the use of a company jet and hotel suite. Perkins recalled the gifts as carrying a mixture of relief and guilt. The combination of risk and privilege is important to London’s role in the story: employment in a prestigious film operation could provide unusual opportunities while leaving junior staff exposed to the behavior of its most powerful executive.

London was not isolated from the company’s wider structure. In 2012, Michelle Franklin worked in the London office as an assistant. She told Jodi Kantor that she had been expected to arrange hotel-room encounters for people described within the company as “Friends of Harvey.” She also described other tasks connected to Weinstein’s hotel stays. When she objected while accompanying a young woman to his hotel room, she said Weinstein dismissed her objection; she was fired soon afterward. Weinstein denied the accounts. Franklin’s experience presents the office not only as a place where individual allegations arose, but as a workplace in which assistants could be assigned tasks they considered outside their responsibilities and risked their jobs by resisting.

Complaints, silence, and return

The London office also figured in the company’s handling of Perkins’s and Rowena Chiu’s complaints about events in Venice in 1998. Their allegations led to a settlement, and Chiu was legally restricted from discussing what had happened. The limitations were not confined to what she could say: they shaped her employment choices afterward. When she tried to interview for other film jobs in London, she found it difficult to explain her circumstances. Miramax had supplied a reference letter, and she asked the company lawyer for leads elsewhere. Instead, she received the message that Weinstein valued her and wanted her back.

Chiu returned to Miramax in the summer of 1999, taking a job based in Hong Kong scouting Asian films for potential Hollywood adaptations. She did not resume ordinary direct contact with Weinstein: she recalled only one conference call, supervised by the company lawyer. The return illustrates how a settlement and the inability to explain a departure could narrow a worker’s options without ending her connection to the company. London is the setting for the job search, but the resulting position moved Chiu’s work elsewhere; the company’s reach made the city one point in a larger professional network rather than the whole of her career.

Irwin Reiter’s recollections further link the London office to decisions made across the company. He had joined Miramax in 1989 and later heard that Perkins had a problem in the London office and that a company lawyer had been sent to England to deal with it. He did not investigate further. His account shows how knowledge of a complaint could circulate among colleagues while remaining bounded: a senior intervention was known to him, but the details and consequences were not pursued. London thus appears within a pattern in which information traveled through the organization without necessarily producing scrutiny or accountability.

The city as a reporting encounter

On a Wednesday, August 2, Jodi Kantor met Perkins at a restaurant table in South Kensington. Kantor had contacted her after years in which journalists had approached her about the Weinstein rumors. Perkins said the previous journalists had all been men; this meeting was the most she had disclosed to any of them. She was still legally prohibited from speaking freely about the matter. The setting therefore marks a shift in access, not the removal of the constraints: in London, Perkins began to tell a fuller account while the settlement’s restrictions still shaped what she could say publicly.

Perkins was an experienced theater professional who worked on prestigious plays and sometimes television, including The Crown. She also divided her time between London and a countryside cottage, returning to the city frequently for work. That established career contrasts with the limited circle of people who knew the full story of her earlier employment. In the interview, the city’s present-day professional life and her past at Miramax met across a restaurant table: a producer with a sustained career was recounting why so little of that history had been available to others.

London consequently serves several connected functions in the narrative. It is the location of a small office without formal complaint structures, the setting of difficult post-settlement job searches, and the place where a reporter gained a fuller account from a source still bound by legal restrictions. The recurrence does not make the city itself a single cause of the events. Rather, London ties together workplace power, constrained mobility, and the slow passage from private knowledge to journalism; what was hard to discuss within the employment system became more legible through later reporting, even as the limits on speech remained part of the story.