Miramax

Miramax was the first film company co-owned and run by Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein. In the book, it is more than a production business: it is the workplace in which careers were made, complaints circulated privately, and agreements could constrain what former employees said about their experiences. The company’s story connects the brothers’ division of labor and the organization’s cultural standing to a pattern of internal silence that later became central to the investigation by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.

Formation and division of work

The Weinstein brothers built Miramax around complementary roles. Harvey Weinstein took charge of prestige movies, while Bob Weinstein concentrated on financial modeling and developed a profitable business in horror films and other mass-market franchises. Their working relationship was intense as well as familial: in the company’s early years, they could spend evenings on the telephone together, talking from late at night into the early morning. Bob later described the bond as exceptionally close, even as colleagues also found him difficult and volatile.

The book places the company’s rise within the brothers’ different strengths and ambitions. Harvey was portrayed as a reader of culture and a forceful pursuer of talent; Bob brought a stronger focus on numbers and commercial planning. That division could support a broad business, but it also tied the company closely to the brothers’ personal partnership. When they later disagreed over spending and the direction of The Weinstein Company, the contrast between Bob’s greater financial discipline and Harvey’s appetite for acquiring and greenlighting films became a recurring source of conflict.

In 2005, the brothers relinquished control of Miramax. Harvey went on to lead The Weinstein Company, his later venture with Bob. The distinction matters in the book: Miramax was the setting for earlier complaints and settlements, while subsequent reporting also examined conduct and company responses at The Weinstein Company. At the time of the London settlement involving Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu, Miramax was owned by Disney, a fact that shaped the women’s understanding of the institutional power they faced.

A workplace remembered in opposing terms

Former employees remembered Miramax as a place of sharp contradictions. Working there could mean participating in influential filmmaking, negotiating business, and learning the industry; it could also mean enduring the boss’s verbal attacks and feeling that one’s dignity was at risk. For some, the combination of privilege, education, excitement, and trauma bound former colleagues together long after they had left. Informal reunions in New York City and Los Angeles acquired the joking name “Mir-anon,” suggesting a shared effort to recover from an experience that had been both valuable and damaging.

The company’s reach also made it possible for information to travel through a dispersed former workforce. Harvey Weinstein had produced or distributed hundreds of films over several decades, and former employees remained connected through the work they had shared. When Kantor and Twohey began asking whether women had settled claims involving him, they followed those connections from one former Miramax employee to another. Many of the people believed to know the most did not respond or were unwilling to discuss their own possible involvement. The reporting therefore depended not on a single accessible archive but on people willing to pass along leads, confirm fragments, or explain what had been understood inside the company.

Complaints and the Perkins–Chiu settlement

The reporting reconstructed an early complaint through the recollections of Irwin Reiter, who joined Miramax on July 15, 1989, as an accountant. The following year, he noticed that an assistant in the small New York City office had left abruptly. He was told that Weinstein had behaved inappropriately toward her and that a settlement had followed. The matter was presented to Reiter as finished, and he did not investigate further. Years later, when Megan Twohey traced the former assistant, former executive John Schmidt confirmed on background that a settlement had been paid after a troubling episode. The woman herself rejected contact and did not authorize reporters to identify her or have others speak for her, so the article referred to her without naming her.

A separate dispute arose in the London office almost a decade later. Perkins and Chiu, then both in their twenties, consulted a lawyer after an incident in Venice. They expected criminal proceedings, but their lawyers advised that they lacked physical evidence and had not contacted police there; the lawyers said settlement was the usual course. The women initially objected to receiving money and wanted any payment donated to charity, hoping that this would make the matter public. They were told that Weinstein’s lawyers were unlikely to negotiate without a financial demand.

Perkins then proposed terms meant to change company practice, not merely resolve the individual dispute. She sought therapy for Weinstein, a sexual-harassment policy and training at Miramax, and a three-person group to assess complaints, including a lawyer. She also proposed that a further allegation within two years, if it led to a settlement above a specified threshold, be reported to Disney or result in Weinstein’s dismissal. Weinstein’s lawyers resisted. After a negotiating session that continued until five in the morning, Perkins and Chiu each received £125,000, but accepted extensive restrictions.

The agreement reached beyond a promise not to speak publicly. Perkins could not discuss her time at Miramax; even a medical professional she consulted would have to sign a confidentiality agreement. She could not be candid with her accountant about the payment, and the agreement recorded, in anonymized form, whom she had already told about the events. It barred her from speaking to existing or future media and required her to assist in preventing or limiting further disclosure. She was not permitted to keep a complete copy of the agreement, only to consult one at her lawyer’s office; the papers she later showed Jodi Kantor were fragments. Chiu had a matching agreement, and the restrictions left the two women unable to discuss the matter with each other.

Reporting, records, and institutional silence

The difficulty of documenting the settlements became a central problem for the journalists. Kantor knew that Rose McGowan said she had received a settlement, but finding a record would be hard. A payment and signed agreement could support the account without, by themselves, proving what had happened. The Perkins documents were consequently important not only for their terms but because they gave the reporters a chance to examine a settlement paper directly. Before that meeting, they knew of settlements and suspected others existed, but had not seen Weinstein settlement documents.

Miramax’s former employees supplied a route into this history, but the organization’s confidential agreements restricted what witnesses could say and what records they could retain. By the time the first story was being prepared, Perkins remained bound by her agreement and Chiu had not spoken publicly. The account of their experience was therefore limited to a few paragraphs that conveyed the existence of serious allegations and a settlement while protecting the women’s identities. The reporting also treated the former assistant’s refusal to be identified as decisive: although several former employees could confirm that she had left abruptly and received a settlement, the journalists did not name her without permission.

The book sets these company-specific restrictions within a broader settlement system. The journalists found that confidentiality provisions were common in harassment settlements, while federal protections excluded some categories of workers, imposed short filing periods, and capped damages. Such agreements could offer women money, privacy, or a way to move on; at the same time, they could deprive later employees, regulators, and the public of information about repeated complaints. In Miramax’s history, that tension is concrete: proposals for policy changes and future reporting were raised in negotiation, but the resulting agreement chiefly imposed duties of silence on the two women.

Significance in the book

Miramax’s importance lies in the contrast between its public cultural influence and the private mechanisms described by former employees. The same company could be remembered as an extraordinary education and as a workplace associated with fear, humiliation, and undisclosed settlements. The informal “Mir-anon” reunions register how that contradiction endured among former colleagues, while the reporters’ search through the old employee network shows how much of the story had to be recovered from dispersed memories rather than accessible records.

The company’s history also clarifies the limits of internal remedies. Perkins attempted to make the settlement address future conduct through therapy, training, a complaints group, and consequences for further allegations. Instead, the final agreement restricted speech and access to its own terms. Miramax thus enters the investigation not simply as the setting of past events, but as an example of how a powerful workplace could contain complaints within private negotiations, leaving later reporters to piece together the record from reluctant witnesses, partial documents, and the few people willing to speak.