Venice, Italy

Venice, Italy, was the setting of a pivotal 1998 episode in the accounts of Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu, two Miramax assistants who later resigned after Chiu told Perkins of Harvey Weinstein’s conduct toward her. The Venice Film Festival brought them into the working environment where Weinstein’s professional routine and private access to junior employees overlapped. Years afterward, the women’s accounts—and what a colleague saw in the aftermath—would become part of a larger investigation whose reporting was limited by confidentiality and the difficulty of putting allegations on the record.

Festival Work and Setting

In September 1998, Perkins and Chiu traveled to Venice for the festival as part of a familiar Miramax routine: screenings, a stay in a top hotel, and meetings with colleagues from New York. The work included scouting films for the company to buy. Amy Israel, an entertainment executive who had worked at Miramax, was among those colleagues. The trip’s professional purpose matters to the account: Chiu was not there as a visitor separated from Weinstein’s business, but as a young assistant whose duties placed her in contact with the producer while the company pursued films and conducted festival meetings.

Chiu later told Jodi Kantor that she was expected to look after Weinstein in the evenings, leaving her alone with him in a hotel room for long stretches. She said he made advances from the beginning of the trip. On the second or third night, they were meant to review a stack of scripts. Weinstein praised her insight and business sense as they worked, then shifted the encounter toward sexual requests. The same hotel setting that accommodated film business thus also enabled the private, unequal encounters at the center of her account.

What Amy Israel Saw

During a meeting in Weinstein’s hotel suite, Israel noticed that something appeared to be wrong with Perkins and Chiu. The two assistants were trembling, she recalled; Weinstein, by contrast, seemed composed and spoke about films as usual. Israel inferred that something had happened to the women and that Weinstein was refusing to acknowledge it. Her observation did not supply the details of Chiu’s experience, but it recorded a visible aftermath in the room and a sharp contrast between the assistants’ distress and Weinstein’s ordinary business manner.

Israel had reason to recognize the danger of Weinstein’s conduct from her own experience, though it occurred elsewhere. She told Kantor that Weinstein had praised and trusted her with significant responsibility when she was young, and had also harassed her. At the Toronto Film Festival, after she arrived at his hotel to collect him for a gala screening, an assistant sent her up to Weinstein’s room. She expected the assistant to be there; instead, she found Weinstein nearly naked in a small towel, asking her for a massage. Israel said she pretended to call her mother to get out of the situation. That account gave context to her recognition in Venice without making her a witness to what had happened to Chiu in the hotel room.

Chiu’s Account and Perkins’s Response

Chiu described wearing two pairs of tights as protection while she and Weinstein went through the scripts. As his requests escalated from massages to a bath, she said, she tried to appease him by removing one pair of tights and allowing him to massage her. When his hands moved further, she tried to return their attention to the scripts and mentioned that she had a boyfriend. Weinstein responded, according to Chiu, by promising career help for him as well. She later explained that she did not directly refuse because she did not want to provoke a confrontation with a man much larger than her, particularly while he remained pleasant. The account presents the pressure as unfolding within a work interaction, where praise, professional opportunity, and sexual demands became entangled.

Before Israel’s meeting, Chiu had confided in Perkins. Perkins became tearful, called Weinstein’s behavior unconscionable, and went looking for him. She later recounted confronting him at a business lunch on a hotel terrace and ordering him to follow her into the hallway. Weinstein swore on his wife’s and children’s lives that he had done nothing wrong. Perkins was twenty-four and had worked for him longer than Chiu; she said she understood that her assistant could not easily take him on alone. The two women joined forces and resigned. Perkins described her role as protecting Chiu, a response that turned their workplace relationship into practical support during a moment when Chiu’s account would otherwise have stood against Weinstein’s denial.

From Festival Episode to Public Record

The Venice episode later entered the investigative record in fragments. A chronology of allegations and settlements identified 1998 as the year of the Perkins and Chiu episode and Venice as its location, while also noting a settlement. When Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were preparing their reporting, Perkins remained bound by a confidentiality agreement and Chiu had not yet spoken publicly. Their story therefore compressed the women’s saga into four short paragraphs: enough to establish serious allegations and a settlement, but not to identify the women through a fuller account of what they said had happened.

The limits on publication were part of the location’s later significance. Israel’s recollection preserved what an observer saw in the suite; Chiu’s later account supplied details of the hotel-room encounters; Perkins described the confrontation and the decision to leave together. These perspectives did not erase Harvey Weinstein’s denial, which rejected the story, but they made Venice more than a festival backdrop. It became the place where professional travel, private access, an employee’s report to a colleague, and the beginnings of a shared response converged—and whose story the terms of a settlement initially kept largely out of view.