Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu's Colleague and Mutual Support Relationship

Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu’s relationship joined ordinary workplace mentorship to an extraordinary act of mutual protection. At Miramax, Perkins was the more senior employee and Chiu was her newly hired assistant, an aspiring producer. When Chiu confided that Harvey Weinstein had done something disturbing to her in Venice, Perkins responded by confronting him and then resigning alongside her. Their bond shaped the immediate response, the terms they sought in settlement, and the long aftermath of being bound to silence by matching agreements.

Colleagues in the Miramax workplace

Perkins hired Chiu in 1998. Chiu had an unusually ambitious creative background: as president of the Oxford University Drama Society, she had staged a Brecht play in the round and Euripides in the original Greek. Perkins warned her to be careful around Weinstein, a caution that reflected the hazards she had already encountered in the workplace. Other colleagues had advised Perkins to choose armchairs rather than sofas in Weinstein’s presence and to wear a winter parka, even when warm, as practical forms of protection. In this environment, Perkins’s warning was not an abstract piece of advice; it was part of how women tried to manage everyday professional contact with a powerful employer.

That September, Perkins and Chiu traveled to Italy for the Venice Film Festival. Their itinerary followed the company’s established festival routine: screenings, a stay in a top hotel, and meetings with colleagues from New York, including entertainment executive Amy Israel. Before one such meeting, Chiu sought Perkins’s help and described what Weinstein had done the preceding night. Perkins became tearful, called the conduct unconscionable, and went in pursuit of him. She later maintained that the details of Chiu’s account belonged to Chiu alone, whether Chiu chose to describe them or keep them private. The distinction mattered: Perkins could stand beside her colleague without claiming ownership of her story.

Israel later recalled seeing both assistants trembling during a meeting in Weinstein’s hotel suite. Weinstein carried on discussing films and did not acknowledge that anything had happened. Her recollection offered an outside view of the aftermath, while Perkins’s account established how the two women themselves responded. The contrast between the women’s visible distress and Weinstein’s ordinary business manner exposed the gap between what colleagues could witness and what the company’s routine allowed to be openly addressed.

A shared departure and an attempted remedy

At twenty-four, Perkins was older than Chiu and had worked at Miramax longer. She understood the imbalance Chiu faced: without support, Chiu’s account would stand against Weinstein’s. Perkins therefore treated her own position as a form of protection and joined Chiu in resigning. Their decision made the relationship more than one of supervisor and assistant; Perkins accepted professional consequences in order to keep Chiu from facing the dispute alone.

The two women consulted a London law firm and initially expected criminal proceedings. Their lawyers pointed to the lack of physical evidence and the fact that they had not contacted police in Venice. They also faced the combined weight of Weinstein and Miramax’s owner, Disney. The legal advice was to seek a settlement, perhaps about one year’s salary, estimated at 20,000 pounds. Perkins and Chiu did not want the money for themselves and proposed that it go to charity, hoping that this would create a public signal. They were told that Weinstein’s lawyers were unlikely to negotiate without a financial request.

Perkins responded by naming a higher figure and trying to make the agreement address future conduct, not only compensation. She proposed that Weinstein attend therapy, that she attend his first session, and that Miramax establish a sexual-harassment policy with training and a three-person complaint-review group that included a lawyer. She also sought a provision requiring that a similar allegation within two years be reported to Disney or lead to Weinstein’s dismissal if the settlement reached a specified threshold: at least 35,000 pounds or six months’ salary. These proposals show how Perkins attempted to turn a private negotiation into a mechanism for oversight, even though the process was controlled by the employer’s and Weinstein’s legal representatives.

Negotiations were prolonged and adversarial. Weinstein was represented by Allen & Overy, while Miramax attorney Steve Hutensky traveled from New York to London to participate. One session continued until five in the morning. The final result was 125,000 pounds for each woman, accompanied by extensive restrictions. The agreements did not deliver the public accountability Perkins and Chiu had hoped to secure. Instead, the financial settlement was paired with provisions that sharply constrained what they could say.

Confidentiality and its consequences

The matching agreements shaped both women’s ability to discuss what had happened. Perkins’s surviving paperwork included restrictions on talking about her time at Miramax, on speaking to media, and on consulting professionals without confidentiality protections. She had to account for people she had already told, though she resisted having to identify them by name. The terms also required her to assist in preventing or limiting further disclosure if information came out. Even holding the agreement was restricted: Perkins was not allowed to keep a complete copy, and could consult one only at her lawyer’s office. The pages she later brought to lunch were incomplete excerpts assembled from the original documents.

The agreements’ effects extended beyond the initial settlement. Perkins and Chiu had assented to confidentiality language that appeared to prevent them from discussing the matter even with one another. The agreements were dated October 23, 1998, only weeks after the events in Venice. Chiu sent Perkins a Filofax planner as a thank-you gift and then disappeared from her view. Perkins felt broken and disillusioned; when seeking new work, she could not explain why she had abruptly left a leading company. She concluded that her film career was over, went to Guatemala to train horses, and eventually gave up trying to arrange the therapy for Weinstein that she had negotiated for. The shared departure had protected Chiu in the immediate crisis, but the settlement left each woman carrying lasting professional and personal costs.

Different paths back to public speech

Nearly two decades later, Perkins’s and Chiu’s paths diverged again. Perkins showed excerpts of the settlement documents to Jodi Kantor in London, making the restrictions visible to reporters who had previously known of settlements but had not seen the paperwork. She later testified about confidentiality agreements to members of Parliament. Her account of entering the Palace of Westminster emphasized a reversal in her sense of power: she understood the institution as a place where her own voice and participation mattered. Speaking about the agreement transformed a document designed to limit disclosure into evidence about how secrecy operated.

Chiu, meanwhile, had not yet gone public with her story when she attended a gathering of women who had spoken about harassment or assault. She told the group that, apart from her husband, her family still knew nothing, and that she had little practice recounting what had happened. She also identified the scarcity of Asian women’s voices in public accounts of this kind and connected that absence to a model-minority expectation of keeping one’s head down and not making waves. Sharing the table did not erase the difference between Perkins’s established public advocacy and Chiu’s continuing uncertainty; it gave Chiu space to consider the consequences of speaking.

The gathering also placed their history beside other forms of workplace activism. Perkins, wearing a sweater embroidered with David Bowie’s name, spoke in succession with Kim Lawson, a twenty-six-year-old McDonald’s worker who lived more than four thousand miles away. Lawson had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and described a September strike in which she marched with her daughter in a stroller, delivered a speech, and received support from men who deliberately walked behind the women. Their circumstances and resources differed sharply, as did the class and professional worlds represented around the table. Yet both women had gained authority through contesting harassment, and their accounts echoed as examples of public action after workplace mistreatment. Perkins said that speaking had allowed her to become the person she had been growing into at twenty-four, the age at which she left Miramax. In that later setting, her old act of shielding Chiu had become part of a wider account of how women could support one another while deciding when, and in what form, to speak.