Zelda Perkins's Assistant Role and Breaking of Her Confidentiality Agreement with Weinstein

Zelda Perkins’s relationship with Harvey Weinstein was shaped first by her work as his assistant at Miramax and then by a settlement that restricted her ability to speak about events connected to her departure. The agreement did more than settle a dispute: it limited whom Perkins could tell, what records she could keep, and how she might respond if the matter became public. Years later, she shared fragments of its terms with Jodi Kantor and took part in public discussions about confidentiality. Her trajectory shows the relationship changing from an employment tie enforced through secrecy into one in which Perkins contested that secrecy through testimony and disclosure.

Assistant at Miramax

Perkins had worked as an assistant at Miramax, where Harvey Weinstein was her employer. The book’s account connects her departure to an incident in Venice and to a settlement involving Weinstein. For years, that arrangement shaped what she could say about her time at the company. She and Rowena Chiu had matching agreements, and the restrictions were severe enough to imply that the two women could not discuss the matter with one another again.

The agreement also governed Perkins’s dealings with people beyond Weinstein and Miramax. When she later showed its surviving pages to Kantor in London, she read provisions stating that she could not speak to anyone about her time at Miramax. A medical professional she consulted about what had happened would have to sign a confidentiality agreement; she could not be truthful with her accountant about the money she had received. The document also required her to account for people she had already told. Perkins had resisted naming them, so the agreement instead recorded them anonymously: three employees and her boyfriend knew she had left for moral reasons, while her two closest friends knew the precise nature of what had happened.

A settlement designed to contain information

The surviving pages showed that the settlement sought to control not only disclosure but also the possibility of future disclosure. Perkins was barred from speaking to any other media, including media that might come into existence later. If the agreement’s terms became public, she was required to provide reasonable assistance with steps intended to prevent further disclosure or mitigate its effects. In practice, the restriction reached beyond keeping her own account private: it required her cooperation in containing information if it escaped the agreement’s boundaries.

The limits extended to Perkins’s access to the agreement itself. She was not allowed to keep a complete copy. If she needed to consult it, she had limited permission to view a copy at her lawyer’s office. The papers she eventually brought to lunch with Kantor were incomplete excerpts assembled after Perkins asked her lawyer how she could comply with terms she could not consult. They were tangible evidence of an arrangement that had governed her life while withholding from her the ordinary ability to refer back to its full text.

Perkins’s settlement belonged to a broader system of confidential sexual-harassment agreements, though the book distinguishes its specific documents from other cases it examines. Such settlements could offer women money, privacy, and a way to move on, especially when federal protections excluded some workers, filing deadlines could be short, and damages were capped. But confidentiality also removed information from public view. The book’s investigation describes agreements that required women to surrender evidence and barred them or their lawyers from helping others with similar claims. In that system, a settlement could resolve an individual dispute while making it harder for future employees, regulators, or the public to recognize repeated allegations. Perkins’s agreement gives that structural problem a personal and documentary form.

From restricted speech to testimony

When Kantor met Perkins in London, the reporters had heard about Weinstein settlements but had not yet seen the paperwork. Perkins hesitated before taking battered sheets bearing the old Miramax logo from her bag, then read the restrictions aloud. The papers were fragments, not a complete agreement, but their clauses made the terms concrete. The encounter turned an account of confidentiality into material that could be examined and reported, and connected Perkins’s experience to the investigation into Weinstein and the use of settlements to suppress disclosure.

Perkins later spoke publicly about confidentiality agreements, including in testimony to members of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster. She described that experience as a change in her sense of authority: the institution and its politicians seemed accessible to her as a citizen, rather than remote from her. The book records her as breaking the nondisclosure agreement and continuing to speak about its effects. It also describes a personal change in her relationship to her own past: after speaking, she said she had been able to grow into the person she had been becoming when she left Miramax at twenty-four. The evidence supports a movement from a contract that narrowed her speech toward a public voice that could address the restrictions themselves.

A relationship reframed in company

At a later gathering hosted at Gwyneth Paltrow’s home, Perkins sat with women whose experiences and resources differed sharply. Kim Lawson, a McDonald’s worker who had been homeless six months earlier and was then earning ten dollars an hour, lived more than four thousand miles from Perkins, a producer two decades older. Yet the two women’s accounts of activism echoed one another. Lawson had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, spoken to the press, and marched in a September strike while pushing her daughter in a stroller. Perkins had taken her experience of confidentiality into a political setting. Their paths were not interchangeable, but the gathering made visible how people in very different circumstances could challenge the silence around harassment.

The meeting also clarified what Perkins’s disclosure meant in relation to others. Rowena Chiu, who had signed a matching agreement, said she was the only person at the table who had not yet gone public with her story; her family, apart from her husband, still knew nothing. She described the particular pressure she felt as an Asian woman in a culture that expected people not to make a fuss, and said that hearing the others helped her consider speaking. Perkins’s own earlier breach of silence thus became part of a setting in which another woman could weigh the same decision without being required to follow it.

The book presents Perkins’s relationship with Weinstein not as a tie that ended when she left Miramax, but as one whose terms continued through the settlement and its attempted control over memory, records, and speech. Her later testimony and disclosure did not erase the agreement’s effects; they exposed how far those effects reached. By bringing incomplete pages into view and speaking alongside women with different forms of public authority, Perkins helped turn a private restriction into evidence of a larger pattern.