store and google play. downloaded for free today. c-span now your front row seat to washington in time, and where. alco c-span is your unfiltered view of government. companies and more including cup's homework can be hard. but squatting in a diner for internetwork is even harder. that is why we are providing lower income students access to affordable internet. so homework and just be homework. cox connects to compete. >> talks on things other television providers seek to democracy. it is a real treat to be hosting that meeting world for the for many years. his top media critic. he started in journalism nearly

50 years ago first as a correspondent for the "new york post" and a staff writer a weekly columnist for the village voice in a contributing editor. for a decade and a half from late to early 90s, he wrote a weekly political column for the new york daily news. also during that period started writing for the new yorker. and in 1992 he began doing annals of communication profile or the magazine. over the years ken has profiled many of the leading figures of the information age. he is on for many important developments in the a media business.ts he has also authored a dozen previous books ranging in subjects network television, to the ad business, for microsoft oto google. five of those works reach the national bestseller list.

in a hollywood ending, can chronicles harvey wall seems volatile and tragic career, his life to becoming one of the biggest powerbrokers for the pioneering producer distributor great movies with highly publicized default to school some women came forward with their stories of sexual abuse by wednesday watershed truck two years ago weinstein was convicted of a great rape in new york an' sentenced to 23 years in prison. he's awaiting awaiting trial on further charges in california. can profiled pointing in the number 20 years ago to train him then as bullying, even violent at times toward employees and collaborators. he was unable at that time to confirm the darker rumors of weinstein's behavior as a sexual

predator. that truth finally emerged in 2017 stories by jodi kantor, and megan and the "new york times". now, we sought to disperse a comprehensive biography and revealing detailed and. insightful context. he examines the abrasionn impulses to dominate that worked weinstein actions which forced of science entrance and checked forei so long. he glinted coming from weinstein's also a larger story about hollywood and about power. so i think we are very interesting discussion this evening. please join me in welcoming ken. [applause]

's thank you. i thought i would begin picking up something bradley said. i did not know harvey weinstein very wellin 2000 to 1 pint agreed to profile him for theer new yorker. during that profile. we spent many hours together including about 12 hours of taped interviewsoo some of whici use in the book. and at one point, the people i talked to alled would say who works for him and were in hollywood we know harvey cheats on his wife. very few people said they knew he was a rapist. so that was not out there the way we now assume it was. but woman a producer of an incident placed at the venice film festival in 19 rowena the

other zelda they were his assistants. the story was that harvey attempted to rape rowena and zelda that you prosecute him, to bring into the police police. no one can ever know the sears we tried to threaten him when he signed disclosure. which he did later on. what happened was they threatened him he got nervous. he flew over too london with his business affairs versus steve who was an enabler if you read the nondisclosure agreement is quite obvious what was going on. non-disclosure agreements. i went to the courts in london and the courts in new york, and i said, why can't i find any evidence of criminal trial

evidence or file filings, lawsuit, etc., about this case? and then i learned why. and the answer was that what harvey would do when someone brought a claim against him privately, usually he would say he was to have his lawyer meet them and say, here's x number of dollars in this case, it was almost $500,000 to 50 each. and in return and you have to sign this nondisclosure agreement, the nondisclosure agreement means you can't tell anyone, you can't tell your parents, you can't tell you your husband, you can't tell you a you can't tell your husband or psychiatrist and if you break the nondisclosure agreement you have to give the money back and it's going to be more expensive. so, i had that information but i couldn't get either woman to speak to me and my source i tell in the book was an academy award-winning producer.

she refused to speak unless the women could speak and they wouldn't. i could figure out a way of showing that disney, the corporate parent or the companye paid for the nondisclosure agreement someone is going to jail, i've got my story. i don't need to the woman to talk to me so in a small conference room there ensued one of the most amazing experiences i've had as a journalist. i said tell me about them and he said what do you want to know. i said i want to know did you intend to rape her i was told he actually raped her which was alinaccurate if i published it t woulded have been false. he attempted to but she escaped. he got up from the small conference table, he was on the end where bradley would be and i was here. he came over here and stood

above me and clenched his fist and his lip trembled and he said if you l publish that it will destroy the lives of my three teenage daughters and my marriage. you can't do that. i said i'm not going to sit down and let this guy take a poke at me. i'm going to stand up and face him face to face. as soon as possible did, he started to cry and i don't mean small tears rolling down his cheek. i mean, he was sobbing, out of control sobbing which was extraordinary because he was really afraid that this was going to finally expose him. no one had ever exposed him before but i couldn't expose him because i didn't have any a womn on the record and the new york wasn't the national enquirer. we couldn't publish rumors. so, next but i kept in mind harvey and knew he was a

predator. in 2015 when the italian model, this is the first time it was ever public. it was in the press that harvey abused women, literally he'd been doing it for four decades. at the police while you're her, she had a tape acknowledging he grabbed her breasts but the da thinking she mightse not be a credible witness because there were questions about her, decided not to file charges. she then got a million dollar nondisclosure agreement and changed her testimony basically exonerating but she did something really clever. before i got towi the reportersi said i believe this is accurate. i believe she was telling me the truth the first time, the model.

but i saw in variety that ashley judd claimed that some studio executive asked her for a massage. second person was angelina jolie. the first movie she did he tried to assault her. and the third was a woman, an aspiring actress that wrote a column for the new york observer.d angelina jolie wouldn't talk, ashley judd wouldn't talk. this woman who claimed and described in great detail and e was anonymous she wouldn't gon the record is so i didn't have . story. a switch to 2015, he calls me up and i didn't know ron. all he knew about him is the woody allen stuff.

i had a question in my mind was he a zealot or journalist. was he trying to square things out with someone. he called me up and after talking to me, i asked him for more information where he was at. i was confident that he was really careful, judicious is the word i would later use. but he said cane i have accesso your papers of the new york public library. so i gave him access to them, which is my tapes and my notebooks, et cetera. but for anything off the record, he couldn't use. the women i mentioned. he said can i interview you. iou said i'm finishing a book. he said i have three women on camera who acknowledge that harvey attempted or did rape them. i have five womenra on camera bt

shielded and the names are not disclosed saying the same thingt and i have the audiotape of the italian model. i said great, you broke the case. what's the next step? he said i meet with the president of nbc news on august 8th. great. august 9th, i call rhonda farrow and i said how did you do? he said can i call you on a secure line and to me i think what is that all about. what we later learned as he was being tailed and in some ways being tapped. so he calls me and says nbc has basically n fired him. he didn't ask it as a question but more as a statement. give me a number and let me call you back. i didn't tell him why. i called david, the editor of the new yorker who was a friend and lion in the world of

journalism. and i said david, this kid has finally broken the case. it's unbelievable. he's judicious and careful. he says have him call me on monday morning. i had one initial meeting with ronan farrow but essentially it was all ronan farrow. nbc then claimed that ronan only had the goods after he went to new yorker which is baloney. he had the goods at that time. in any case, two sets of reporters do an amazing job. they got the women comfortable enough to talk. i'm talking about jodi kantor at the times, broke the story in early october and a week later ronan farrow broke the story in the new yorker. and what they did. to talk not with fellow victims, so they would feel comfortable. but getting women who were

really assaulted and afraid to come out and speak against harveyar weinstein is an extraordinary thing. there are people that said [inaudible] into the culture was changing. it did in some ways that we shouldn't minimize what these reporters did. it's extraordinary. anyway, i then say how did i come to write a book. i said what they did, ronan and maggie and jodi, they were looking at harvey from the right side. writing the book from the inside looking out, what he went through and experienced in his whole career. so i said one question i wanted to address is what made harvey the monster that he became. and in reporting, i found some interesting things. i found for instance that in

flushing queens where he grew up, his mother was a veryli volatile personality, nothing like harvey as an adult yelling all the time, yelling so much that his friends who i interviewed, they played poker on the weekends. i also learned. harvey did not to my knowledge.

he started a rock promotion company that was wildly successful. they got a sinatra, the stones, they had all these top performers, the eagles, to come perform at the buffalo stadium and other places. so, he was a really powerful guy and he had a woman work there by the name of hope do more who i interviewed and now lives in san antonio. i think, and i have her picture infi the book, i think that she was the first woman he raped. she was an assistant. but he raped many other women and the more power he got, the more it escalated throughout his life. so that is one thing i wanted to explore is what made harvey who he was named one of the things that made him who he was was

power. his brother wasn't raping women. you can't blame miriam weinstein for that. it's's as simple. i also came to feel harvey was a hasociopath and even that's contextual. how did this guy get away with this for four decades without anyone blowing the whistle. it was reporters who got the benefits of the tips and came to the screening or go to book contracts. it was quite extraordinary his use of power to keep the secret. when people say to me we knew he cheated on his wife but we

didn't know he raped women. let me tell you the story. i interviewed a woman by the name of hilary who was an agent who was going to move back to new york. very attractive young woman. she came up for a job interview at miramax. she gets on the elevator and who was on the elevator about harvey weinstein. he looks her up and down and says what are you doing here. she says i have an interview with human resources. he says, and see me when you're done. so hilary goes to human resources,s has the interview ad the human resources head walks her back to harvey's office. they walked in together and the first thing he says, he points his finger and says you're hired. he didn't consult with the human resources. he hired her and she had to go off on a trip to europe on vacation and she was coming back in threeni or four weeks. the day before she was to start

work, for executives reached out to her and said we would love to take you for drinks. she said with a great place this is, what a great culture. what they said to her over drinks was hillary, you don't want to come to work here. you're an attractive woman. he will assaulted you i promise and she didn't go to work. she basically didn't take the job. so that level of people knew how many others knew or should have known. the agents that send their actresses to hotel suites and young actors came backth and in some cases didn't come back. in some cases it was a career advancement for them but many came back wounded, hurt, abused by this monster. and they tell the agency and what didg. they do, nothing. they issued a statement at one point after he was exposed in

the fall of 2017 saying we should have done more, the top agency. so i was interested in the culture of silence and tried in the book to identify how that happened and who some of the culprits were. i covered the trial every day and one of the things you get a treasureem trove of all these e-mails that are submitted. if you go up to the office at the end of the day and read these e-mails, many of them are incriminating to people that covered up for harvey. it was extraordinary. the third thing i was interested in, power. how did harvey, who had amazing power at one point. he published a magazine and top books. he was making movies is a serious director, actor unlike the studio, he was a magnet in

hollywood and when disney acquired him in 93 they gave him money tono produce movies and nt just to distribute them. he was producing more than any other studio, miramax. so he was really of power. and at one point, when he took a reporter for the observer down in a headlock outside and screamed, and we know he did this because he had his tape recorder going, i'm the effingham sheriff of this town and don't you forget it. he felt that he was this powerful figure. so i was interested in exploring the power, giving money to obama and the clintons and the governor, the republican governor of new york and michael bloomberg, the republican and independent mayor. so he was basically parceling

out roles. the other thing that interested me was the relationship between the brothers and harvey and bob started this business together. they were equal partners. in many ways he was more successful in those horror movies they were partners and worked together you knew the onlyly decision-makers were the two brothers. he was complaining incessantly that harvey was spending like crazy. when he was divorced disney basically chased him out of saying he is too difficult to work with, and he was. he starts the company and got a billion dollars of investment money and he lost all of it.

he is a terrible n businessman d his movies are not as successful as they were in the '90s and early 2,000's. so, he would complain stop prspending money and flying on private planes all the time and stopwn buying gowns. then one day they are in a meeting in 2015 and he sucker punches his brother and breaks his nose and blood is flowing all over. everyone says my god what is going on. this is awful. and on june the second, 2015, several members of the board the phoneharvey on and i have a tape of this that i transcribe and share the transcription in the book.

he starts screaming at the board members i want you to fire my brother. we can't fire your brother. you have to do that. you're the ceo of the company. weem are just board members. you should fire him, he's losing all this money. he wasn't, harvey was losing the money. in any case, i was able to get weinstein to cooperate with me and tell me his story and we vprobably did 20, 25 interview. it was hard to get him to talk and it took a while but eventually, he did and he was candidyo with me. one ofth the things you learn is that after he was exposed in 2017, he couldn't be fired unless the board voted him off but the board was his board. he could be fired if a couple of anti-harvey board members joined with bob who like harvey had

waited. he said i think you are a sex addict and you should go to this place in arizona and get help. he listened to his brother and went there but he didn't seek help. he didn't stayor in the dormitoy with the other patients where rush limbaugh went and some other famous tiger woods went there. he spent all this time hanging out at a diner and from that point on he h stopped talking to his brother and has not talked to him since from 2017 through today. so, he then into the early 18 is in danger of getting indicted. he needs a criminal lawyer and i want to end with this story because i think that this

hencapsulates something fundamental. he w meets with arguably the bet criminal attorney in new york ancity. they meet at the club and he's sitting looking and sees this guy walk in with that huge stomach but he had on a beautiful crisp linen he comes over and sits down and orders a cheeseburger and extra large portion of french fries and i would like a big bowl of ketchup, please. he then orders a little caesar salad. before the caesar salad comes, harvey starts and the oil or the grease from the hamburger starts slipping down but then he reaches, he doesn't use a knife ortc fork, he reaches into the ketchup bowl with a handful of french fries and goes like this and shovels it in his mouth

orrepeatedly. suddenly there are what looked like bloodstains on his white shirt. then a french fry falls down the front of his shirt and harvey starts to reach in to grab it out. he says what are you doing, stop that. stand up and it will fall out, but he couldn't stop because he has impulse control issues. if you gave him a pack of cigarettes he would rip off the top because he doesn't have the patience to open up the top of the box. diet cokes he had them lined up. he ate just shoveling food ins his mouth and talking while he chewed fast and people were woue created to sit across from him. but the harvey that abused women was the same that he was sitting across. he couldn't control himself and he couldn't breathe his temper, his sex drive, he had a severe

diabetes, yet he always insisted that a bowl of peanut covered, chocolatee covered m&ms be in hs hotel suite or his office and he would just, again, with diabetes, eating chocolate. anyway, that's the odyssey of my experience with this guy. the interesting thing for me was to spend so much time reporting on the monster, and yet being able hopefully to step back and describe the movies he made and the talent he had to make the movies without negating the fact that he was a monster. but it was hard. thank you. [applause] your book on ted turner i loved

the article.wa it was one of my favorites. it was great. two great people. this was common knowledge he would be right people in public. they commented on his behavior at the oscars. how did it take so long for people to finally say enough. he was abusive to his assistants. i just don'tu understand. >> well, you know, look at this town today. look at republicans. they know donald trump is lying about winning the election. he didn'tt win. he lost by 7 million votes. they know that but they are afraid to say anything. so fear, they don't want trump to come out against them. they will lose the primary next year. so fear of harvey is similar to the fearr we see. a second reason, conformity. no one wants too be a rat.

o,they don't want to, you know they wanted to conform, keep a low profile, not to get on the bad side of people or think that people will think ill of you because you are a rat and the third reason i think is lack of character. i mean,, thehe people who should have blown the whistle on harvey have a character deficiency in my judgment. those who knew. >> did his brother no? >> his brother said i knew my brother was a sexual -- the phrase he used was he couldn't control his urge but he used another phrase i will think of in a minute. but he said i didn't know he was raping women. the brother actually in the case of the two women i mentioned, the $500,000 i asked i said i

need to see how you pay for itid thinking again that if disney rypaid i would have my story and someone is going to jail. then harvey protested and i said i need to see you tomorrow and he slid acrossss the table to canceled checks and bob said to me you paid and i said yeah because harvey said he was being blackmailed by these women. do i know he knew, he said he didn't know. i don't know what else i can do but ask the uncomfortable question, which is what i did. any other questions? yes, sir. >> i'm about the same age as harvey weinstein. i'm from buffalo. i was in college at the same timeme he was in college at a different school. sbut the fact that this change into a monster with the start of becoming a monster happened in my hometown interests me.

do you know why it was there? partly being away from his home? >> i thinknk it was power. for r the first time he had real power. it was a big concert promotion group. they were having all these acts and they put police to do security at night and a big advertiser in the press for the concerts. so there was a concerted community of people who were very much in his corner. but i think it was power, the power went to his head and he thought he could get away with it. one of the things you find when you talk to, when you cover people who have large egos will be at aic politician or a public figure of some kind harvey

weinstein, they are surrounded by young and very beautiful women whoio are very ambitious. and unlike say the automobile companies, youom don't have attractive, sexy women working side-by-side with the ceo or the people in hollywood and i think one of the things that happened is that a woman would say i loved your movies. they are so good. how do you do it and i think that he confused a complement. i think people like bill clinton did the same thing. and i think it's not uncommon to see that happening. >> he was out of college. he dropped out after his junior year when he got power.

i think then this happened. >> i think hollywood directors pare very creative people and i read a portion of your book that talked about the contest between shakespeare in love and saving private ryan. harvey never directed a movie as far as i recall. >> he did one. he and his brother directed a movie, a childhood friend and it was a total flop. they wrote the script and it wasn't unlike based on harvey and corky's experience in buffalo. >> was he jealous of spielberg's creativity and the fact that this guy made money hand over fist for a while? >> harvey located miramax in new york not hollywood. he had this attitude that it was

us and him versus them and he was fighting the hollywood establishment, fighting the movie theaters that didn't want his foreign films. so, he was basically with the kind of paranoia. what they said about saving privatebl ryan they would say ts publicly though he denied it to me and others he ever said this which was a lie, he said the first 17 minutes of saving private ryan was brilliant, but then the movie just dissolves into nothing and that's what he was telling the press and the academy and denying he did that. spielberg was so incensed as i described in the book when harvey came over to congratulate him at the end of the academy awards that night which was based on the 88 movies, spielberg just ran away and wouldn't talk to him.

>> i always thought that one of the interesting points of the movement is when the associate kathleen kennedy got involved in raising money for women to meet with lawyers and things like that. do you have? any signs of that f she was an important figure in that? >> i have no sense of her relationship with harvey or that role at all. we have a lot of men asking questions. >> i noticed that. but how do you know i am a man. [laughter] thanks for the presentation. given your contact and communications with ronan farrow about a sexual predator, did the subject of woody allen come up and do you have anything to say about him? >> i didn't talk to him about woody allen. what i did with, as i mentioned

i was skeptical of ronan farrow because i was worried was he a zealot or a reporter and i watched the hbo documentary and i thought it was pretty convincing woody allen was guilty. i ran into alec baldwin, i am not name dropping, but there was an outdoor thing in the hamptons last week and i said that to him and he had just interviewed woody allen on his podcast and he said that's false. the district attorney general of connecticut who said he should have prosecuted he said was actually having an affair. i had no idea and i shouldn't have said that, by the way because i was writing rumors that may not be true. in any case, woody allen has some supporters. i am not one.

>> thank you. you said. you really didn't like him and what is it like to spend i'm not sure how many years you spent but to get out basically most mornings and have to inhabit this person especially because you wanted to talk about him from the inside, so it is different from reporting. you did have to kind of get inside his head. what was that experience like? did you want to take a shower at the end of the day or what happens? >> i did take a shower at the end of the day but i'm not sure if it was causal. [laughter] i actually found as suggested, a really interesting discipline to challenge. and it made it easier by the fact so many of the movies were so good, and made easier because when you probe people about what was his talent, you learn that he really had an immense talent.

one of the talents is that he understood that the key to the successful movie was a good screenplay. it wasn't the actor or the director. you could havee a good actor ad director but a lousy screenplay he said to me. he is a voracious reader. he reads a lot. second, he was a brilliant marketing guy. you look at what he did for instance the crying game. early before the movie ends we learn the ex- prisoner who was killed and the guy that meets her discovers she is a he and it opens in england and the audience knew that and the movie failed. harvey figured out a way to do a survey, to pay for a gallup poll that showed the public didn't want to know the ending. he called editors and he said you cannot destroy your

audiences experience by coming out and telling but the ending is and they didn't. there was a huge success, so much so when it came out in 93 that disney decided they were going to acquire the weinstein company and they abated against ted turner to do that and they won. so he was a pretty good marketing guy. and also, harvey, and you knew this from talking to him, he knew a lot about movie history. he wasn't just a suit which is how the actors talk about people in the studio. one of the stories i tell is when ben affleck and matt damon ridid good will hunting, the script for that, it was turned down because they said it was too violent and it really

wouldn't work. harvey read it and loved it but thathe met with ben affleck andt damon and said i don't understand something. he said it's a really good script but on page whatever, 170 or 150, the matt damon character has sex with a man and it's totally out of character. where did that come from and they said to him we put that in tto see whether you read the book. [laughter] and he did. >> i am particularly interested in the politicians who took money from harvey weinstein and did you speak with them and what was your take on how much they knew and which of the three attributes, whether it is lack of character advancement or what have you that motivated them.

>> i know that hillary was warned by lena dunham, the director, that you can't be in business, this is 2016 campaign she's running for president. you have to reject harvey weinstein because he's a rapist. hillary's person who she told of the two, his press secretary, her press secretary, she claims she was never told that. is that true, i don't know. governor pataki was one of the people who called harvey and harvey "the new york times" is investigating you. one of the first clues he had that he was being chased by "the new york times" kind of came from governor pataki. he raised several hundred thousand dollars for. so, did i dwell on talking to politicians, no but i had access. it's an amazing array of e-mails from governor pataki et cetera

that i didn't need to talk to them at that point. i could have talked to them and maybe i should have talked to them and said you were told this. why did you do what you did and continue to keep in touch with them and that is a fair criticism thaton i could have de more on that. >> thank you. i have q a question. >> the boss has a question. >> weth were talking before abot your efforts to interview weinstein. you had all these conversations for your original profile. but obviously you are interested in trying to talk through the book and my question you've written other books about other things you've done so many profiles a for the magazine abot a number of things.

how important is it or not when you're doing these profiles were biography is totu actually be ae to talk to the person you're writing about? >> i won't name the reporter but a very esteemed reporter i said what are you doing next year into the reporter said i'm doing a biography of a very prominent figure and i said is the figure cooperating with you. he says who the hell cares. well he should care it's a terrible book. your job is to get inside that person for instance i will give you one example of what, i mean. one of the things i do all the time is i assume, going through multiple interviews not just one and i'm not looking to play gotcha. i actually say to than my task is to try to understand you and so when i covered the microsoft

trial and it was called microsoft 3.0, which they lost the argument was that they were in a monopoly. cjudge jackson was the judge in this case and i sat in the courtroom every day as i did in the harvey case and he agreed to let me interview him after the court was over but before he issued or maybe after he issued. i come to his office and we wound up doing 12 hours of interviews, four hours and four hours. the first four hours i spent my questions were all tell me about your childhood, tell me about your father, your mother, how you became a lawyer, how you went to work for the nixon reelection campaign in 1972. as judge jackson talked about his experience at richard nixon,

who he said it was one of the worstt experiences of my life, this man i am revered and went to work for and i really wanted to be in the government and a public servant but he lied. he lied to everyone he worked for and he was an awful man. then i thought back to the trial and there were 20 hours of taped interviews with bill gates and he would often play them on the screen and what you saw was nixon. you saw gates refusing to answer questions, misleading et cetera. what i realized was judge jackson, when he saw bill gates, he was seeing richard nixon. so, that early interview was so revealing of who he was. look at harvey.

i think learning about his mother isim incredibly revealing to him and i asked his brother. i said he was very candid about the mother and i said what do you see, again these are the early questions you ask about biography, which becomes very important. i said what do you see of your father in harvey and he said to me i don't see my father. i see myr. mother. i find when you have an intimate conversation with people about their life, you develop an intimacy with them that is particularly they don't think you're trying to play gotcha that you're interested in the questions you're asking them and it becomes a solidifying thing. i remember when i interviewed i spent a long time doing a profile with murdoch another person who actually doesn't talk toro me anymore but we spend

enormous amounts of time and i knewis from the early conversatn about his father who he revered the early days of oxford when he was a radical leftist and hippie boast in his dorm room at oxford, murdoch to me became someone really intimate. ken knows me. i've shared secrets with him whthat i haven't shared with people that worked for me and i think that happens. and it's one of the things that allows you to profile someone hopefully with some insight. >> if you could have interviewed him what would you have asked him? >> first i tell the story in the book he was getting very nervous i was the only one doing a

biography of him and so he tells his pr guy he says i will talk to ken if he agrees to ask me any negative questions that come up in the book, claims made against me in the book that i haven't already answered and i went back to his pr guy and i said i would be happy to do that but i want the freedom to ask him any questions. no, end of negotiations. they come back a week or so later and say harvey will agree to do interviews if you don't tape it and i said a dealbreaker. i have two. harvey will agree a week later to do it if you, if he has a translator to do the script and i said i can't let you do that. at the end he agreed after two months of negotiations to my

terms and then his lawyer called me the day before we were supposed to do the first severan phone interviews. he doesn't have internet access in prison. his lawyers said i can't allow my client, but among the questions i wanted to ask and i did ask in the e-mail exchange, one of them i asked the following question which of course he didn't answer. when you put your head on a pillow at night after raping say jessica, one of the key defendants in the trial, how did you explain to yourself what you had just done. he never answered that question and i suspect if he had answered the question he would have said something he was always saying, it was consensual. she wanted something from me and iit wanted something from her it was a fair trade. now you've really got to be

skewed in the head to think that's a fair trade, but that was him. he tried to normalize this behavior. he would come into a suite, zelda described the santa said i gave a list of ten do's and don'ts and one was when harvey comes in the sweet after dinner and takes off all his clothes and parades around the sweet naked, itt is normal. this is harvey.he and what he did with a lot of women he would say i have a kink in my neck can you give me a massage, i will give you one and one of the warnings among the warnings she had on a piece of paperwh which i have is don't er give him a massage. and also wear two pairs of pants. so people p knew, where two pais of pants and don't let him take

any off. so in any case, the people that worked forwa him knew that he ws a beast. there wasn't just having affairs, it was about conquest and conquest of men who he yelled out and put down and conquest of women sexually. any more questions? >> i thought this would take another evening but how did you develop your wonderful interviewing skills and if you were to advise somebody doing interviews like youee have been doing, what would you say? >> listen, be a good listener. you don't need to talk. let the silence work for you. ask a question and don't jump in andnd interrupt them. let them talk and it will build their confidence that you are not some shark.

you don'tt give into an international interview like i'm here to drill your teeth or you won't have the person's attention. listening i think is a key ingredient of journalism and one of the reasons why, one of the things that concerns me about the nature of journalism is the watch the cable networks and all these pendants are expressing opinions. they are not listening. let me tell you who is going to win the election. how do you know who's going to win. so the abilityd th to listen disappears and i think that is the death of good journalism. >> many of us have read about the legendary hollywood moguls of the 30s, 40s and 50s and the casting couch and how many of them allegedly did enough reporting i have to think

it did occur did what weinstein did or did they not, that's my question. how are they different -- >> weinstein is different. the casting couch with harvey is his defense and it was quite disgusting the abuse of power. certainly may have abused judy garland and one of the things, there was a brilliant autobiography in which he says one of the things the early studio heads believed, and i think they were right is you don't cast a woman in the role unless you want to sleep with her and that was harvey's view. the difference between the old moguls of hollywood and harvey is raped was harvey's ammo. it was into the mof many of

them. i'm not saying that they were not aware of rape in the same way. the abused women and it was disgusting, but you talk about physical assault he was holding down women. you listen to abigail's description, it's unbelievable. i mean,, or what he did with ro. i don't think the louisville mayors or the other moguls, first of all they were not as big as harvey to be able to do that. >> i just watched a rerun of the old movie how to succeed inbusiness without trying whichs a great movie. but there's a scene where one of the executives is chasing a secretary around and they played for laughs at the time i'm sure was funny.

the woman is kind of laughing as she does such and i'm certainly not excusing what weinstein did or what the mayor did and there's a lot we don't know about what theyit did, but it seems like what weinstein did was maybe it was more but it was a continuation of something that had been going on for decades in hollywood.e' >> but i would argue there's a difference between chasing a woman around the couch, which is a sexual harassment, and rape. rape is a criminal offense, which is why he is in prison. and i just think he was so extreme and what he did. >> thank you. >> thank you. this was fun. [applause] middle and high school students,

it's your time to shine. you're invited to participate in this year's c-span documentary competition. in light of the upcoming midterm elections, picture yourself as a newly elected member of congress. we ask the competitors what is your top priority and why. make a five to six minute video that shows the importance of your issues from opposing and supporting perspectives. don't be afraid to take risks with your documentary. be bold. among the $100,000 in cash prizes is a $5,000 grand prize. videos must be submitted by january 20th, 2023. visit the website at student cam.org for competition rules, tips, resources and the step-by-step guide.

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