For more than 20 years, Zelda Perkins had known that the film producer Harvey Weinstein was a sexual predator, though not the scale of his abuse. This year, Weinstein was finally convicted of rape; in March, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison. Perkins was “blown away”.
Perkins was not one of the women Weinstein assaulted, but her colleague was. Instead, Perkins became – as a naive but furious 24-year-old assistant – one of the few people brave enough to stand up to the rich, powerful man known for his bullying and ability to make or break careers.
In 1998, Perkins exposed Weinstein’s behaviour to his company, Miramax; until recently, she had been living under the terms of the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) she signed. It was not until almost 20 years later, when Weinstein’s history of sexual assault came out and Perkins, along with other women, started speaking about it, that she realised what a burden it had been. The agreement had prohibited her from discussing what she and a colleague had been through with anyone – including family.
When we speak over Zoom, she is gregarious and talkative, but, looking back, she realises how those two decades affected her. “Once I started speaking out, I found my voice. It sounds so corny, but I found myself – from that 24-year-old who had been told she was wrong and stupid and to shut up.” Perkins now campaigns against the egregious use of NDAs; in the swell of the #MeToo movement, it has been a busy few years. The pandemic, she says, has almost been a welcome pause from it all, although with promised legislation around the use of NDAs having stalled, she is ready to get going again.
In the mid-90s, Perkins was one of Weinstein’s assistants, based in London. On his frequent visits to the UK, she had become accustomed to fending off sexual harassment – when she went to his hotel room to wake him, he would try to pull her into bed or expose himself to her. “Every time he’d leave to go back to America, the relief for having survived was huge,” she says. But she learned to deal with him, with a mixture of “humour and aggression”. She was also protected, she thinks, by her “lack of ambition. If I had wanted desperately to be working in the movie industry, I would have probably ended up in the position of lots of other women who were his victims.”
The moment when she could take no more came not when he harassed her, but her assistant, Rowena Chiu. On a trip with Weinstein to the Venice film festival in 1998, Chiu alleges their boss tried to rape her. She fled, traumatised, to Perkins. “I said to her: ‘That’s it. We’re done. You’re not going back in a room with Harvey.’”
Perkins confronted Weinstein immediately. Back in London, she reported it to a senior female colleague at Miramax, who simply told her to get a good lawyer. Perkins, in her naivety, thought this would mean it would go to court (she had not gone to the police – the assault had not happened to her, she points out, and Chiu did not want to report it).
It was only when speaking to her own lawyer that she realised she, too, had been subject to extreme sexual harassment. She laughs, as if to underscore how ridiculous that sounds now. “It’s not, like, OK for your boss to be in his underpants or naked? It had all been normalised to me. And then the reality was that we had no evidence [of the attempted rape]: we hadn’t gone to the police, it had happened in Italy. Pretty quickly, we were told there was nothing we could do other than agree some form of settlement with him. It was a huge, horrible realisation that ultimately it was about who had the power. It would just be two silly girls’ word against Harvey Weinstein. And that realisation was really upsetting.”
The negotiating process was long and intimidating and, although Perkins could have walked away, she was determined and fuelled by anger and also a sense of responsibilitytowards Chiu. At one point, the two women and their legal team had a meeting with Weinstein’s lawyers that ran through the night until 5am. “We were made to feel like criminals,” she says. “We weren’t allowed pen and paper, we weren’t allowed to go to the loo unaccompanied. We weren’t allowed to speak to anybody.” Weinstein’s legal team had demanded that she give names of anyone she had told about what had happened. She refused. “I felt Harvey would go after them.”
Perkins thought that if they could get Weinstein to agree to their demands – that he should be fired should he try to attempt a settlement again, that he should have therapy and that the company must create a robust HR system – signing an NDA would not be for nothing. “That’s what we were paying for with our silence – we’re paying him to stop.” That said, as she walked out of the building, having signed an NDA that would pay her and Chiu £125,000 each, “I felt ashamed. It felt like a massive personal failure that I’d not held Harvey to account for what he did. My heart was broken, because I believed in our justice system and I couldn’t believe that I didn’t have access to justice because of a man of power. I didn’t realise that that was how the world worked.”
Losing her job was not a huge deal – she was not passionate about the film industry – but keeping silent was. Perkins could not talk about it to friends or explain in job interviews why she had left. She had been considering a law degree, but lost faith in the legal system. When a friend got married in Guatemala, Perkins ended up staying there for five years, working with horses. “I was somewhere where no one’s interested in the fact that I worked in the film industry. It was liberating.”
Back in the UK, Perkins started working in theatre, becoming a successful producer, but Weinstein still loomed large. She was nervous of the NDA when journalists started contacting her, including the New York Times writer Jodi Kantor and the journalist Ronan Farrow, who were working on exposing Weinstein. “I realised that the right people were beginning to talk,” says Perkins. She was shocked, because she thought Weinstein had harassed only his staff. “All the relationships he had with actresses, I thought, were consensual. It was upsetting, because, again, I felt partially responsible. If my agreement had worked, if I had actually done what I had wanted to do, which was go to court and expose him, he would have been stopped. So I thought I had a moral duty to come forward.”
She was still nervous that the terms of her NDA would mean repercussions, but she thought: “I can’t go on. And if nobody listens or if I get bankrupt and sent to jail, I get bankrupt and sent to jail – it’s not that scary.”
When she heard Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison, “it was the first time I felt any emotion about the whole case”, she says. “I was almost crying, almost laughing. I actually couldn’t believe that justice had been served. And it’s making me emotional now.” Her voice breaks. “I spent 20 years of my life believing that justice didn’t work.” She had not followed the case closely, partly because she did not dare to believe he would be convicted, let alone given a long sentence. Also, she says, it was never just about Weinstein. “Right from the beginning, my focus has been on disclosure agreements and the law.”
In 2018, Perkins gave evidence to the women and equalities select committee into sexual harassment at work. Theresa May, then the prime minister, “was very behind what we were doing, which was really exciting and I couldn’t believe how fast everything was happening. I really believed that we would be able to make change.” Legislation to restrict the use of NDAs was announced last year, but since then nothing has happened.
The BBC found that British universities had spent more than £1m on NDAs in the past four years, including in cases of sexual assault.The House of Commons has also used NDAs in recent years in settlements with former staff. They are also widely used to silence women claiming pregnancy-related discrimination at work.
“They were designed for protection of intellectual property, or if two people want to make a consensual agreement not to have an argument dealt with publicly,” says Perkins. “There is nothing ethical about a legal agreement that hides damaging behaviour – bullying, racism, any form of assault –[and] protects that kind of information and works purely for the powerful. The disparity of power in nearly every situation an NDA is used is shocking.”
Weinstein, she says, was a distraction from the real problem – the system in which he operated, including the use of NDAs – and she is determined that, now he is in prison, the issue will not go away. “There are always going to be Harveys, but if the law doesn’t protect you then we’re screwed. I didn’t have power over Harvey, I didn’t have power over the case, but what I can do is try to change the system that enables men like him.”
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