De Caunes, who was in her early thirties at the time, was already an established actress, but she wondered what would happen to younger and more vulnerable women in the same situation. Over the years, she said, she’s heard similar accounts from friends. “I know that everybody—I mean everybody—in Hollywood knows that it’s happening,” de Caunes said. “He’s not even really hiding. I mean, the way he does it, so many people are involved and see what’s happening. But everyone’s too scared to say anything.”

8.

One evening in the early nineties, the actress Rosanna Arquette was supposed to meet Weinstein for dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel to pick up the script for a new film. At the hotel, Arquette was told to meet Weinstein upstairs, in his room.

Arquette recalled that, when she arrived at the room, Weinstein opened the door wearing a white bathrobe. He said that his neck was sore and that he needed a massage. She told him that she could recommend a good masseuse. “Then he grabbed my hand,” she said. He put it on his neck. When she yanked her hand away, Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it toward his penis, which was visible and erect. “My heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,” she said. She told Weinstein, “I will never do that.”

Weinstein told her that she was making a huge mistake by rejecting him, and named an actress and a model who he claimed had given in to his sexual overtures and whose careers he said he had advanced as a result. Arquette said she responded, “I’ll never be that girl,” and left.

Arquette said that after she rejected Weinstein her career suffered. In one case, she believes, she lost a role because of it. “He made things very difficult for me for years,” she told me. She did appear in one subsequent Weinstein film—“Pulp Fiction.” Arquette believes that she only got that role because of its small size and Weinstein’s deference to the filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino. (Disputes later arose over her entitlement to payment out of the film’s proceeds.) Arquette said that her silence was the result of Weinstein’s power and reputation for vindictiveness. “He’s going to be working very hard to track people down and silence people,” she explained. “To hurt people. That’s what he does.”

There are other examples of Weinstein’s using the same modus operandi. Jessica Barth, an actress who met him at a Golden Globes party in January, 2011, told me that he invited her to a business meeting at the Peninsula. When she arrived, he asked her over the phone to go up to his room. Weinstein assured her it was “no big deal”—because of his high profile, he simply wanted privacy to “talk career stuff.” In the room, she found that Weinstein had ordered champagne and sushi.

Barth said that, in the conversation that followed, Weinstein alternated between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed. “So, what would happen if, say, we’re having some champagne and I take my clothes off and you give me a massage?” she recalled him asking. “And I’m, like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ ”

When she moved toward the door to leave, Weinstein lashed out, saying that she needed to lose weight “to compete with Mila Kunis,” and then, apparently in an effort to mollify her, promising a meeting with one of his female executives. “He gave me her number, and I walked out and I started bawling,” Barth told me. (Immediately after the incident, she spoke with two people; they confirmed to me that she had described her experience to them at the time.) Barth said that the promised meeting at Weinstein’s office seemed to be purely a formality. “I just knew it was bullshit,” she said. (The executive she met with did not respond to requests for comment.)

9.

Weinstein’s behavior deeply affected the day-to-day operations of his companies. Current and former employees described a pattern of meetings and strained complicity that closely matches the accounts of the many women I interviewed. The employees spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, they feared for their careers in Hollywood and because of provisos in their work contracts.

“There was a large volume of these types of meetings that Harvey would have with aspiring actresses and models,” one female executive told me. “He would have them late at night, usually at hotel bars or in hotel rooms. And, in order to make these women feel more comfortable, he would ask a female executive or assistant to start those meetings with him.” She was repeatedly asked to join such meetings, she said, but she refused.

The executive said that she was especially disturbed by the involvement of other employees. “It almost felt like the executive or assistant was made to be a honeypot to lure these women in, to make them feel safe,” she said. “Then he would dismiss the executive or the assistant, and then these women were alone with him. And that did not feel like it was appropriate behavior or safe behavior.”

One former employee told me that she was frequently asked to join for the beginning of meetings that, she said, had in many cases already been moved from day to night and from hotel lobbies to hotel rooms. She said that Weinstein’s conduct in the meetings was brazen. During a meeting with a model, the former employee said, he turned to her and demanded, “Tell her how good of a boyfriend I am.” She said that when she refused to join one such meeting, Weinstein became enraged. Often, she was asked to keep track of the women, who, in keeping with a practice established by Weinstein’s assistants, were all filed under the same label in her phone: F.O.H., which stood for “Friend of Harvey.” She added that the pattern of meetings was nearly uninterrupted in her years of working for Weinstein. “I have to say, the behavior did stop for a little bit after the groping thing,” she told me, referring to Gutierrez’s allegation to the police. “But he couldn’t help himself. A few months later, he was back at it.”

Two staffers who facilitated these meetings said that they felt morally compromised by them. One male former staffer noted that many of the women seemed “not aware of the nature of those meetings” and “were definitely scared.” He told me that most of the encounters that he saw seemed consensual, but others gave him pause. He was especially troubled by his memory of one young woman: “You just feel terrible because you could tell this girl, very young, not from our country, was now in a room waiting for him to come up there in the middle of the day, and we were not to bother them.” He said that he was never asked to facilitate these meetings for men.

None of the former executives or assistants I spoke to quit because of the misconduct, but many expressed guilt and regret over not having said or done more. They talked about what they believed to be a culture of silence about sexual assault inside Miramax and the Weinstein Company and across the entertainment industry more broadly.

10.

Weinstein and his legal and public-relations teams have conducted a decades-long campaign to suppress these stories. In recent months, that campaign escalated. Weinstein and his associates began calling many of the women in this article. Weinstein asked Argento to meet with a private investigator and give testimony on his behalf. One actress who initially spoke to me on the record later asked that her allegation be removed from this piece. “I’m so sorry,” she wrote. “The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse.” Weinstein and his legal team have threatened to sue multiple media outlets, including the New York Times.