Memories of some of my encounters with Harvey Weinstein over the past two decades, just off the top of my head: September 2006, arriving at the New York fashion show for the fashion label Marchesa, co-run by Weinstein’s now ex-wife Georgina Chapman. Weinstein prowled around the front row, crossing off a name on his list every time a famous actress arrived to watch the show. (Several actresses have since said Weinstein “bullied” them into wearing Marchesa to high-profile events.)

In 2011, hiding in a bathroom in LA to get away from Weinstein because he blamed me personally for an article in the Guardian’s business section that had reported financial difficulties at his company. In 2012, being called by one of Weinstein’s myriad assistants, when I was again in Los Angeles to cover the Oscars, to say that Weinstein had personally banned me from various restaurants because of “unfriendly” Guardian coverage. No specific date, as this was pretty much a constant over the past two decades: laughing knowingly with other journalists about how if we gave anything other than glowing coverage to his films, or actors in his films, Weinstein would ban us from his film screenings and threaten to pull advertising from our publications.

In 2014, Weinstein writing an outraged article for this paper about my coverage of his Baftas party. He signed off with the suggestion: “Next time Hadley Freeman comes to one of our parties she should relax, loosen up, have a glass of champagne and be sure to stay the whole night and really, truly … enjoy herself.”

Too many had turned a blind eye, perhaps assuming that the normal rules do not apply to celebrities. Which raises the question: who are we turning a blind eye to now?

The only thing that’s surprising about Weinstein’s conviction for rape is that he has actually been convicted. The initial allegations that he raped women were so unsurprising – they felt almost inevitable, really – that as soon as they were published in 2017, first in the New York Times, followed days later in the New Yorker, Weinstein’s career was finished. There were no anguished discussions about giving him the benefit of the doubt, no solemn handwringing about how complicated relations between the sexes are these days. It was as if we all had always known – which, to a certain extent, many of us had.

If you were even a casual follower of the movie industry, you’d have known of his reputation as a terrifying bully. Certainly I knew. Hell, I’d experienced it. But never did I really question it. “This is how the industry works,” Weinstein told Dawn Dunning, a witness at his trial, after telling her he would help her career if she agreed to a threesome with him and one of his assistants.

And that’s pretty much what I thought too: “This is how the industry works,” I said to myself, hiding in a toilet stall in LA as I waited for Weinstein’s fury to abate. Nice guys in the movie industry – Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg – are seen as the exceptions; alpha, bullying producers are the rule. In Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, the sociopathic murderer (played by Tim Robbins) works as a film producer, and the movie is stuffed with A-list cameos, with everyone from Julia Roberts to Bruce Willis showing they’re in on the joke.

And then there were the whispers about women, the rumours that he offered roles in exchange for sex. Was this always consensual? And what is the endpoint of this mentality, when a man believes his status gives him access to women’s bodies? Ah, well, that’s how the industry works, isn’t it?

Being a bully doesn’t mean someone is a rapist. It does, however, suggest a degree of sadism – and something was clearly very rotten about Weinstein for a long time. But those who should have been holding him to account, who should have looked at his behaviour and thought, “This is not how sane adults behave”, excused him. When Weinstein wrote his article castigating me for not enjoying his party enough, a prominent film reporter tweeted that I had been “petulant” and applauded Weinstein for “winning this round”. (He has since deleted the tweet.)

Play Video 5:04 Harvey Weinstein: how a Hollywood mogul was undone – video explainer

Once again, we are in the same position as we were after Bill Cosby’s convictions and after Jimmy Savile and Michael Jackson’s’s posthumous downfall: realising not just that a famous person was a sexual predator, but that they were sexual predators in plain sight. Too many had turned a blind eye, perhaps assuming that the normal rules do not apply to celebrities. Which raises the question: who are we turning a blind eye to now?

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On some level, I knew something was wrong with Weinstein. I suspect that what made Weinstein so cross about my silly article about his silly Baftas party was my line about how bloody miserable Uma Thurman looked that night. Thurman has since said that Weinstein attempted to sexually assault her in the mid-90s, but she continued to work with him. “I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did,” Thurman said in a 2018 interview with the New York Times about the incident.

Perhaps she was, but so were many others: all those who worked for him despite knowing the truth; anyone who normalised his bullying and treated it as par for the Hollywood course; everyone who assumed – as I did – when the allegations emerged that nothing would come of them because rape was too difficult to prosecute, and because he was, still, too powerful and too rich. Weinstein presumably thought that too: he’d spent his whole career getting his own way by playing by his own rules. Instead he faces up to 25 years in prison. Because this, it turns out, against all odds, is how the industry works now.

• Hadley Freeman is a Guardian columnist and features writer