An assistant who co-wrote the letter described to me, by phone, the events of October 5th, the day the first Times story was published. Harvey came in to work at 375 Greenwich Street, his fiefdom (his brother Bob worked at a different address), where he had a “lair”: in addition to an office, there was a large living room with a commodious couch and trophy walls of photographs of Harvey and his stars. He expressed satisfaction that the piece had come out on a Thursday rather than a Sunday, when, by his reckoning, more people would have seen it. The assistant told Harvey that he was resigning from his position. (He is hoping to be reassigned within the company.) Harvey offered to provide a reference—he didn’t yet understand how undesirable that would be. Later, as the assistant was leaving to spend the afternoon drinking and strategizing with his colleagues at a nearby pub, he says that Harvey reached for his arm. Sobbing, Harvey said, “I’m not that guy. I’m not that guy.”

On the following Tuesday, the staff convened in a conference room, with soul-food takeout from Bubby’s. As they gathered, someone mentioned that The New Yorker story was up. The assembled employees read in silence. They listened to the tape. They knew that voice too well. Some began to shake, and many of them wept as they contemplated the roles they might have played as accomplices, unwitting or not. “People were having a wave of retroactive memories,” a creative executive who worked on the letter told me. “Some of the stories were within the time frame of people who still worked there.” A longtime employee offered to answer questions based on his experiences travelling with Harvey. There was a silence, and then, according to the creative executive, “One of the female assistants was, like, ‘Tell us everything.’ ”

In the time since, people both inside and outside Hollywood have been processing the reality that Harvey Weinstein is “that guy.” In fitting revenge for his reduction of women to bodies, there has been thorough discussion of Weinstein’s own ungainliness and girth (not incidental, as he allegedly used his imposing size to threaten, impede, and overwhelm his victims). Fired from the Weinstein Company, external validation stripped away, he’s now just a body and its urges—not the passionate filmmaker responsible for eighty-one Oscar wins but the animal who allegedly masturbated into a potted plant, or a kitchen pot, or both. (A Weinstein spokesperson told The New Yorker, “There are many stories about Harvey Weinstein that have become urban legend. Some are true and some are not.”)

On Saturday evening, a few hours after Weinstein was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a group of women, former assistants and executives at Miramax and the Weinstein Company, gathered at a house in Los Angeles. They stood around a kitchen island, nibbling on grapes and cheese and drinking wine, while the rice water boiled and the hostess’s husband put the kids to bed. The women said they hadn’t known—they were not “honeypots”—but they were struggling to make sense of how Weinstein’s behavior had gone unchecked. They were dealing with the twin discomforts of having their entire professional community wonder if they were complicit in or victims of his assaults, or both. They wanted Harvey’s downfall to mean something and to create real change within their industry and in the world.

“You feel a little bit like an idiot,” the hostess said. “There were things you knew. Clearly there was also a strategy on his part. He could be flamboyant in his ‘People can know I’m a womanizer.’ But the idea that he took it to sexual assault or even rape was really well hidden.”

The woman standing to my left, in bluejeans, said, “Looking back, the problem is that the unspoken message we were being given from the powers that be across media, Hollywood, and politics is that he can get away with this shit.”

“But get away with what?” a woman in black said. “At the time, you didn’t know this was happening. What you knew was that he was a bully, a screamer, a yeller, a thrower, a pig—not that he was a rapist.” She said that she and her husband got into a fight when the news broke. He insisted that she and her friends must have known.

The hostess said, “The public lynching has been so severe that I think it’s a huge warning call to men in the future. Probably there are people—any number of agents—”

“I want to talk about that,” the woman in jeans said. “The larger culture of harassment and bullying, because you don’t feel like you can come out and report something. The patriarchy is creating this environment for men and women of misogyny and sexism. There is somehow this understanding that you can be this caricature of being bombastic and bullying and treating your underlings—”

“As inhuman,” a fourth woman, chopping chicken, said.

“When this shit happens, a woman doesn’t know who she can turn to, because everyone seems to have a blind eye to it,” the woman in jeans said. “The people around him, his enablers, and there had to have been enablers, men and women, perpetuated the bullying culture. As long as that’s O.K., we’re in trouble, we can’t get out from under it.”

The woman in black said, “It’s naïve to think that Harvey is the only Harvey out there.” (On Tuesday, Harvey Weinstein’s business partner and brother, Bob, who has called Harvey “indefensible and crazy,” was accused of sexual harassment by a showrunner on a Weinstein Company television project, a claim he denies.)

After a while, the hostess said that she had a Harvey story, one whose import she only now understood. She had never told her friends; it didn’t seem like a big enough deal before. After she’d worked at Miramax for a couple of years, a position opened to be Weinstein’s assistant. She wanted to be a producer, so she interviewed for the job. “You’re too pretty to be working for Harvey,” a senior female executive told her. “It will embarrass him.” Confused but undeterred, she persisted. Finally, one of Weinstein’s former assistants took her out to lunch. “Do not take this job,” the former assistant said. “You will see things you will never be able to unsee, and you will do things you will never forgive yourself for.” She didn’t have enough information to comprehend the warning, but she heeded it anyway. The gravity of her near-miss is still sinking in. “There are obviously people that knew,” she said. “And, if they knew, and they knew you, they would protect you.”

The hostess walked me to the door. She had one last point to make. As Hollywood reckoned with its own culture and how to evolve it, there was a more pressing change she did not want people to lose sight of.

“Please, may this empower people to step forward about Trump, and we can bring him down,” she said. With Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie and countless others speaking out about Weinstein—and more than five hundred thousand women sharing their own experiences with sexual harassment under the hashtag #metoo—the floodgates are open. (On Sunday, BuzzFeed reported that a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” who has accused Trump of groping and kissing her, had subpoenaed his campaign for documentation related to “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately.” Trump has denied her allegations.) The hostess told me, “Trump women can come through and throw him down. That would be the biggest play women can make. That’s what we need to do.”