“I’ve found a spiritual connection I never had. In that, I have experienced the power of being vulnerable.”
On Monday evening, in The New York Times, Harvey Weinstein did what he has been doing for decades: He explained the world from the perspective of Harvey Weinstein. This particular explanation came in the form of an email the accused rapist sent to the reporter Alan Feuer, for an article that explores what Weinstein’s life has been like in the past year and a half, as he has awaited the criminal trial that begins this week.
“Harvey Weinstein’s Dark Days” is rich in reporting and tense in tone. The story features friends of Weinstein, both named and anonymous, sharing information about how he has been passing the time since his arraignment (“reading books, watching streamed TV shows, Googling himself and nervously obsessing about the outcome of his trial”). The story also features Weinstein writing notes to Feuer about vulnerability—notes belying a belief that the language of pain used by Weinstein’s accusers applies just as readily to himself.
Weinstein, he and those remaining loyal to him share, is “terrified.” He is “dazed.” And he is “utterly isolated.” He suffers. He is making a performance of the suffering. A car accident this summer—Weinstein swerved his Jeep, he said, to avoid a deer—led to pain so severe, he said, that he required back surgery to ease it. Weinstein, just after the operation, gave an interview to the New York Post, which ran with a hospital-room photo shoot that featured, among other images, a close-up shot of Weinstein’s blood-filled IV bag. Weinstein walks, now, when he appears in public, hunched over a walker, its spindly legs shod with tennis balls.