The Eve of #MeToo
And all the years since.
This is the story of a Hollywood comedy writer who took down an evil billionaire industry executive, creating the spark that would join the flame that would become the global bonfire known as the #MeToo movement.
I moved to Los Angeles in the spring of 2015 after a devastating break-up that left me feeling lost, empty, and directionless. I finally found someone I could spend my life with. Unfortunately, they felt the exact opposite. We lived near each other in the West Village, and New York is small enough that I knew I’d eventually run into them out with their shiny new girlfriend. The one that replaced me. So, I devised a plan to avoid further heartbreak: I moved across the country.
I never planned on staying in Los Angeles permanently, but now that I’m here, I think I’ll keep it. I didn’t have a job lined up when I arrived, but within a few weeks, I was offered a head writing position at a production company in Beverly Hills. I accepted it because being paid to write is the dream. What I didn’t know was that working there would completely break me and land me in a #MeToo lawsuit a year before #MeToo existed.
The billionaire who owned the production company assaulted me on Monday, September 19, 2016. And Gloria Allred was my lawyer by nine a.m. on September 20th.
What followed in the years after the lawsuit was an endless barrage of harassment on social media by the evil pig who assaulted me. I moved four times in the first year after the assault. I stopped posting on social media, and I made all of my accounts private. I deleted my life as I had known it and became scared for the very first time.
I was a single young woman in the midst of a high-profile sexual assault lawsuit against an evil billionaire. I genuinely feared he would pay someone to have me killed. I knew he was too much of a coward to murder me himself. He’d outsource it to one of his followers who needed the money.
I thought about getting a professionally-trained guard dog for protection. I grew up with Rottweilers and knew that if I got one, he wouldn’t let anything happen to me.
He would take a million bullets and protect me with every last ounce of his soul. I was so fragile. And if someone did come after me, my Rottweiler would rip them apart slowly with teeth as sharp as daggers and a jaw so powerful the strongest vice in the world couldn’t open it. He would ensure my attacker suffered the most horrific pain before finally ripping their throat out, ending their pathetic life.
But I got a golden retriever instead because what I needed more than a guard dog was one who could lick the tears that fell down my face and offer me comfort when I felt so incredibly alone. I needed a dog to give me a reason to live, and that dog is gently sleeping on my kitchen floor right now, blissfully unaware that six years ago he saved my life.
In the fall of 2017, I lived in a cute backhouse in Echo Park. The Comedy Central show I’d been working on ended the month before, and my puppy, Perci, was my constant companion since I lived alone.
I was more than a year into the lawsuit and supposed to attend my assailant, Alki David’s deposition. Knowing that I had to spend a day in the same room, right across the table from the man who terrorized me throughout the previous year, caused me excruciating stress.
A friend of mine from New York, Brian, called one day. He was coming to LA for a wedding and asked if he could crash with me. I’d heard stories about Brian being creepy towards women, but I agreed that he could stay on my couch while he was in town. I did worry a little about leaving him alone in my house because I could picture him rifling through my underwear drawer while he jerked off into my hand towel. But I swept these thoughts aside because having even a defective human body around was a small measure of comfort.
While Brian was visiting, he wanted to hang out with his friend, Charlie, who was Harvey Weinstein’s Vice President for legal affairs. I’d met Charlie in Manhattan a few years before when Brian took me to a Christmas party at Charlie’s duplex apartment near Washington Square Park. His party was filled with models and actresses, artificially laughing at his insufferable jokes.
Everyone wanted to be friends with Charlie because Charlie was in Weinstein’s inner circle. Being friends with Charlie meant you might get a job in a movie. I never wanted to be friends with Charlie. I had no room in my life for a Charlie. He had encyclopedic film knowledge, which was impressive, but that’s all he had — that and tacos. Charlie liked to eat tacos.
Brian invited Charlie over to my house one night. Charlie loved tacos so much and spoke about them with such frequency that just seeing Charlie made me automatically hear a crunch. So when he walked in the door, crunch-crunch… I didn’t know anything remarkable was about to happen.
“Something big and bad is coming out about Harvey,” Charlie said.
Oh, I thought. I did not wonder what it might be.
Years before, when I lived in Manhattan, I worked as a freelancer for a production company. Our Tribeca offices occupied the same building as the Weinstein Group. One morning, as a twenty-six-year-old ambitious TV host, I was waiting in the lobby for the elevator. When it arrived, the doorman motioned me to step inside, and I did. A UPS delivery man followed me. Then came a third man who wreaked of predatory sweat and decaying flesh.
I could tell by the size and the stench that this was Harvey Weinstein.
He mashed his way into the elevator and stopped. When he saw me, he opened his mouth and wiped his bloated tongue across his rotting lips. He looked down at my feet, scanned up my legs, past my abdomen, and into my eyes. “Are you an actress?” he asked.
I told him, “Yes.”
Here, he physically shoved the delivery guy out of the elevator. “Take the next one!” he barked.
The elevator doors closed.
Harvey said, “What brings you to the building?”
I told him I had a meeting at a production company, not his.
He told me to stop by his office after my meeting and to leave my contact information with his receptionist. He got off on his floor, and I rode up to mine. When I arrived at the office, I told everyone what happened. They all told me the same thing: do NOT give your info to him. I won’t, I told them, nodding my head. I had no idea he was so reviled.
But, once I was back in the elevator, I thought yeah, but I’m me. And I would love to become an Oscar-nominated actress. Brilliantly, I pressed the button and got off on Harvey’s floor. I wrote down my name, phone number, and email and left it to his receptionist. And then, luckily, never heard a word from Harvey Weinstein. Phew. I like to think that as soon as I got back on the elevator, his receptionist ripped apart my information and threw it in the trash to protect me. That woman was my hero.
Charlie, Brian, and I sat on my wooden chairs out on my deck, overlooking the lights of downtown LA. They were drinking beer out of tall glasses I had purchased at Pier One, and I was drinking red wine out of my last remaining unbroken wine glass I stole from Malibu Winery.
Charlie’s phone rang. He looked at the screen, rose from his chair, walked across the deck to my hammock, and laid down. He spoke on the phone for at least forty minutes. Brian and I made small talk while we waited for Charlie to finish his call so we could head to a brewery downtown for some epic tacos. When he joined us again, Charlie said, “That was Harvey. He thinks this will all blow over, and it’ll be back to work by Monday. He said Rose McGowan is accusing him of some pretty insane stuff, but she’s not credible, so he’s not worried.” He wasn’t worried, not worried at all.
I stared out at the distant downtown LA buildings, all lit up for the evening, and I suddenly wanted to scream at him, “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!”
Instead, the three of us went for tacos and beer.
The next morning, the Weinstein story broke, and with it, a new hashtag was born.
#MeToo
Exactly two years later, to the day, I was sitting with my lawyers in a basement-level courtroom at The Stanley Mosk courthouse. We were at lunch when we got the call. The jury in my #MeToo trial had come back with a verdict.
The courtroom was packed with reporters, friends, and enemies. I stood up as the jury filed back into the room. Every single female juror made eye contact with me and nodded their heads as if to say, “We have your back. We believe you.”
And that’s the moment I knew that I had won. That we had won.
