Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

New York Attorney General Launches Blockbuster Suit Against Harvey Weinstein

The office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a blockbuster lawsuit on Sunday against disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, as well as Weinstein’s production company and his brother, alleging multiple violations of New York State civil rights laws, human rights laws and business laws.

Weinstein was fired from his production company, The Weinstein Company, late last year after more than a dozen women accused him of sexually assaulting, harassing or raping them.

The New York Times reported Monday that the lawsuit had disrupted an effort to sell The Weinstein Company.

“The Weinstein Company repeatedly broke New York law by failing to protect its employees from pervasive sexual harassment, intimidation, and discrimination,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “Any sale of The Weinstein Company must ensure that victims will be compensated, employees will be protected going forward, and that neither perpetrators nor enablers will be unjustly enriched. Every New Yorker has a right to a workplace free of sexual harassment, intimidation, and fear.”

The lawsuit includes new allegations that Weinstein told several employees that he would “kill” them. It also alleges that he exposed himself to a female employee in 2014 or 2015, and that in 2015 the company took no action after a female employee complained that Weinstein had told her to come to his hotel room, appeared naked under a bathrobe, and badgered her for a massage.

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.