CAA on Monday filed court documents against Julia Ormond, as well as Disney and Miramax, in relation to the actress’ Harvey Weinstein accusations.
According to Ormond’s initial lawsuit, she alleged that the Creative Artists Agency should have warned her about the disgraced producer’s misconduct since that could have prevented her from enduring an alleged sexual assault by Weinstein. However, CAA now claims that written documents from 2017 and deposition testimony prove that “she experienced Weinstein’s misconduct firsthand before she became a CAA client — completely undercutting her claim that CAA could have, or should have, warned her about Harvey Weinstein.”
The court documents, obtained by TheWrap, also called Ormond’s claims “utterly baseless,” since the actress testified that her U.K.-based agent Patricia Marmont “warned her that Weinstein may hit on her and that, if he did, Plaintiff should be careful about how she dealt with it because he was a powerful man.”
The agency further argued that their agents such as Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane did not have any knowledge of Weinstein’s behavior until the first allegations were made public in 2017 — decades after Ormond’s alleged sexual assault in December 1995.
Furthermore, CAA also seeks to block the actress from discontinuing her initial claims against Disney and Miramax — the pair reached a separate settlement with the “Temple Grandin” star two weeks ago — suggesting the two companies have not been open during the discovery phase.
“We are pleased with the resolution reached with Disney and Miramax and applaud Ms. Ormond’s strength and perseverance in bringing the case to this point,” Ormond’s attorney Meredith Firetog said in a Tuesday statement. “CAA’s spiteful and meritless effort to derail that settlement — so it can deflect blame onto Disney and Miramax for its own failure to protect Ms. Ormond — will not succeed. Nor will CAA’s attempts to victim-blame Ms. Ormond because she had a professional relationship with Weinstein before he sexually assaulted her.”
Weinstein has long denied Ormond’s allegations. Most recently, his New York rape retrial jury found the former producer guilty on one charge of first-degree sexual assault, acquitted him on a second charge and the third charge was declared a mistrial after the jury foreman refused to return to deliberations.
