Just when you thought the Harvey Weinstein scandal couldn’t get any worse, here we are: The New York Times grimly reported Tuesday that Weinstein didn’t just make his assistants set up encounters with women — they also had to help him get erections for those encounters.
In Tuesday’s extensive story about Weinstein’s vast network of enablers, Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who first broke the story of the Weinstein scandal two months ago, reported that the indie mogul demanded that his assistants help him procure penile injections he used for erectile dysfunction.
On Wednesday’s episode of the Times’ podcast The Daily, they detailed, with some awkward pauses, exactly what that job entailed. Assistants had to “procure it for him, they had to keep it at their desks sometimes, and they had to deliver it to him. Sometimes they even had to clean up the dispensers.”
In other words, they had to do pretty much everything but inject the drug. That’s maybe the one bit of good news here, since the medication is injected directly into the penis.
Could the assistants refuse? Not really, according to the Times. Kantor said that one assistant, Michelle Franklin, was fired soon after she objected to the assignment.
The sad tale of how Weinstein overcame God’s attempts to prevent the Weinstein scandal is only one aspect of the Times’ story on the coverup, which you can and should read in its entirety here.
Weinstein has admitted “impolitic behavior” (you think?) in response to the Times’ story, but has consistently denied any non-consensual sex occurred.
P.S.: If you’re a Hollywood executive Googling “What type of penile injections did Harvey use,” you’ve drawn all the wrong lessons here.