Harvey Weinstein and the leadership of both Miramax and The Weinstein Company have been slapped with a new class-action lawsuit from women who accuse the disgraced mogul of sexual misconduct.
The new suit, filed Wednesday in New York’s U.S. District Court, includes six women who said they faced “credible and objective threat of being blacklisted by Weinstein and major film producers such as Miramax and TWC if they refused Weinstein’s unwanted sexual advances or complained about his behavior.”
Past and present TWC board members such as Dirk Ziff and Paul Tudor Jones are also named as defendants — an escalation from an earlier suit filed by the same firm on November 15 that also alleged assault, infliction of emotional distress and violation of a federal RICO statute designed to take down criminal enterprises.
The new suit claimed that Weinstein isolated women who sought him out professionally, either as aspiring actresses or to break into the industry, and then subjected them to unwanted sexual advances that included “flashing, groping, fondling, harassing, battering, false imprisonment, sexual assault, attempted rape and/or completed rape.”
The suit states: “The proverbial ‘casting couch’ was Harvey Weinstein’s office of choice, a choice facilitated and condoned by TWC and Miramax.”
Zoe Brock, Louisette Geiss, Nannette Klatt, Katherine Kendall, Sarah Ann Masse and Melissa Sagemiller are all named plaintiffs in the case, but attorney Steve Berman has put out a call for other women to join the suit.
Weinstein has previously denied that he ever engaged in nonconsensual sex.
Reps for Weinstein and TWC were not immediately available for comment.