Here's Why So Many Women Knew The Rumors About Harvey Weinstein
For women, knowledge of abusive men â obtained via gossip or whisper networks â isnât frivolous or titillating. It is a means of survival.

Harvey Weinstein in 2007.
Women will tell you they donât know precisely when, or how, they become aware that a man is a sexual predator. Someone â almost always another woman â usually tells us, in ways explicit and implicit, to be careful around a man. To not show up to a meeting alone. To invite someone else to come to lunch. To never stay late or go to drinks or email in a manner that could be taken the wrong way. These âwhisper networks,â as theyâre often called, are what women use to keep each other safe when normal routes of protection â HR complaints, direct confrontation, the police â simply wonât work, either because of a manâs power or because the burden of proof, when it comes to sexual harassment, is so heavy, and the price of becoming an accuser is so steep.
Over the last 30 years, thousands of women have come in and out of the orbit of Harvey Weinstein, the iconic producer whose history as an alleged serial sexual harasser became public last week. Women in his orbit, whether as assistants, waitresses, script readers, or makeup artists, knew about Harvey, either by reputation or through firsthand experience. But thousands of other women, women with no connection to Hollywood or New York or Weinstein, also knew the rumors. We read the reports about his temper and volatility, but we had also heard stories that he was, to put it bluntly, gross: the kind of guy who promised to make someone a star in exchange for sex, and leveraged his power in the industry to make sure no one talked about it.
He was a bigger, more powerful version of the sort of guy so many of us had encountered in our own lives. But we knew about him because of a much-derided and feminized way that women gain knowledge: celebrity gossip.
At the apex of Weinsteinâs power â and alleged abuse of it â in the late â90s, gossip about âa high-powered movie mogulâ and exploitative relationships with less powerful women was percolating in newsgroups like alt.showbiz.gossip. Similar gossip had been the subject of dozens of âblind itemsâ (descriptions of a scandal in which celebritiesâ names are removed, or âblinded,â and replaced with clues of their identity) for years. The columnist wouldnât name names, for fear of litigation, but commenters sure did. There were blinds and conversations, some more explicit than others, on The Defamer, Oh No They Didnât, Celebitchy, Popbitch, Fametracker, and Lainey Gossip, including an infamous one titled âCasting Couch.â
Weinsteinâs alleged abuses of power were a joke on 30 Rock and a thinly veiled storyline on Entourage. It was everywhere and nowhere. Nobody officially knew about these alleged abuses of power, at least not enough to do anything about it, and yet everyone did. It was so known â in the business, but among anyone who paid attention to celebrity gossip in the 2000s â that it felt like normal, or just normalized, one part of a larger misogynist industry, aided and abetted by those around him out of fear and hunger for some kind of reciprocity.
I first heard about Weinstein, as a character, through profiles in Entertainment Weekly, but my understanding of him wasnât fully fleshed out until I read Peter Biskindâs Down and Dirty Pictures â a chronicle of the rise of Miramax and independent film. Itâs a book, itâs a history, but itâs also filled with gossip. Thereâs nothing explicit about Weinstein and sex and women. Thereâs plenty, though, if you read between the lines.
Thatâs how gossip has long worked: through pun, innuendo, and blind items, which speak the unspeakable. The gossip columnists of classic Hollywood embedded signals of which stars were gay and which ones were cheating, who was secretly dating whom and whose wedding was shotgun and whoâd been on the original âcasting couches.â Within the business, this information was often used to control stars, to keep them in line; outside, it offered titillation (scandal!) but it also offered solace: Hollywood stars, theyâre gay like us.
Itâs no wonder so many men deride and degrade gossip: Itâs our most effective armor against their abuses.
Women didnât take solace in the knowledge of Weinsteinâs alleged harassment. But the gossip percolating around him became another form of knowledge, of currency in the economy of how women protect ourselves and others. And when the gossip is authenticated in the press, it just confirms the sad truth weâve gradually come to understand, from years of gossip and personal experience: that all types of men, in all types of positions and political persuasions, develop and maintain power by exploiting womenâs lack of it. Whether itâs Donald Trump or Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein or the myriad âdevils in pussy hats,â the message remains: We trust men at our own peril.
This sounds dire, but itâs difficult, given the evidence, to argue otherwise. Of course not all men are harassers and abusers; there are, of course, good men. Many of us are related to or partnered with them. But there are enough men like Weinstein and Ailes, young and old, liberal and conservative, ones who make us feel like objects, or dirty and out of control in our workplace or classrooms, ones who can and will ruin our lives â that weâve become dependent on unofficial modes of communication to protect ourselves. Itâs no wonder, then, that so many men deride and degrade gossip: Itâs our most effective armor against their abuses.
In the wake of the Weinstein revelations, many men â including extremely plugged-in, media machinationâsavvy journalists â expressed astonishment, especially at the suggestion that everyone knew. That response is best encapsulated by a headline from The Onion â ââHow Could Harvey Weinstein Get Away With This?â Asks Man Currently Ignoring Sexual Misconduct of 17 Separate Coworkers, Friends, Acquaintances.â
It is menâs privilege, in other words, not to have to know. For women, that knowledge, obtained via gossip or whisper networks, isnât frivolous or titillating. It is a means of survival. Until men make it their duty to not just know, but to act upon that knowledge â publicly decrying and dismantling the hierarchies of power that shelter this sort of conduct â it will remain womenâs burden to bear. â
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Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in Missoula, Montana.
Contact Anne Helen Petersen at anne.helen.petersen@buzzfeed.com.
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