The Los Angeles police department has opened an investigation into sexual assault allegations made against disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as famous victims continued to come forward, including 12 Years a Slave star Lupita Nyong’o, who published a powerful personal essay detailing her alleged harassment in the New York Times.
An Italian actress and model, whose name has not been released, told the LAPD on Thursday that she was raped by Weinstein in a hotel near Beverly Hills in 2013, police confirmed on Thursday.
“The LAPD robbery and homicide division has interviewed a potential sexual assault victim involving Harvey Weinstein, which allegedly occurred in 2013,” an LAPD spokesman said.
Weinstein is already under investigation by London’s Metropolitan police over five allegations of sexual assault from the 1980s to 2015, and detectives in New York have said they are looking into a 2004 sexual assault allegation against the producer by actor Lucia Evans.
Dave Ring, lawyer for the Los Angeles woman accusing Weinstein of rape, said his client thanked the “courageous women” who had previously spoken out.
Unlike some of the other allegations made against Weinstein, this alleged incident does not fall outside of the state statute of limitations, meaning that he could potentially be prosecuted for a crime.
Meanwhile, Oscar-winner Nyong’o claimed on Thursday that Weinstein harassed her when she was a young film student, adding to the growing list of women who have made similar accusations. She wrote that Weinstein invited her to his home for a screening, asked to give her a massage, and when she tried to sidestep the request by offering to give him one instead, propositioned her for sex.
“If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing,” she wrote. “He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them.”
The 12 Years a Slave actor wrote that she “felt sick in the pit of [her] stomach” after allegations by more than 50 women became public.
The number of women accusing Weinstein of harassment has continued to grow since a New York Times investigation at the start of the month alleged incidents of sexual harassment, and the New Yorker published three allegations of rape.
Weinstein has said many of the details are inaccurate, and has denied accusations of criminal sexual harassment, rape and sexual assault. Sallie Hofmeister, a spokeswoman for Weinstein, has said: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein … with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.”
The producer remains in sex addiction “rehab” in Arizona.
On Thursday, director Quentin Tarantino – one of Weinstein’s most frequent and celebrated collaborators – said that he had been aware of alleged assaults by the producer and said he wished he had done more to help women affected.
“There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip,” he said in the interview with the New York Times. “It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.
“I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard. If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him.”
Going one step further, Kevin Smith, a director who, like Tarantino worked closely with Weinstein on a number of projects, announced that he would donate all future residuals from his Weinstein-backed films to the non-profit Women in Film, which “advocates for and advances the careers for women working in the screen industries”.
“My entire career [is] wrapped up in something really fucking horrible,” Smith said on his podcast. “I’m not looking for sympathy. I know it’s not my fault, but I didn’t fucking help.
“I sat out there talking about this man like he was a hero, like he was my friend, like he was my father and shit like that.”
Weinstein Company staff wrote an open letter claiming that, while they knew about Weinstein’s flaws, they didn’t know the extent to which his behavior had been predatory and unlawful.
“We all knew that we were working for a man with an infamous temper,” the staff, thought to number more than 30, wrote. “We did not know we were working for a serial sexual predator. We knew that our boss could be manipulative. We did not know that he used his power to systematically assault and silence women,” the letter read.
The ripple effects of the Weinstein allegations continue to reach far beyond the confines of Hollywood. For much of the week, the hashtag #metoo trended on social media with women in industries far beyond entertainment sharing their experiences of harassment. According to CBS News there were more than 12 million “Me Too” Facebook posts, comments, reactions in just a 24-hour period in the US.
In France the social media campaign coalesced around the Twitter hashtag #balancetonporc (“expose your pig”).
But not everyone was on board. Catherine Deneuve, arguably France’s most celebrated screen performer, said the“flood” of social media posting was “terrible” in an interview with French HuffPost. “Is it interesting to talk about it like this? Does it help? Does it add anything? Will it solve the problem in any way?”