Episode 4: The Assistants

The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow

Pineapple Street Studios

News, Society & Culture, True Crime

4.8 • 10.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2019

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2017, Rowena Chiu declined requests for interviews from Ronan Farrow and other reporters. Chiu was 24 years old when she took a job as an assistant to Harvey Weinstein. It was only a matter of weeks before she found herself in a situation that would change the course of her life. In this episode, Chiu recounts her alleged assault, the effort to silence her through a non-disclosure agreement, and the forces that kept her from speaking to journalists for 20 years. She and others with allegations against Weinstein discuss the complex pressures that prevent sources from coming forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, I know we've done a little warning before every episode, but just a heads up this
0:05.3	week's story delves deeper into a specific account of sexual violence.
0:09.7	If that's something that's upsetting to you, please take care while you're listening.
0:14.5	What did you think when I first called you and started texting you?
0:18.8	Complete terror.
0:19.8	Yeah, it's always really frightening.
0:22.6	Over the 20 years, every time I saw a journalist name pop up in my inbox, there would always
0:28.3	be a moment of complete blind terror.
0:32.9	For 20 years, Rowena Chu lived in fear of talking about her allegation that Harvey Weinstein
0:38.5	tried to rape her when she was his assistant in the late 90s.
0:42.6	And then about two and a half years ago, she started getting calls from me and other reporters.
0:47.6	I remember hiding in my bathroom with my very young baby who was only six months old and
0:55.2	speaking and hushed with us, so we were keeping paranoid secrets of the Saudi government.
1:03.3	You know, it was really still quite frightening.
1:06.9	Rowena declined to talk to me or any other reporter back in 2017.
1:11.0	She only started talking about this all publicly this fall.
1:14.4	Sometimes I'm asked in interviews, why did it take you such a long time to come forward
1:18.3	with your story?
1:19.3	You know, the New Yorker and the New York Times broke it in October 2017 and you didn't
1:23.5	speak until September 2019, that's almost two whole years.
1:28.1	What were you doing in those two whole years and why did it take you so long to come forward
1:31.8	with your story?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pineapple Street Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Pineapple Street Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.