Chiu, who became Weinstein’s assistant in 1998 in London, says he attempted to rape her in a hotel room before she got away, which was the start of many years of secret trauma. On the second anniversary of the #MeToo movement, she told her story in a soul-crushing opinion piece in The New York Times, writing about the power dynamics between Weinstein and herself and how they worked in his favor: gender, race, seniority, and wealth. Chiu also contributed her story to the recent book She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.
“Where the BE HEARD Act resonates with me is the intersectionality between racism and sexism, the power imbalances,” Chiu told Refinery29. “It resonates with me that it’s working to extend an equal playing field to bring equality to many workers who are being ignored and underrepresented.”
“Having Rowena here with her powerful testimony to these incidents and the way these legal tools were used against her, knowing what this did to her own life, her own health, her own agency, is the real reason I wanted her to come,” Clark told Refinery29. Trump, who himself has been accused of sexual harassment or assault by more than 20 women, is part of the culture that kept Chiu silent for so long, she added. “There is something about the State of the Union and looking this president in the eye and saying, ‘You cannot erase us.’ The truth is close, and we’re here to bear witness.”
Another key part of BE HEARD is that it would ban companies from making workers sign mandatory arbitration clauses when they’re hired and certain types of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). In her New York Times story, Chiu described the harrowing experience of being pressured into signing a restrictive NDA after the incident with Weinstein, including being made to stay in an office overnight “with the barest minimum of food and drink” for the negotiations. The NDA kept her “from speaking to family and friends, and made it extremely difficult to work with a therapist or a lawyer, or to aid a criminal investigation. Chillingly, it also required us to identify anyone we had already spoken to,” she wrote. When she went public, she essentially broke her NDA. Weinstein, who has claimed they had a consensual “six-month physical relationship,” has threatened to sue her for this, she wrote.
Original story here.
