Does Hollywood not have HR departments and lawyers? Any HR department worth their salt would not allow meetings to be conducted in a hotel room for both perception and liability reasons. Hotels do rent small conference/meeting rooms.
^^I agree. What is wrong with this industry!
434 & 436 , amazingly I hadn't made that connection before.
Maybe there is indeed something about this industry, that I don’t know about, that would make a visit to a guy’s hotel room sound normal and non-threatening.
But absent that…
Aren’t women basically born knowing that they should not accept offers to go to some unfamiliar guy’s hotel room alone??
I guess there are the rationalizations that could kick in to suspend common sense:
- he’s much too important to want to bother with little old me;
- he’s old and ugly, he would never think I could be interested in him (actually stated)
- I’m new to this business this must be the way all important guys do business;
- This guy can literally make my career, and that is literally all I am thinking about
But it seems to me like some suspension of normal caution may have been involved, in some cases.
Not saying that it is their fault. Accepting some guy’s invitation to go to his room “to talk about her career”
should mean just what it says, and should not be considered an open invitation to being harassed or worse.
But I would have assumed most women above age 16 would know to try to avoid such situations anyway ??
Back when I worked for a corporation, I routinely asked men to my hotel room. It was necessary.
I think I would have been fired if I’d asked the company to rent a conference room every time I met with a male. I’m positive the request would have been denied for financial reasons.
I am a lawyer. I used to fly around the country for hearings. The hearings were usually held in hotels. They started early–usually about 8 or 8:30. Often, the company witnesses worked a couple of hours away. I’d fly in the day before and stay in the hotel. The witnesses would come to my hotel room after work and we’d go over their testimony, often as late as midnight. They’d meet me in my hotel room to do this.
I loved it when I stayed in one of the suite hotels, but often that wasn’t feasible. Among other reasons, the company had very firm rules on how much I could spend on a room.
I never had a problem. I guess it helped that all the male attorneys did the same thing I did, so it was considered routine.
@jonri Is still done that way now? If so, that surprises me.
But wouldn’t a meeting between a lawyer and a client (representative) or witness be a much different power relationship than a meeting between the CEO of a movie company and an actor trying to get a significant role in a movie?
In the former case, the various parties are (at least theoretically) on the same side and would not want to do anything (e.g. sexual misconduct shenanigans) that would disrupt the cooperation. In the latter case, one has a large degree of power over the other’s future career.
From what I’ve read, in some cases the initial invitation would be to meet in the hotel restaurant or bar. Then once the woman arrived, they’d be told it was moved up to the room.
If you’re meeting a creep alone in a conference room, he can still assault you.
A public location like a restaurant would be a bit safer but it’s not unreasonable to assume that many legitimate business meetings require a less public location.
Wow, jonri. That is surprising. It sounds very uncomfortable to have someone, anyone besides husband, friends or family in my hotel room. I’d much rather meet with someone at a restaurant or downstairs in the lobby. I wouldn’t ask for a conference room (though many hotels have empty conference rooms that late in the evening), but in my hotel room? Yikes! Uncomfortable.
“If you’re meeting a creep alone in a conference room, he can still assault you.”
Yup. At one co, stuff was happening inside the executive offices during work hours. The heavy oak doors were replaced with glass doors after the guy’s “voluntary” departure.
Having read far too much on this scandal, I can respond to this. First of all, as has been widely reported, they didn’t show up alone. Weinstein arranged for female assistants to be at these “meetings.” Then he would send the assistants away.
Secondly, these “hotel rooms” would be suites. It wouldn’t be like showing up at some guy’s bedroom; it would be like showing up at his house.
I have a family member in the business and it sounds like the hotel suite meetings are pretty normal. As others have said they aren’t just sitting on the end of a bed in some normal room, they were most likely in a separate room set up with a conference table and chairs. Some of these people are recognizable so I guess they like their privacy in the room which obviously is a horrible double edged sword. Privacy from the public but also so private you can have these Weinstein situations happen.
I know when my family member does press junkets they do those in a hotel - they set up a room with a blank screen in the background then just the logo changes for each TV channel or website or whoever is doing the interview. The actors just sit there and wait for the next interviewer to come in.
I hope the assistants that were knowingly setting up these young women to be victimized get outed, they had to know what was going on.
After my first year of law school I was working in the city for the summer and my roommate had a job with a small fashion company in the garment district of NYC. She hoped to work for one of the big fashion designers after law school so jumped at this summer job. It was a real eye opener and she did not last the summer. She ended up going into finance as I did.
The deal back then at her company was that they kept a large, lavish corporate apartment in the city, so on the evenings the “executives” did not feel like doing a commute or had early morning meetings they could stay in the city. According to her a few of the men would stay in together and after work invite a group of female support staff or admins out to a very nice dinner and then hold some sort of alleged “staff meeting” at the corporate apartment.
My roommate went along the first time thinking it was legit, but said once they got there the alcohol continued to flow, there was no talk of business and the executives were inviting the girls to sit next to them on the couches. She wanted out and pretended she had to meet her parents who were dropping something off to her. The whole thing turned into a fiasco as she did talk to her parents about the experience and they strong armed her to quit. Then the father called the placement office at the law school and lambasted the director for not better screening the summer jobs they were making available to the students.
At the end of the day she only worked half the summer and then had a somewhat strained relationship with the school’s placement office. So not a great result for her even though she did the right thing.
Several assistants say they knew what was going on. Read the New Yorker article.
I dare say these were not hotel rooms in the “normal” sense, they were full-up suites with living rooms, separate bedrooms, a bar, maybe even a conference room.
I’ve read how many professional interviews (think lawyers) are held in such facilities.
When one is meeting with someone and there are likely to be paparazzi, gossip mongers, autograph/selfie seekers in the vicinity, it doesn’t surprise me that many meetings are held in suites. Fact remains that taking a meeting with someone, anyone, is not an invitation for sex.
When a certain senior manager, later exec/site leader was in his office at lunch with the door closed, odds were extremely high a certain OA was in there with him. If he was doing it with one, he was doing it to more. To this day, there are women who do not believe the guy would do that, no matter what was said. It was power.
I honestly don’t know how it is done now.
@busdriver11 I wasn’t about to meet someone in a hotel lobby or at dinner to go over testimony, since it was possible that the people on the other side of the hearing or, in some cases, the hearing officers would be there. (Usually I didn’t know what they looked like.)
I had a job which was fundamentally the same at 3 different corporations and it worked the same at all of them. To the best of my knowledge none of the female attorneys at any of them ever had a problem. That doesn’t mean that none of them were sexually harrassed by people they interacted with professionally–they were. I just mean that it never happened when someone was in her hotel room preparing the testimony for the next day.
And, yes, the power dynamic was different. After all, they wanted me to help them get the best result possible.
I posted to make the point that there was a time when meeting someone in his/her hotel room for a business meeting wasn’t that uncommon. I don’t think the women had to be idiots to agree to this–especially if HW routinely invited men to his hotel room for business meetings.
The assistants also say that the meetings were originally scheduled elsewhere, then changed to the hotel room.
So imagine you are 20 and an aspiring actor. A powerful producer who could make or break you schedules a meeting at 3 o’clock in the hotel bar. You agree excitedly. At last, your big break! Then his assistant calls and says something came up, but he still wants to me you. Can he squeeze you in at 9 pm in his suite? You’ll meet with him and his assistant. Do you say, “I’m not going to his hotel room for him to molest me”? That’s a hard thing for you to say. You want the job, and after all, the assistant will be there. It looks legit.
Conducting business meetings in hotel rooms isn’t that unusual, especially in the entertainment business where a lot of contacts are made during film festivals when everyone is staying in a hotel. Not everyone has “suites.” And not everyone can/wants to conduct these meetings during social functions or in open areas where privacy is questionable. So yea, it’s a perfect setting for awkward interactions.
These situations sound ripe for abuse. I’m guessing Harvey might be just one in a long line of abusers, with people (both men and women) afreaid to speak up.
The younger brother speaks up: