Latest Harv slap a triple threat
3 women in class-action suit
One week after being cuffed and charged with sex crimes in Manhattan, disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been slapped with more sexual-assault claims, including accusations that he raped a woman at the Tribeca Grand Hotel during a pitch meeting for her startup.
Three women, including tech entrepreneur Melissa Thompson, filed a class-action lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on Friday accusing the man behind “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction” of luring them to hotel rooms around the world under the false pretense of talking business.
They are suing Weinstein — as well as Miramax and The Weinstein Company — for assault, battery and racketeering.
Thompson, now the CEO of a health-care technology company, says she met Weinstein in 2011 through mutual friends and tried to sell him on her video-streaming company.
Weinstein agreed to meet with her in his Tribeca office, and immediately put the moves on her, the lawsuit claims.
“So am I allowed to flirt with you?” Weinstein, 66, asked, according to the suit.
“Ummmmm. We’ll see. A little bit,” she said.
“Weinstein became curt and said: ‘Oh, then I won’t. What do you want?’ making clear that she had to play if she wanted his business,” according to the complaint.
Weinstein then told Thompson to meet him for a drink at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, “promising to make a deal for Internet services,” the suit claims.
But instead of inking a deal, Weinstein took off his pants and “walked towards her naked from the waist down,” the lawsuit claims.
“Weinstein grabbed her, using brute force to push her flat on the bed on her stomach as he pulled her dress up and moved her underwear to the side,” the lawsuit claims.
A second woman, Canadian actress Larissa Gomes, says the former media mogul “demanded to see her breasts” in a hotel room in Toronto. When she resisted, he allegedly screamed: “You know Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd were exactly where you are at one point. Look at them now.”
The third woman, actress Caitlin Dulany, says Weinstein sexually assaulted her in her New York City apartment in the mid ’90s and at the Cannes Film Festival.
Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.
The lawsuit also accuses Weinstein’s lawyer, Ben Brafman, and Brafman’s former associate Alex Spiro of misleading Thompson into turning over video and audio evidence against Weinstein.
Brafman and Spiro deny the allegations.