Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Just a quick warning, the episode you're about to hear contains strong language. Hey, everyone. Natalie here.
Chapter 2: What is the background of Andrew Goldman and his work?
This week, we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes with Andrew Goldman, a longtime journalist whose new podcast, Dead Certain, has been getting a lot of buzz. Dead Certain is about the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley and the case against the Kennedy cousin who was convicted in the killing. But today, Andrew's not talking about that.
He's telling us another story from his vault, one that is also about how power and justice do and do not work. Here's the episode. Campsite Media
Welcome to Infamous, a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. I'm Vanessa Grigoriadis. Thank you for listening to our show. Today, we're talking to an old friend of mine who was in a scandal himself with Harvey Weinstein, one of the most infamous men in America. Now, this scandal does not involve the serious crimes you're thinking of.
Let me introduce you to Andrew Goldman, help you get to know him, and then we'll move on to Harvey. Okay, so you're in New York. You're working at the New York Observer. Can you explain what that is?
It was a full of attitude newspaper that was run then by this incredibly charismatic editor named Peter Kaplan. Generally, the marching orders were to go out and make some noise and to be funny and to be snarky.
So what were you writing about?
I was kind of doing features and stringing for their scene slash gossip column called The Transom.
I do want to just explicate this bizarre job that both of you and I seem to have had. Being sent into these parties with rich and famous people, not having to stick out your tape recorder and get a second from Kim Kardashian. Actually having to put a gown on. I had two gowns that I had to wear in order to go to the Rockefeller estate.
You know, it's how fancy of you to actually have your own gown, because when I was at the Observer, we had an Observer tuxedo that was so stinky and smelly. But anybody who had to go to one of these events would wear this thing and you'd find like, you know, a crudité in the pocket. It was like a communal, a communal, poorly fitting tuxedo.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of Harvey Weinstein in the film industry?
Imelda Marcos, who was, had been married to Ferdinand Marcos. He was one of these dictators from the Philippines who had basically robbed the Philippines of billions. And Imelda became very famous because she had a closet filled with thousands and thousands of pairs of designer shoes, like, you know, probably millions of dollars worth of shoes.
So her closet became the big joke and her shoes became the big joke. And then, of course, Leona Helmsley. I think that Leona Helmsley might have been known as the Queen of Need. She was a hotelier when Leona Helmsley died, which was probably 15 years ago. She left all of her money to this ridiculous, like, lapdog.
Trouble. It's the pampered pooch who inherited $12 million.
Yes, yeah.
Anyway, so there are a few stories that I can dine out on. One of them is the Harvey Weinstein story. Another one would have been my dinner with the Queen of Mean and the Queen of Shoes.
Okay, so tell me what happened.
So this was in the year 2000. I was frequently covering parties for the transom. However, I had a younger colleague who I was actually dating at the time named Rebecca Traister who was doing a film column. She was doing really great work on these stories on independent film in New York. And at that moment – Basically, the king of New York independent cinema was Harvey Weinstein.
He'd created something that didn't exist before, which was a real...
bonafide studio uh in tribeca which was called miramax um and he and his brother had built it from nothing and you know had had this string of oscar-winning hits like shakespeare in love my heart belongs to you but i will marry wessex a week from saturday goodwill hunting the most gifted mind to ever enter its classrooms is the person who cleans its floors
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Chapter 4: How did Andrew Goldman encounter Harvey Weinstein at the party?
But Harvey, at that moment, and I've heard from many people, legitimately felt like his work was going to make him ambassador to Israel.
Oh, God.
OK. Yeah. So he had been doing everything he could to flatter, to raise money for the ticket. And Joe Lieberman was somebody, one of his pet issues was violence in films. He felt like it was poisoning our children. What do you do with a troubled person before they become a killer? What about the impact of violence in the entertainment culture?
So Harvey Weinstein, the story goes, and Rebecca had done a pretty good job of reporting it by that point. Harvey Weinstein was sitting on this film because he thought that it would offend Joe Lieberman, the release of this film, because it was a violent film.
So Rebecca had for days, if not weeks, been trying to get somebody at Miramax to comment, some official comment as to why they were burying this film. And there was this invite that came for a party at the Tribeca Grand Hotel hosted by Harvey Weinstein. And so it allowed me to bring her to a party that otherwise she wouldn't have been invited to.
And she could actually go up to the man himself and ask him the question.
We're going to do a break, and then we'll share what happened when Andrew got to Harvey Weinstein's party, because this is the serious altercation that I referenced at the top of the episode.
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Chapter 5: What led to the altercation between Andrew Goldman and Harvey Weinstein?
possibly frame this as us being the aggressors in this situation and you know in the post Trump it's sort of easy to understand how stuff like this happens then it wasn't quite so easy but I think at that point I realized after having done nothing that my only defense was to actually get it on record and so I went to the to the nearest police precinct and said I want to report that I was attacked last night by Harvey Weinstein and
They did not arrest him, but he was aware that I'd filed a police report, which changed things, I think, from the Miramax perspective considerably when they got wind of this. And that was my only defense because I was told I couldn't talk to the press.
So what was your takeaway from this as a youngster? So you're watching all this happening and what are you thinking about New York society?
As a youngster, my takeaway was I thought that I was in a business, the media, which valued scoop, which valued news. Now, I don't think that I was under the illusion that it valued truth, but I was under the – that a great scoop like this would trump any other factors.
And what I didn't realize was the raw power that he wielded trumped any of the news interest that anybody would actually have in the real story. That he had enough money to spread around, enough people well-positioned enough to bury it.
After you file the police report, nothing happens, right? The police never go and talk to him.
Police don't do anything. Absolutely nothing happened.
And he just goes on to rape women just constantly. So how do you think this affected you as a person?
It made me somewhat, I have to say, I think that probably at that point, I left The Observer not that long after. I think that it felt like maybe it was time for me to make a transition. It was time for me to get a new job somewhere else.
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