I met Weinstein and, yes, I’d heard the rumours

According to an ex-employee of Harvey Weinstein’s, the movie producer once whispered something to himself that she found so disturbing she wrote it down. After leaving his film company, where she claimed to have acted as a ‘honeypot’ to lure young models and actresses to meetings with her boss in hotel rooms, she signed a confidentiality agreement. But she has decided to speak out anyway. The words he muttered were: ‘There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.’

This is one of the less shocking details in a long New Yorker article published on Tuesday in which 13 women allege that Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, including three who accuse him of rape. This followed a New York Times investigative piece last week in which the 65-year-old producer is accused of having reached legal settlements with eight women over a period dating back 30 years. The Weinstein Company initially said that he would be taking a leave of absence and his lawyer, Lisa Bloom, described the allegations as ‘patently false’. Then, a few days later, the company announced he had been fired and his lawyer decided she could no longer work for him.

If the accusations are true — and Weinstein denies he has ever had non-consensual sex — this scandal will confirm the deepest suspicions of American conservatives about Hollywood liberals. Until now, Weinstein has been one of the film industry’s most prominent supporters of progressive causes, particularly women’s rights. He helped to endow a chair at Rutgers University in the name of Gloria Steinem, the feminist author, and in January he made a point of joining a women’s march at the Sundance Film Festival to protest against the serial groper in the White House.