MPs forced to wait for Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein ducks MPs challenge / Justin Welby's trip to Wetherspoon's / Annabel's leaves eager members in purgatory / Peter Mandelson on the Corbyn 'cult' 
No show: Harvey Weinstein
AFP/Getty Images
28 March 2018

MUCH has been made of Mark Zuckerberg’s no-show at the DCMS select committee hearing on Monday — but where were Harvey Weinstein, or representatives from Disney and Miramax, who were called to appear before a select committee on sexual harassment this morning?

Zelda Perkins, pictured, a former assistant to Weinstein who has pressed for non-disclosure agreements like the one gagging her to be regulated, was giving evidence to the committee. It is, she says, “annoying” that there is not as much fuss over Weinstein “declining” the request to appear as there is over Zuckerberg. “I think it’s pretty telling that nobody from the Weinstein camp is prepared to show their face, as if my NDA was a perfectly normal contract.”

Last autumn Perkins broke the NDA she had signed nearly 20 years ago. Weinstein sexually harassed her and a female colleague for a number of years, she claims. The two women eventually agreed a £250,000 settlement as well as the NDA.

Perkins says that her NDA had another clause: that Weinstein, as part of the bargain, should seek treatment for his behaviour. But, she says, the law firm which holds the NDA is refusing to release it to her because Weinstein has refused permission. The clause might have stopped his harassment, had he honoured it, she says.

Perkins worked in Weinstein’s Miramax office in Soho and quit in 1998.

The Women and Equalities Committee is examining the ethics of non-disclosure agreements as part of its inquiry into sexual harassment.

The Weinstein Company filed for bankruptcy last week and said that all those bound by NDAs had been released. But Perkins, despite the committee asking for the NDA, says lawyers are still keeping her from seeing it. “The idea we have been released in some great moral gesture is spin. I am essentially being abused by the NDA that I am still not allowed to hold a copy of, even after the committee’s request.”

Corbyn ‘cult’ has Mandy in a spin

PETER Mandelson still puzzles over the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. New Labour’s former Minister of Darkness, Smoke and Mirrors, said at the Design Museum’s Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics exhibition: “Corbyn has taken a disparate set of interests — young idealists, old Trotskyists, traditional working class, educated urban professionals and eco-warriors — and united them under his own notion of ‘the people’. The ‘many’ vs the few and united behind a single personality... it’s a sort of cult rather than a coherent programme or credible manifesto.”

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LILY Allen, returning to music after a hiatus, doesn’t understand accusations that she spends too much time arguing on Twitter. “I’m just spending time on my phone,” she tells Vice. “You’re willing to spend three hours in the mirror getting the right selfie... I would rather spend three hours arguing with racists.”

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IT’S a busy Holy Week for the Archbishop of Canterbury — or is that boozy? Yesterday he visited the world’s largest Wetherspoon’s, the Royal Victoria Pavilion in Ramsgate, and Britain’s smallest brewpub, The Four Candles in Broadstairs. “He was doing other things that weren’t pub-related as well,” said his spokesperson.

Munroe Bergdorf back in the pink after the Labour Party sees red

Still worth it: Munroe Bergdorf and Vanessa White (Photo Dave Benett/Getty Images)
Dave Benett/Getty Images

MUNROE Bergdorf had been keeping a lower profile following her appointment — and then hasty resignation — as a Labour Party adviser on equality issues. The former L’Oréal model was hired by shadow equalities minister Dawn Butler, but was in the role for only a week before social media posts surfaced showing she had called Suffragettes “white supremacists”.

She also made jokes about lesbians: “The tweets were juvenile jokes made with friends who identify as LGBT+ regarding a website called ‘Lesbians who look like Justin Bieber’,” Bergdorf explained. “However they were in bad taste and certainly not reflective of who I am today.”

Earlier she was sacked from a L’Oréal campaign after another Facebook post showed she described “all white people as racist”. Bergdorf was at Icetank in Covent Garden for the launch of a new beauty range for Dr Murad.

SW1A

AT THE explosive meeting of Labour’s Parliamentary Party on Monday night, one shadow minister was conspicuously neutral as MPs railed against anti-Semitism in the party. Dawn Butler, pictured, who has the Women and Equalities brief, apparently neither applauded nor showed any emotion.

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DAVID Abrahams, the Labour donor who has given more than £600,000 to the party since 2000, has announced he is leaving it. He wrote on Twitter, “Labour very discriminatory! We fight against racism and anti-Semitism not support by default!”

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JOHN Bercow remains unmoved by the opening of pasty chain Greggs in Westminster station. Despite MPs’ excitement, the Speaker is a Caffè Nero loyalist. He has been spotted balancing no fewer than four cups while crossing the road before most people have even got out of bed.

Quote of the day

‘We don’t name-call in this chamber.' Speaker John Bercow reminds MPs of Commons courtesy after Boris Johnson referred to Emily Thornberry as “Lady, the Baroness whatever it is — I cannot remember what it is — Nugee" (her married title)

FOMO frenzy at spanking new Annabel’s

New membership: Salma Hayak and Rita Ora (Photo Dave Benett/Getty Images for Vogue)
Dave Benett/Getty Images for Vog

THE new Annabel’s has had a sumptuous £100 million refurbishment, which includes a Picasso in the reception and loos that look like Marie-Antoinette’s knicker drawer. But also overhauled was the cobwebbed membership (the original club opened in 1963) causing the worst outbreak of social anxiety since, I don’t know, the opening party of Studio 54?

Now there’s a “waitlist” popularly known as “purgatory”. Old members are feverishly calling to ask what they can do to get in. Guests have included Salma Hayek and Rita Ora, right. Clever owner Richard Caring for creating such intense hype.

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