Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Why Weinstein Held On For So Long and Fell So Fast

An interview with Timur Kuran, the social scientist who wrote a path-breaking book on "preference falsification."

October 17, 2017 at 12:00 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

Open secrets.
Photographer: Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

More than three dozen women have now alleged that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them. It’s been little more than a week since the New York Times and The New Yorker broke the story, and Weinstein’s world has collapsed, with new allegations continuing to pile up. He’s lost his company and his wife. He’s been stripped of his credits on TV shows and movies and expelled from the Oscar-granting Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- only the second person ever to suffer that punishment -- and from the Producers Guild of America. Seemingly overnight, the feared and admired king of Hollywood has become a powerless pariah.

If Weinstein’s behavior was really an open secret -- it did, after all, make it into a joke on “30 Rock ” -- how did he keep it up so long? How and why did so many people hide the truth? And how could such a quick reversal happen?