When you see a lot of movies and TV shows, you do a lot of wondering about what happened behind the scenes. Why did that actress get so many parts? Why did this one rise so quickly? Why did that one disappear? Wasn’t that nude scene gratuitous? Put on the magical sunglasses and you see the ugliness. Salma Hayek said Weinstein came to the set of her 2002 film Frida and threatened to shut it down unless she filmed an out-of-nowhere nude lesbian sex scene to put in the picture. Dewy young things are apparently told that this sort of thing is “the price of admission” by the male producer-director-agent nexus. Judging by her subsequent choices, I’m guessing the privately educated 21-year-old Reese Witherspoon wasn’t thrilled to be told to go nude for the 1998 film Twilight. She came to Los Angeles to act, not to strip. But, hey: price of admission. Now those images are out there, forever.

Ashley Judd was all set to play a big role in The Lord of the Rings. (The Liv Tyler part.) Then declined Weinstein’s invitation to explore what was under his bathrobe. He spoke to director Peter Jackson. He didn’t say, “She rejected my advances.” He told Jackson that Judd was a nightmare to work with, in maybe 1998. He did the same with Mira Sorvino. These actresses were red-hot. Sorvino had an Oscar at 28. She never got a lead role in a major movie after 1999. Judd continued to work but not in big-budget movies. She might have been a superstar. Annabella Sciorra, who alleged that Weinstein raped her when she was at her peak in the early 1990s, said she couldn’t get a role for three years after the encounter. (Weinstein has denied all charges of rape and sexual assault.) The producer simply moved on to the next young cutie. There are busloads of them arriving all the time. Agents and managers continued to send the girls to meet with him alone. Did they ever ask themselves if they were complicit in systematic criminal sexual abuse? Did it ever occur to them that even those actresses who played along with the sex game had been thrown into a lose-lose situation no one should ever have to face?