If I had to sum up the general consensus on Harvey Weinstein it’s that he was the worst of a particular type of powerful man. That is to say he was not unique but representative of a group of men who abused their power to take advantage of, and in many cases just outright rape, vulnerable women. Harvey wasn’t unique so much as he was uniquely placed in a major industry where a lot of young, beautiful women are looking for work.

But a piece published earlier this month by New York magazine suggests Weinstein may have had another issue driving him to his repulsive behavior. Based on a recently published book about Weinstein’s downfall, the article suggests that Weinstein’s body had been permanently deformed by a medical emergency he experienced in 1999. [Be warned, this is gross.]

In the winter of 1999, Harvey Weinstein was medevacked from the island of St. Barthélemy to New York City with a mysterious life-threatening bacterial infection. Whatever it was embarrassed him so much that he checked into an undisclosed hospital under a fake name, shunned visitors, and expended the majority of his limited energy to keep the press from learning he was hospitalized at all. For decades, he would claim the near-death experience, which left him with scars from a stomach operation and a tracheotomy, was the result of food poisoning.

But during his rape trial in 2020, a picture of what might really have happened to Weinstein began to emerge. One of his victims, Jessica Mann, explained that when she first saw him naked, she “thought he was deformed and intersex.” Mann went on to explain that in addition to Weinstein’s poor hygiene, blackheads, and predilection for golden showers, “he does not have testicles, and it appears like he has a vagina.” Her description is consistent with that of Fournier’s gangrene, a rare infection that burns and shrivels skin in the genital area and often requires surgical removal of the testicles. Jurors were later shown full-frontal photographs of Weinstein naked to corroborate testimony from Mann and other women who described his body. Those photographs have remained sealed, but jurors seemed repelled by what they saw, wincing and passing the images along quickly, as if they could not bear to look at or hold them.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this but looking back I see that the Daily Mail wrote about it back in June of 2020. Their story was based on a series of articles published by Graydon Carter. Those articles are behind a paywall but here’s what the Daily Mail reported:

According to the profile, ‘At the time, Harvey blamed something he ate. But for years after, the tracheotomy scar from the scary, near-death experience was impossible to hide.’

He had been stricken with Fournier’s gangrene, ‘an acute infection of the genital region that diabetics and middle-aged men are prone to.’

Weinstein was both.

Some patients require skin grafts while extreme cases can require an orchiectomy – the removal of the testicles – as seems to have been the case with Weinstein.

Weinstein hinted at some sort of physical ‘trauma’ in an unreleased public statement in 2017 when he attempted to explain away his anger and sex addiction by recounting all that he had been through physically.

So the idea here isn’t that the deformity made Weinstein what he was only that it may have exacerbated his personal desire to be seen as a Playboy rather than what he was…a deformed man who’d lost part of his genitals.

Despite all the true power he amassed, Weinstein was a sexual fraud. He would call himself a sex addict, but his history with women bears more in common with incel culture. Like incels, he claimed women were withholding sex that was rightly his. After his crimes were exposed, Weinstein became desperate to propagate an image of himself as a hedonist and a cad, but these were flattering smoke screens he preferred to the truth. Weinstein was addicted not to sex as much as he was addicted to anything — like food, cigarettes, or rape — that could make him forget who he is. And along with release and oblivion, he hunted an elusive assurance that women would come to him of their own volition. He “liked the belief he was a Don Juan,” one of his victims told Auletta. “He wanted to feel like he wasn’t a rapist.”

Some of the time the women who slept with him did so willingly albeit in the hopes of securing work in his films. But Weinstein is in prison because on many occasions that wasn’t enough. He couldn’t accept no for an answer and he became a predator. Again, that doesn’t make him unique. As we’ve seen there were a lot of predators in Hollywood and the media. Still, I do wonder if the reason he became, at least arguably, the worst of his type is that he had this secret deformity.