Carly Simon was ‘embarrassed’ by Harvey Weinstein during film screening with the Clintons
Singer/songwriter said that people were ‘intimidated’ by Weinstein’s power
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Your support makes all the difference.Singer Carly Simon has described how Harvey Weinstein invited her to a film screening, then gave her an out-of-tune guitar and ordered her to play for celebrity guests including Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Simon said she had been invited to Camp David for a showing of Happy, Texas, which was released by Weinstein’s Miramax Films in 1999, only to be “embarrassed” by the producer’s unexpected demand.
“Harvey had the nerve to get this cheap guitar from somewhere and bring it to me in the theatre seat and say: ‘Sing now. Sing ‘Anticipation’.’ The guitar was out of tune and one of the strings was off it. So he embarrassed me greatly,” she said.
“I couldn’t not do it because everybody turned around to look at me in the theatre and there I was.”
The singer/songwriter also recalled an earlier incident in which Weinstein had recruited her to work on a film project, only to not pay her once the work was completed.
“He asked me to score a movie that his wife at the time had made, a little Japanese cartoon, and so I did it in good faith,” she recalls. “I hired musicians and scored the movie and, at the recording session, I said: ‘Well, how shall I get paid?’ He said: ‘Well, we’ll figure it out later,’ and he never followed up.”
Simon, who has written a new memoir titled Touched by the Sun, additionally told The Guardian that people were “intimidated” by Weinstein’s power. “I can just see him in all the scenes that are painted of him with the women,” she said. “I was lucky not to be one of them.”
Weinstein has been accused of sexual misconduct, including rape and assault, by more than 80 women. He denies all the allegations.
Weinstein’s trial on rape charges is scheduled for January and will take place in New York.