Harvey Weinstein Downplays Epstein Ties Despite Evidence Of Overlap

Disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein minimized his links to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein in a sweeping new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, despite evidence suggesting the two convicted sex offenders were far from strangers.

Asked if he knew Epstein during a prison interview published on Tuesday, Weinstein said, “No. I maybe ran into him once or twice. He didn’t travel in my circles. We certainly were not friends.”

Weinstein further distanced himself from Epstein when the interviewer compared the media attention both men received and asked if Weinstein believed Epstein may have been “unfairly accused” of sexual predation, just as the filmmaker has long claimed he was.

“No. I just know what I read in the papers — I can’t say one way or another,” Weinstein said. “I don’t have a lot of faith in the media. Or prosecutors, either. But the crimes he’s charged with are really awful. They’re nothing at all like mine.”

But despite Weinstein’s claims, the men do appear to have inhabited the same wealthy and powerful circles.

Epstein and Weinstein were both part of a group of investors who tried to buy New York magazine in 2003, and each had close ties to publicist-turned-Hollywood-exile Peggy Siegal, who recently told New York magazine that the film producer “hated Jeffrey.” She did not elaborate as to why.

Siegal never formally represented Epstein, but files released by the Department of Justice include over 5,000 emails between the two. In one, Siegal describes her client as a “world-class bully.”

Siegal says she even tried to leverage Epstein’s relationship with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince, to get the Weinstein-produced 2010 film “The King’s Speech” to the royal family, though she apparently did so behind Weinstein’s back.

Inclusion in the Epstein investigation files does not necessarily imply a link to Epstein’s crimes. But attorney Brad Edwards, who represented the late Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, claimed that Epstein and Weinstein had a falling-out after Weinstein got rough with one of the financier’s “favorite girls” while getting a massage at Epstein’s apartment in France.

“Jeffrey viewed the aggressive mistreatment as disrespectful to him,” Edwards wrote in his 2020 memoir “Relentless Pursuit.” “Jeffrey then came into the room, got in Harvey’s face, and kicked him out of his house, delivering the message that he was never to come back.”

The Department of Justice’s so-called Epstein files include records of an FBI informant who alleged that Epstein had trafficked her to Weinstein. They also contain emails Epstein sent to a top Kremlin official asking for help silencing the woman, who he said was trying to blackmail “a group of powerful [businessmen] in New York.”

“It is bad for business for everyone involved. She arrived New York Saturday of last week staying at the Four Seasons. On 57 street. Suggestions?” Epstein wrote in a July 2015 email to Sergey Belyakov, Russia’s former deputy minister of economic development.

No criminal charges resulted from these accusations, and Weinstein’s attorney Arthur Aidala declined to comment to News Nation about the FBI memo.

The files also include a handwritten note from March 2005 that appears to show that Weinstein had tried to reach Epstein by phone.

Though there are no records of direct correspondence between Epstein and Weinstein in the Epstein files, the documents include multiple emails in which Epstein asked others about the sexual assault allegations against Weinstein that came to light in late 2017.

“How bad does the harvey weinstein story get?” Epstein asked Brad Karp, the chair of law firm Paul, Weiss at the time.

Weinstein is currently detained at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, awaiting retrial on one of three rape charges overturned in 2024. During a separate retrial last June, he was reconvicted of one charge and acquitted of another. The third charge, which will be retried starting April 14, ended in a mistrial.

He was separately found guilty of rape, forced oral copulation and third-degree sexual misconduct in California in 2022 and subsequently sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.