In his first major sit-down from behind bars, the disgraced mogul fumes about life at Rikers (“I’m dying here”), his wrecked legacy and his delusions about the future (“I will be proven innocent. That I promise you”).
The day before I was to meet Harvey Weinstein, a blizzard dumped a foot of snow on New York, grinding the city to a halt. It seemed like an omen. Waking in my hotel the next morning, I half hoped that Rikers would be closed as well. Then my phone buzzed with a terse email from a prison administrator: “We’re on!” it said.
So, I called an Uber and nervously set off with a cameraman and a trunk full of recording equipment for the short voyage to Rikers, the notorious island facility in Queens where Weinstein has been incarcerated for much of the past six years.
