Two comedians and an actor confronted Harvey Weinstein after seeing him attend a showcase for young actors at a bar in New York City on Wednesday night.
All three were reportedly booed, asked to leave or insulted for addressing the disgraced film producer and alleged serial rapist, as seen in videos of the encounters and according to interviews.
The encounters took place at Actors Hour, an event billed for young actors and artists and held at the Downtime Bar in Manhattan’s East Village on Wednesday night. Weinstein was there with an entourage of people, which reportedly included “young women.”
Amber Rollo, a comedian who said she insulted Weinstein off-stage Wednesday night, tweeted a video of her friend Kelly Bachman, also a comedian, confronting Weinstein while performing her set.
“The response in the room was not positive,” Rollo said in an email to HuffPost, describing the audience’s reaction to the verbal attacks on Weinstein. “I felt scared for my safety.”
That video and Rollo’s tweets have since gone viral.
When Bachman took the stage that night, she noted that there was an “elephant in the room” and “Freddie Krueger in the room,” referring to Weinstein.
“I didn’t know that we had to bring our own mace and rape whistles to Actors Hour,” Bachman said as people in the audience booed her. At least one person can be heard telling her to “shut up.”
“Oh, shut up? This kills at group therapy for rape survivors,” she said in response to the negative reaction. Then she revealed that she herself was a rape survivor.
“I have been raped, surprisingly not by anyone here,” Bachman continued. “And I’ve never been able to confront those guys, so just a general ‘fuck you.’”
Bachman later told BuzzFeed News that seeing Weinstein during her performance was a “nightmare come to life.”
“It kind of felt like old-school Harvey to me — having his own table in a Lower East Side bar, surrounded by actors,” Bachman told the news site.
More than 70 women, including many actors, have accused Weinstein of rape, sexual assault and misconduct. He pleaded not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault stemming from accusations of two women and was released from jail after posting $1 million in bail in 2018.
After Bachman’s performance, an actor named Zoe Stuckless yelled at Weinstein, calling him a rapist, as seen in another video that has gone viral. A woman can be seen asking her to leave, then Stuckless was ushered out.
“Nobody’s really going to say anything,” Stuckless said while standing next to Weinstein’s table. “I’m going to stand 4 feet from a fucking rapist and nobody’s going to say anything.”
The actor later wrote in a Facebook post that they couldn’t sit in silence and watch as Weinstein enjoyed a night watching “young artists be vulnerable on stage.”
“The more I sat there the more furious I was at all of our inaction,” Stuckless wrote. “This room was a microcosm of our whole community. And I couldn’t sit there and let him laugh. So I spoke up.”
Bachman and Stuckless didn’t immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment.
In a series of tweets posted Wednesday and Thursday, Rollo explained that she had also approached Weinstein after another person, apparently Stuckless, had shouted at him while crying during intermission.
Rollo, who says she also survived rape, called Weinstein “a fucking monster and told him he should disappear,” according to her tweets.
Then a person who was with the film producer asked Rollo who she was and called her a “cunt” before a woman who was sitting with Weinstein “gently guided” her out, Rollo said.
As part of his bail agreement, Weinstein surrendered his passport and agreed to wear a tracking device. In August, a third woman joined the pending criminal case against him, adding two more charges of predatory sexual assault to his case. He has pleaded not guilty.
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Weinstein’s representative Juda Engelmayer said the producer was “out with friends” when the confrontations broke out Wednesday night.
“This scene was uncalled for, downright rude and an example of how due process today is being squashed by the public, trying to take it away in the courtroom too,” Engelmayer said.
Rollo said that she has received an “overwhelmingly positive” response to her tweets on her encounter with Weinstein.
“I was really disheartened last night but the response online has helped a lot,” she told HuffPost. “Of course there is the occasional troll, but as a woman in comedy, I’m used to shutting them down.”