Important Journalism

I sat with Kordel Davis this summer in the cacophonous food court in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, and we talked about that moment. “They made you doubt yourself,” I said, and—in as pure an expression of teenage-male anguish as I’ve ever seen, tears welling in his eyes—he said, “Like I’ve doubted myself my whole life.”

Kordel was born to a 16-year-old single mother in Reading, Pennsylvania, and was removed from her care and placed in two successive foster homes. At age 3, he was adopted by a white couple who had already adopted 9-year-old white twins from foster care, and who would adopt a black infant the next year; they divorced soon after that, at which point family life was further complicated by frequent moves, and the eventual introduction of new stepparents and stepsiblings. Kordel attended a majority-white high school, where he made good friends and had many caring teachers, and where he found a mentor in the football coach. Yet he also says that he was hazed as a freshman on that team, including by an older white player who beat him in front of others, and that he was called a racist nickname by his teammates. When the nickname came to the attention of a teacher and his coach, the other players claimed that it was meant to be affectionate.

“After all that,” I asked him, “why would you join an all-white fraternity with these privileged kids?”

“Because I’ve been around kids like that all my life,” he said. “I know how to handle them.”

Or at least he thought he did.

The story of black members of historically white fraternities is a complex one. Although the clubs started opening their ranks to African Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, they have few black members; nationally, only 3 percent of Beta Theta Pi’s members are black, for example. There is reason to believe that official membership policy and actual practice diverge. In 2015, cellphone video of some Sigma Alpha Epsilon members from the University of Oklahoma singing a fraternity song became public:

There will never be a n— SAE
There will never be a n— SAE
You can hang him from a tree
But he’ll never sing with me
There will never be a n— SAE

Any hope that this was the local custom of one rogue chapter disappeared when authorities discovered where the brothers had learned the lyrics: on a 2011 “national leadership cruise” that brought together hundreds of active and alumni members.

When Kordel Davis was interviewed by a police detective after Tim Piazza’s death, he had a scar on his forehead, which was still there when I met with him over the summer. It was from an injury sustained during his own bid-acceptance night the previous semester, when he, too, had fallen after drinking heavily. “My shirt, my phone—they were covered in so much blood,” he told me. His fraternity brothers put him to bed, he survived the night, and the next morning they took him for medical care—at a privately owned urgent-care clinic instead of University Health Services, where hazing might have been suspected. Keeping that incident secret was one of the costs of membership. Yet after Kordel was initiated, he did not seem to have the full measure of brotherhood that the others enjoyed. Once, he brought some friends to a party—to which other brothers had also brought guests—but was told he was not allowed to have guests, and so he had to leave, embarrassed, with his friends.

Kordel seemed rootless when I talked with him over the summer. “I lost my future,” he told me. He was seized by remorse over what had happened to Tim, and he had decided not to return to Penn State, although he had loved it there and had been awarded a significant financial-aid package. He’d read enough on online message boards to know what fraternity members on campus thought of him: that he had ratted out his brothers by talking so openly to the police, and thereby ruined Greek life for everyone.

I thought about the summons he had received from the police department, about the day he had gone there, alone, a 19-year-old black kid in a county that is 90 percent white, to report on events surrounding the death of a white college student. Still, the police were kind to him. They had a nickname for him, based on his actions on the tape: the Good Samaritan.

When I dropped Kordel off at his father’s home, I wondered whether this experience would indeed cost him his future. But he is resilient, incredibly so. By summer’s end he had been accepted at Rutgers, and had taken out student loans to pay his tuition. Perhaps he won’t have to pay them back himself. I asked a lawyer with extensive knowledge of fraternity litigation whether Kordel might have his own civil claim against Beta Theta Pi, and he affirmed that—given the hazing he had experienced as well as the scarring—he could indeed have a “deep-six-figure claim.”

In late may, shortly after the grand jury’s harrowing presentment was released to the public, Jud Horras appeared on CBS This Morning. In a conversation with Gayle King, Charlie Rose, and Norah O’Donnell, he was measured, calm, and so ungraspable—always separating the thugs of one rogue chapter from the larger entity of the fraternity industry—that midway through the interview, O’Donnell lost her patience and interrupted him.

“There have been 60 deaths over eight years involving fraternity activities,” she said angrily. “There should be zero tolerance. There should be immediate action on this. It is unacceptable. This is murder.”

Her sentiment was one shared by many people when they learned about what had happened to Tim Piazza, but it revealed a common misunderstanding: Fraternities do have a zero-tolerance policy regarding hazing. And that’s probably one of the reasons Tim Piazza is dead.

For most of their long history, fraternities pretty much did as they pleased. But in the 1980s, parents of injured and dead children began to fight back: They sued the organizations and began to recover huge sums in damages. Insurance companies dropped fraternities en masse. Because of this crisis, the modern fraternity industry was born, one that is essentially self-insured, with fraternities pooling their money to create a fund from which damages are paid.

The executives realized that even if they couldn’t change members’ behavior, they had to indemnify themselves against it, which they did by creating an incredibly strict set of rules, named for a term of art in the insurance industry: risk-management policies. These policies forbid not just the egregious behaviors of hazing and sexual assault, but also a vast range of activities that comprise normal fraternity life in the majority of chapters. You can’t play beer pong in a fraternity house. You can’t have a sip of alcohol if you’re under the age of 21, or allow anyone else who’s underage to have a sip of alcohol. During a party, alcohol consumption must be tightly regulated. Either the chapter can hire a third-party vendor to sell drinks—and to assume all liability for what happens after guests consume them—or members and guests may each bring a small amount of alcohol for personal use and hand it over to a monitor who labels it, and then metes it back to the owner in a slow trickle.

In an emergency, when the police and an ambulance show up, the national organization will easily be able to prove that the members were in violation of its policies, and will therefore be able to cut them loose and deny them any of the benefits—including the payment of attorneys’ fees and damages—that come with the fraternity insurance the members themselves have paid for.

Fraternity members live under the shadow of giant sanctions and lawsuits that can result even from what seem like minor incidents. The strict policies promote a culture of secrecy, and when something really does go terribly wrong, the young men usually start scrambling to protect themselves. Doug Fierberg, a Washington, D.C., lawyer whose practice is built on representing plaintiffs in fraternity lawsuits, told me that “in virtually every hazing death, there is a critical three or four hours after the injury when the brothers try to figure out what to do. It is during those hours that many victims pass the point of no return.”

All of these dynamics came into play the night Tim Piazza was fatally injured. The chapter president, Brendan Young, was—get this—majoring in risk management. He fully understood that officers of the fraternity face greater liability than do regular members. He became the president in November 2016, and shortly before rush began, in January 2017, he texted Daniel Casey, the pledge master: “I know you know this. If anything goes wrong with the pledges this semester then both of us are fucked.” He wasn’t suggesting they scrap hazing; he was reminding his subordinate that they had better not get caught doing it. (Young’s lawyer declined to comment.)

Even a full day after Tim died, some members were, amazingly, still focused on the consequences that could befall them. “Between you and me,” a member texted Young, “what are the chances the house gets shut down?”

“I think very high,” Young replied. “I just hope none of us get into any lawsuits.”

“You think they are going to sue?” asked the brother, to which Young responded in a way that is chilling and that reveals a sophisticated knowledge of how such events play out: “It depends if they want to go through with it, or just distance themselves from us all together.”


In fact, Jim and Evelyn Piazza have not chosen to distance themselves from the men who hazed their late son and left him to a fate that Jim compares to a crucifixion. They attended every day of the pretrial hearings that determined which of the charges against the brothers would go to trial, a grueling process that—with its many continuances and breaks—lasted the entire summer.

It ended, finally, with what looked like a significant defeat: The most-serious charges—of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault—were dropped. In the courtroom, the 16 fraternity brothers (two had waived their right to a preliminary hearing) backslapped one another and exchanged fist bumps. The Piazzas quietly left.

Still, 14 of the Beta brothers will face a total of 328 criminal charges—jury selection is scheduled to begin in December—and the Piazzas also plan to file a civil suit after the trial ends. (When asked for comment, the national Beta fraternity stated that members of the Penn State chapter had not met its “expectations of friendship and brotherhood” and that it had “moved to close the chapter in February and expel men charged in the case.” An attorney for the chapter did not respond to a request for comment.)

The university has responded to the crisis with some significant steps: It has wrested discipline of the fraternities from the IFC, a group run entirely by frat brothers, and put it firmly in the hands of the Office of Student Conduct; checks on fraternity parties will be conducted not by St. Moritz, but by university employees. It has also permanently banned Beta Theta Pi from campus. The motivation behind these changes may lie as much in an earnest desire for reform as in a panicked need to contain what could become an ever-widening scandal, one with the potential to be as newsworthy as the Sandusky scandal.

At the end of the Piazza presentment, the grand jury issues a stunning condemnation of Penn State’s fraternity culture:

The Penn State Greek community nurtured an environment so permissive of excessive drinking and hazing that it emboldened its members to repeatedly act with reckless disregard to human life … Timothy Piazza died as a direct result of the extremely reckless conduct of members of the Beta Fraternity who operated within the permissive atmosphere fostered by the Pennsylvania State University Interfraternity Council.

The grand jury is now investigating the broader issue of hazing at Penn State and may recommend criminal charges. It is also reviewing the James Vivenzio and Marquise Braham cases. The presentment that could emanate from those horrific cases will surely be the subject of intense media scrutiny.

As for the university’s permanent ban of Beta Theta Pi from campus, a week after the most-serious charges against the former brothers were dropped, Beta alumni received an email inviting them to stay at their beloved house during football weekends this fall.

The Greek system has powerful allies at Penn State. After Tim Piazza’s death, several prominent trustees of the university vouched for fraternities, which they felt should be reformed but not hobbled. Their logic was sometimes tortured. William Oldsey told The Philadelphia Inquirer in May that the story of Tim Piazza—whose parents he pitied mightily—offered not an indictment but an endorsement of Greek life: “This is a good-enough system that it attracted a kid of the high caliber and character of Tim Piazza.”

So let us now imagine all the forces arrayed against 19-year-old Tim Piazza as he gets dressed in his jacket and tie, preparing to go to his new chapter house and accept the bid the brothers have offered him.

He is up against a university that has allowed hazing to go on for decades; a fraternity chapter that has hazed pledge classes at least twice in the previous 12 months; a set of rules that so harshly punishes hazing that the brothers will think it better to take a chance with his life than to face the consequences of having made him get drunk; and a “checking system” provided by a security firm that is, in many regards, a sham. He thinks he is going to join a club that his college endorses, and that is true. But it is also true that he is setting off to get jumped by a gang, and he won’t survive.

So here is Tim, reaching for his good jacket—in a closet that his mother will soon visit to select the clothes he will wear in his coffin—a little bit excited and a little bit nervous.

“They’re going to get me fucked up,” he texts his girlfriend, and then he pulls closed the door of his college apartment for the last time.

He has been told to show up at exactly 9:07. Inside, the 14 pledges are lined up, each with his right hand on the right shoulder of the one in front of him, and taken into the living room, where they are welcomed into the fraternity with songs and skits. And then it is time for the first act of hazing in their pledge period: quickly drinking a massive amount of alcohol in an obstacle course, the “gauntlet.” Court documents and the security footage provide excruciating detail about what comes next.

About an hour after the gauntlet begins, the pledges return to the living room, all of them showing signs of drunkenness. At 10:40, Tim appears on one of the security cameras, assisted by one of the brothers. The forensic pathologist will later describe his level of intoxication at this point as “stuporous.” He is staggering, hunched over, and he sits down heavily on the couch and doesn’t want to get up. But the brother encourages him to stand and walks him through the dining room and kitchen and back to the living room, where he sits down again on the couch. And then Tim tries to do something that could have saved his life.

He stands up, uncertainly, and heads toward the front door. If he makes it through that door, he may get out to the street, may find a place to sit or lie down, may come to the attention of someone who can help him—at the very least by getting him back to his apartment and away from the fraternity. He reaches the front door, but the mechanism to open it proves too complicated in his drunken state, so he turns around and staggers toward another door. Perhaps he is hoping that this door will be easier to open; perhaps he is hoping that it also leads out of the fraternity house. But it is the door to the basement, and when he opens it—perhaps expecting his foot to land on level ground—he takes a catastrophic fall.

On the security footage, a fraternity brother named Luke Visser points toward the stairs in an agitated way. Greg Rizzo clearly hears the fall and goes to the top of the steps to see what’s happened. Later, he will tell the police that he saw Tim “facedown, at the bottom of the steps.” Jonah Neuman will tell the police that he saw Tim lying facedown with his legs on the stairs.

Rizzo sends a group text: “Tim Piazza might actually be a problem. He fell 15 feet down a flight of steps, hair-first, going to need help.” (Rizzo, who was not charged with any crimes, told the police that he later advocated for calling an ambulance.)

Four of the brothers carry Tim up the stairs. By now he has somehow lost his jacket and tie, and his white shirt has ridden up, revealing a strange, dark bruise on his torso. This is from his lacerated spleen, which has begun spilling blood into his abdomen. The brothers put him on a couch, and Rizzo performs a sternum rub—a test for consciousness used by EMTs—but Tim does not respond. Another brother throws beer in his face, but he does not respond. Someone throws his shoes at him, hard. Someone lifts his arm and it falls back, deadweight, to his chest.

At this point, the brothers have performed a series of tests to determine whether Tim is merely drunk or seriously injured. He has failed all their tests. The next day, Tim’s father will ask the surgeon who delivers the terrible news of Tim’s prognosis whether the outcome would have been different if Tim had gotten help earlier, and the surgeon will say—unequivocally—that yes, it would have been different. That “earlier” is right now, while Tim is lying here, unresponsive to the sternum rub, the beer poured on him, the dropped arm.

A brother named Ryan Foster rolls Tim on his side, but has to catch him because he almost rolls onto the floor. Jonah Neuman straps a backpack full of books to him to keep him from rolling over and aspirating vomit. Two brothers sit on Tim’s legs to keep him from moving.

This is the moment when Kordel Davis arrives and attempts to save Tim’s life, only to be thrown against the wall by Neuman. Davis disappears from the video, in search of an officer of the club. By now Tim is “thrashing and making weird movements,” according to the grand-jury presentment.

Daniel Casey comes into the room, looks at Tim, and slaps him in the face three times. Tim does not respond. Two other brothers wrestle near the couch and end up slamming on top of Tim, whose spleen is still pouring blood into his abdomen. Tim begins to twitch and vomit.

At this point, Joseph Ems appears “frustrated” by Tim, according to the grand jury. With an open hand, he strikes the unconscious boy hard, on the abdomen, where the bruise has bloomed. This blow may be one of the reasons the forensic pathologist will find that Tim’s spleen was not just lacerated, but “shattered.” (Ems was originally charged with recklessly endangering another person, but that charge—the only one brought against him—has been dropped.) Still, Tim does not wake up.

Forty-five minutes later, Tim rolls onto the floor. The heavy backpack is still strapped to him. He rolls around, his legs moving. He attempts to stand up, and manages to free himself from the backpack, which falls to the floor. But the effort is too much, and he falls backwards, banging his head on the hardwood floor. A fraternity member shakes him, gets no response, and walks away.

At 3:46 in the morning, Tim is on the floor, curled up in the fetal position. At home in New Jersey, his parents are sleeping. Across campus, his older brother, Mike, has no idea that Tim is not safely in his bed.

At 3:49 a.m., Tim wakes up and struggles to his knees, cradling his head in his hands; he falls again to the hardwood floor. An hour later, he manages to stand up, and staggers toward the front door, but within seconds he falls, headfirst, into an iron railing and then onto the floor. On some level he must know: I am dying. He stands once again and tries to get to the door. His only hope is to get out of this house, but he falls headfirst once again.

At 5:08 a.m., Tim is on his knees, his wounded head buried in his hands. Around campus, people are beginning to wake up. The cafeteria workers are brewing coffee; athletes are rising for early practices. It’s cold and still dark, but the day is beginning. Tim is dying inside the Beta house, steps away from the door he has been trying all night to open.

Around 7 o’clock, another pledge wanders into the living room, where Tim is now lying on the couch groaning, and the pledge watches as he rolls off the couch and onto the floor, and again lifts himself to his knees and cradles his head in his hands, “as if he had a really bad headache.” The pledge lifts his cellphone, records Tim’s anguish on Snapchat, and then—while Tim is rocking back and forth on the floor—leaves the house. A few minutes later, Tim stands and staggers toward the basement steps, and disappears from the cameras’ view.

The house begins to stir. Some fraternity members head off to class, and in the fullness of time they return. And then, at about 10 a.m., a brother named Kyle Pecci (who was not charged) arrives and asks a pledge, Daniel Erickson (who was also not charged), a question that seems to both of them a casual one: Whatever happened to that pledge who fell down the stairs at the party? They come across Tim’s shoes, and realize that Tim must still be somewhere in the house, so they look for him. The search reveals him collapsed behind one of the bars in the basement. He is lying on his back, with his arms tight at his sides and his hands gripped in fists. His face is bloody and his breathing is labored. His eyes are half open; his skin is cold to the touch; he is unnaturally pale. Three men carry him upstairs and put him on the couch, but no one calls 911.

Fraternity brothers with garbage bags appear in the footage and start cleaning up the evidence. Brothers try to prop Tim up on the couch and dress him, but his limbs are too stiff and they can’t do it. Someone wipes the blood off his face, and someone else tries, without luck, to pry open his clenched fingers. Clearly the brothers are trying to make this terrible situation appear a little bit better for when the authorities arrive. But they do not use their many cellphones to call 911. Instead one brother uses his phone to do a series of internet searches for terms such as cold extremities in drunk person and binge drinking, alcohol, bruising or discoloration, cold feet and cold hands.

Where is Tim right now, as his body lies on the couch? Are his soul and self still here, in the room, or have they already slipped away? He has put up a valiant, almost incredible fight for his life, but by now he has lost that fight. When he was a little boy, he used to make people laugh because he got so frustrated with board games; he didn’t like playing those games, with their rules and tricks. He loved sports, and running, and playing with his friends at the beach. But his body is cold now, his legs and arms unbending.

Finally, at 10:48 a.m., a brother calls 911—perhaps realizing that it would be best to do so while the pledge is still technically alive—and Tim is delivered from the charnel house. Soon his parents will race toward him, and so will his frantic brother, who has been searching for him. They will be reunited for the few hours they have left with this redheaded boy they have loved so well, and at least it can be said that Tim did not die alone, or in the company of the men who tortured him.

On February 7, the Facebook page of the Beta Theta Pi national organization will report that “Tim Piazza, a sophomore at Penn State who had recently accepted an invitation to join the Fraternity, has passed due to injuries sustained from an accidental fall in the chapter house.” Flags at the fraternity’s administrative offices in Oxford, Ohio, will fly at half-mast for eight days, “representative of the eight young men of Tim’s same age who founded the Fraternity.” The Facebook post will encourage collegiate members around the country to “conduct Beta’s official Burial Service” on Friday evening, from 4 to 8 o’clock. And with those final rituals of the fraternity, Tim Piazza’s 28-hour membership in Beta Theta Pi will come to an end. “Rest in peace, Tim Piazza,” ends the post. “Rest in peace.”

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/a-death-at-penn-state/540657/

By Caitlin Flanagan

Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too

by Salma Hayek


HARVEY WEINSTEIN was a passionate cinephile, a risk taker, a patron of talent in film, a loving father and a monster.

For years, he was my monster.

This fall, I was approached by reporters, through different sources, including my dear friend Ashley Judd, to speak about an episode in my life that, although painful, I thought I had made peace with.

I had brainwashed myself into thinking that it was over and that I had survived; I hid from the responsibility to speak out with the excuse that enough people were already involved in shining a light on my monster. I didn’t consider my voice important, nor did I think it would make a difference.

In reality, I was trying to save myself the challenge of explaining several things to my loved ones: Why, when I had casually mentioned that I had been bullied like many others by Harvey, I had excluded a couple of details. And why, for so many years, we have been cordial to a man who hurt me so deeply. I had been proud of my capacity for forgiveness, but the mere fact that I was ashamed to describe the details of what I had forgiven made me wonder if that chapter of my life had really been resolved.

When so many women came forward to describe what Harvey had done to them, I had to confront my cowardice and humbly accept that my story, as important as it was to me, was nothing but a drop in an ocean of sorrow and confusion. I felt that by now nobody would care about my pain — maybe this was an effect of the many times I was told, especially by Harvey, that I was nobody.

We are finally becoming conscious of a vice that has been socially accepted and has insulted and humiliated millions of girls like me, for in every woman there is a girl. I am inspired by those who had the courage to speak out, especially in a society that elected a president who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by more than a dozen women and whom we have all heard make a statement about how a man in power can do anything he wants to women.

Well, not anymore.

In the 14 years that I stumbled from schoolgirl to Mexican soap star to an extra in a few American films to catching a couple of lucky breaks in “Desperado” and “Fools Rush In,” Harvey Weinstein had become the wizard of a new wave of cinema that took original content into the mainstream. At the same time, it was unimaginable for a Mexican actress to aspire to a place in Hollywood. And even though I had proven them wrong, I was still a nobody.

One of the forces that gave me the determination to pursue my career was the story of Frida Kahlo, who in the golden age of the Mexican muralists would do small intimate paintings that everybody looked down on. She had the courage to express herself while disregarding skepticism. My greatest ambition was to tell her story. It became my mission to portray the life of this extraordinary artist and to show my native Mexico in a way that combated stereotypes.

The Weinstein empire, which was then Miramax, had become synonymous with quality, sophistication and risk taking — a haven for artists who were complex and defiant. It was everything that Frida was to me and everything I aspired to be.

I had started a journey to produce the film with a different company, but I fought to get it back to take it to Harvey.

I knew him a little bit through my relationship with the director Robert Rodriguez and the producer Elizabeth Avellan, who was then his wife, with whom I had done several films and who had taken me under their wing. All I knew of Harvey at the time was that he had a remarkable intellect, he was a loyal friend and a family man.

Knowing what I know now, I wonder if it wasn’t my friendship with them — and Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney — that saved me from being raped.

The deal we made initially was that Harvey would pay for the rights of work I had already developed. As an actress, I would be paid the minimum Screen Actors Guild scale plus 10 percent. As a producer, I would receive a credit that would not yet be defined, but no payment, which was not that rare for a female producer in the ’90s. He also demanded a signed deal for me to do several other films with Miramax, which I thought would cement my status as a leading lady.

I did not care about the money; I was so excited to work with him and that company. In my naïveté, I thought my dream had come true. He had validated the last 14 years of my life. He had taken a chance on me — a nobody. He had said yes.

Little did I know it would become my turn to say no.

No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with.

No to me taking a shower with him.

No to letting him watch me take a shower.

No to letting him give me a massage.

No to letting a naked friend of his give me a massage.

No to letting him give me oral sex.

No to my getting naked with another woman.

No, no, no, no, no …

And with every refusal came Harvey’s Machiavellian rage.

I don’t think he hated anything more than the word “no.” The absurdity of his demands went from getting a furious call in the middle of the night asking me to fire my agent for a fight he was having with him about a different movie with a different client to physically dragging me out of the opening gala of the Venice Film Festival, which was in honor of “Frida,” so I could hang out at his private party with him and some women I thought were models but I was told later were high-priced prostitutes.

The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.”

When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress.

In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.

At that point, I had to resort to using lawyers, not by pursuing a sexual harassment case, but by claiming “bad faith,” as I had worked so hard on a movie that he was not intending to make or sell back to me. I tried to get it out of his company.

He claimed that my name as an actress was not big enough and that I was incompetent as a producer, but to clear himself legally, as I understood it, he gave me a list of impossible tasks with a tight deadline:

1. Get a rewrite of the script, with no additional payment.

2. Raise $10 million to finance the film.

3. Attach an A-list director.

4. Cast four of the smaller roles with prominent actors.

Much to everyone’s amazement, not least my own, I delivered, thanks to a phalanx of angels who came to my rescue, including Edward Norton, who beautifully rewrote the script several times and appallingly never got credit, and my friend Margaret Perenchio, a first-time producer, who put up the money. The brilliant Julie Taymor agreed to direct, and from then on she became my rock. For the other roles, I recruited my friends Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton and my dear Ashley Judd. To this day, I don’t know how I convinced Geoffrey Rush, whom I barely knew at the time.

Now Harvey Weinstein was not only rejected but also about to do a movie he did not want to do.

Ironically, once we started filming, the sexual harassment stopped but the rage escalated. We paid the price for standing up to him nearly every day of shooting. Once, in an interview he said Julie and I were the biggest ball busters he had ever encountered, which we took as a compliment.

Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s “unibrow.” He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me. He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.

It was soul crushing because, I confess, lost in the fog of a sort of Stockholm syndrome, I wanted him to see me as an artist: not only as a capable actress but also as somebody who could identify a compelling story and had the vision to tell it in an original way.

I was hoping he would acknowledge me as a producer, who on top of delivering his list of demands shepherded the script and obtained the permits to use the paintings. I had negotiated with the Mexican government, and with whomever I had to, to get locations that had never been given to anyone in the past — including Frida Kahlo’s houses and the murals of Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, among others.

But all of this seemed to have no value. The only thing he noticed was that I was not sexy in the movie. He made me doubt if I was any good as an actress, but he never succeeded in making me think that the film was not worth making.

He offered me one option to continue. He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.

He had been constantly asking for more skin, for more sex. Once before, Julie Taymor got him to settle for a tango ending in a kiss instead of the lovemaking scene he wanted us to shoot between the character Tina Modotti, played by Ashley Judd, and Frida.

But this time, it was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another. There was no room for negotiation.

I had to say yes. By now so many years of my life had gone into this film. We were about five weeks into shooting, and I had convinced so many talented people to participate. How could I let their magnificent work go to waste?

I had asked for so many favors, I felt an immense pressure to deliver and a deep sense of gratitude for all those who did believe in me and followed me into this madness. So I agreed to do the senseless scene.

I arrived on the set the day we were to shoot the scene that I believed would save the movie. And for the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears.

Since those around me had no knowledge of my history of Harvey, they were very surprised by my struggle that morning. It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then.

My mind understood that I had to do it, but my body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing. At that point, I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot. I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse. As you can imagine, this was not sexy, but it was the only way I could get through the scene.

By the time the filming of the movie was over, I was so emotionally distraught that I had to distance myself during the postproduction.

When Harvey saw the cut film, he said it was not good enough for a theatrical release and that he would send it straight to video.

This time Julie had to fight him without me and got him to agree to release the film in one movie theater in New York if we tested it to an audience and we scored at least an 80.

Less than 10 percent of films achieve that score on a first screening.

I didn’t go to the test. I anxiously awaited to receive the news. The film scored 85.

And again, I heard Harvey raged. In the lobby of a theater after the screening, he screamed at Julie. He balled up one of the scorecards and threw it at her. It bounced off her nose. Her partner, the film’s composer Elliot Goldenthal, stepped in, and Harvey physically threatened him.

Once he calmed down, I found the strength to call Harvey to ask him also to open the movie in a theater in Los Angeles, which made a total of two theaters. And without much ado, he gave me that. I have to say sometimes he was kind, fun and witty — and that was part of the problem: You just never knew which Harvey you were going to get.

Months later, in October 2002, this film, about my hero and inspiration — this Mexican artist who never truly got acknowledged in her time with her limp and her unibrow, this film that Harvey never wanted to do, gave him a box office success that no one could have predicted, and despite his lack of support, added six Academy Award nominations to his collection, including best actress.

Even though “Frida” eventually won him two Oscars, I still didn’t see any joy. He never offered me a starring role in a movie again. The films that I was obliged to do under my original deal with Miramax were all minor supporting roles.

Years later, when I ran into him at an event, he pulled me aside and told me he had stopped smoking and he had had a heart attack. He said he’d fallen in love and married Georgina Chapman, and that he was a changed man. Finally, he said to me: “You did well with ‘Frida’; we did a beautiful movie.”

I believed him. Harvey would never know how much those words meant to me. He also would never know how much he hurt me. I never showed Harvey how terrified I was of him. When I saw him socially, I’d smile and try to remember the good things about him, telling myself that I went to war and I won.

But why do so many of us, as female artists, have to go to war to tell our stories when we have so much to offer? Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to maintain our dignity?

I think it is because we, as women, have been devalued artistically to an indecent state, to the point where the film industry stopped making an effort to find out what female audiences wanted to see and what stories we wanted to tell.

According to a recent study, between 2007 and 2016, only 4 percent of directors were female and 80 percent of those got the chance to make only one film. In 2016, another study found, only 27 percent of words spoken in the biggest movies were spoken by women. And people wonder why you didn’t hear our voices sooner. I think the statistics are self-explanatory — our voices are not welcome.

Until there is equality in our industry, with men and women having the same value in every aspect of it, our community will continue to be a fertile ground for predators.

I am grateful for everyone who is listening to our experiences. I hope that adding my voice to the chorus of those who are finally speaking out will shed light on why it is so difficult, and why so many of us have waited so long. Men sexually harassed because they could. Women are talking today because, in this new era, we finally can.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.html