News feed
NEW YORK CITY: “Now I’m down in TriBeCa/ Right Next to DeNiro…” – Jay Z’s Empire State Of Mind’s lyrics were referencing a part of town with a (recently revealed) tainted past. Below Canal street and just off Hudson lay 375 Greenwich Street, home to the TriBeCa Film Center and Robert De Niro’s TriBeCa Grill restaurant. On it’s third floor – and overlooking the pretty Franklin Street – is Harvey Weinstein’s seedy office. Here, his wood-armed, well-worn infamous casting couch still sits there, The Post has learned.
While the office is quietly on the market (its price was slashed from US $10 million to US $7.9 million in recent months), real estate broker Michael Rudder of Rudder Property Group told Page Six that a client is considering buying the office, but the couch will be removed. “Definitely, nobody wants the couch. The circumstances surrounding it make people uncomfortable,” Rudder said. “If we buy it, we’ll donate the couch to a shooting range.”
It’s jarring to look at the sofa knowing it’s owner’s history. The cream-coloured leather-like lounge appears stained which makes it even more disturbing to look at. Weinstein’s former assistant Sandeep Rehal went on the record last year to say she had to routinely “clean up the semen on the couch in Weinstein’s office” and she did so “three or so times a week” while Weinstein was in New York. Rehal also claimed she was told to pick up used condoms and syringes in which Weinstein used to inject an erection drug into himself.
Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez – one of more than a dozen women who came forward to allege Weinstein had sexually assaulted them, matters of which were published in the New York Times’ explosive investigation in 2017 – knew this couch well. Gutierrez says she was sitting on the lounge when Weinstein “pawed her breasts” and tried to put his hands up her skirt during a business meeting in March 2015.
Off to the side is another office with a separate futon-like grey couch and treadmill. Lucia Evans, the woman who told The New Yorker magazine she was coerced into performing oral sex on Weinstein, said the office had exercise equipment in it. Weinstein was charged in May with sexually assaulting Evans – but the charge was overturned a few weeks ago (just as fellow accused sexual assaulter Kavanaugh wore down tired lawmakers and worked his way in the U.S. Supreme Court) after the prosecutor interviewed a friend who put Evan’s allegation into question.
Weinstein is still being investigated for several other counts of both rape and sexual assault. Actresses Cara Delevingne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Daryl Hannah, Asia Argento, Annabella Sciorra and Mira Sorvino were just some of more well-known stars who came forward and spoke out against the Hollywood director’s disgusting behaviour.
