A shocking account of how Harvey Weinstein rose to become one of the most iconic figures in the
world of movies how he used that position to feed his monstrous sexual appetites and how it
all came crashing down from the author who has covered the Hollywood power game for the New
Yorker for three decades. Twenty years ago Ken Auletta wrote one of the iconic New Yorker
profiles for which he is famous of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein then at the height of
his powers. The profile created waves for exposing how volatile even violent Weinstein was to
his employees and collaborators. But there was a much darker story that was just out of reach:
rumors had long swirled that Weinstein was a sexual predator but no one was willing to go on
the record and in the end he and the magazine concluded they couldn't close the case. But the
story always nagged at him and many years later he was able to share his reporting notes and
all that he knew with Ronan Farrow and to cheer him along with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey as
they broke their pioneering stories and wrote their bestselling books. But the story continued
to nag at him. Farrow Twohey and Kantor did a brilliant job exposing the trail of assaults
and their cover-up but the larger questions remained: what explained Weinstein's
monstrousness? Even more importantly how and why was it never checked? How does a man run the
day to day operations of a company with hundreds of employees and revenues in the hundreds of
millions of dollars and at the same time live a shadow life of sexual predation without ever
being caught for years and years? How much is this a story about Harvey Weinstein and how
much is this a story about Hollywood and power? To answer that question fully Ken Auletta has
spent the past three years constructing a full reckoning with a career in film that has no
parallel in Hollywood's history in its combination of extraordinary business and creative
success and a personal brutality and viciousness that left a trail of ruined lives in its wake.
How did one thing relate to the other? Spider's Web is an unflinching examination of
Weinstein's life and career in full. Not simply a prosecutor's litany of crimes it embeds them
in the context of his overall business his failures but also his outsized successes. To
understand how he could behave as he did we have to understand the power he wielded. Iconic
film stars Miramax employees and board members old friends and family even the person who
knew him best Harvey's brother Bob all talked to Auletta at length. The result is not simply
the portrait of a predator it is a portrait of the power that allowed Weinstein to operate
with such impunity for so many years the spider web in which his victims found themselves
trapped. To understand Weinstein's web is to understand how many other spider webs no doubt
still remain.
