Weinstein has snaked his way past complaint after complaint alleging that he engaged in sexual misconduct. Since a bombshell New York Times report from October 5 alleging the film producer had harassed and assaulted actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan, at least 32 women have now come forward insisting that they had been targeted by him.
According to data from the Clinton Foundation's website, this same man donated between $100,001 and $250,000 to the nonprofit.
"Donations, these included, have been spent fighting childhood obesity and HIV/Aids, combatting climate change, and empowering girls and women, and we have no plans to return them," the Clinton Foundation said in a Monday statement to the Washington Times.
The allegations against Weinstein include groping women, masturbating in women's hotel rooms while they were asleep, threatening women if they spoke up about their experiences, exposing himself to unwilling women, rape, and many more variations of conduct both creepy and criminal. But these apparently won't push the foundation to renounce the Hollywood mogul's cash.
In a statement posted on Instagram, UK actress Kate Beckinsale said Weinstein targeted her at the age of 17. "I was incredibly naïve and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him. After declining alcohol and announcing that I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed. A few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn't remember if he had assaulted me or not," Beckinsale wrote.
The actress continued, "I had what I thought were boundaries — I said no to him many times over the years — some of which ended up with him screaming at me, calling me a cunt and making threats, some of which made him laughingly tell people oh ‘Kate lives to say no to me.'"
"It speaks to the status quo in this business that I was aware that standing up for myself and saying no to things, while it did allow me to feel uncompromised in myself, undoubtedly harmed my career… Let's remember that Harvey is an emblem of a system that is sick, and that we have work to do."
The foundation has long been an epicenter of scandal.
Deputy chief of staff to Clinton at the State Department and longtime Clinton confidante Huma Abedin gave special treatment to major Clinton Foundation donors while working at the State Department as part of an elaborate "pay to play" scheme. The group's donation records have never been audited in full compliance with the law, analyst Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
Ortel scrutinized claims that the organization misspent funds intended for fighting HIV/AIDs, effectively defrauding donors. "Long before 2002, when Bill Clinton, Ira Magaziner and others illegally began soliciting funds, allegedly to ‘fight HIV/AIDS internationally,' the original Clinton Foundation failed to register truthfully in numerous states and localities," Ortel said in June. This helped the organization skirt around tax laws.
The foundation also filed "materially misleading federal tax forms concerning the status of their state and local filings," he said, emphasizing, "material defects in public filings for the Clinton Foundation — which was founded on October 23, 1997, in Arkansas — began long before 2002, and have escalated right to the present."
