One of the Journalists Who Brought Down Harvey Weinstein Is Out With a New Bomb Shell Report
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a man whose reputation is that of a progressive Democrat, feminist, and champion of the Me Too movement, has just been accused by four women of assault and abuse. In a bombshell an detailed report at The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow and co-author Jane Mayer report the stunning news.
The four women “accuse Schneiderman of having subjected them to nonconsensual physical violence,” The New Yorker report charges. Two of them have gone on the record and allowed their names to be used.
The accusations are not only disturbing, they are all similar, suggesting a pattern not only abuse, but excessive drinking by Schneiderman.
One woman “says that Schneiderman warned her he could have her followed and her phones tapped, and both say that he threatened to kill them if they broke up with him.”
All the women say Schneiderman slapped them across the face, not only without their consent, but totally out of the blue – and hard. At least two sought medical attention. And at least two say he called each a “whore.”
“In the privacy of intimate relationships,” Schneiderman told The New Yorker in a statement, “I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity. I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross.”
The New Yorker details the first time Schneiderman allegedly became violent with one of the women, Michelle Manning Barish.
One night, they were in the bedroom of his Upper West Side apartment, still clothed but getting ready for bed, and lightly baiting each other. As she recalls it, he called her “a whore,” and she talked back. They had both been drinking, and her recollection of their conversation is blurry, but what happened next remains vivid. Schneiderman, she says, backed her up to the edge of his bed. “All of a sudden, he just slapped me, open handed and with great force, across the face, landing the blow directly onto my ear,” Manning Barish says. “It was horrendous. It just came out of nowhere. My ear was ringing. I lost my balance and fell backward onto the bed. I sprang up, but at this point there was very little room between the bed and him. I got up to try to shove him back, or take a swing, and he pushed me back down. He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.”
Additionally, she “says that Schneiderman also took prescription tranquillizers, and often asked her to refill a prescription that she had for Xanax, so that he could reserve ‘about half’ the pills for himself. (Schneiderman’s spokesperson said that he has ‘never commandeered anyone’s medications.’) Sometimes in bed, she recalls, he would be ‘shaking me and grabbing my face’ while demanding that she repeat such things as ‘I’m a little whore.’ She says that he also told her, ‘If you ever left me, I’d kill you.'”
The entire story can be read at The New Yorker.
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