Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 6, 2020, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A14 A 14 THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2020 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COMNEWS I WORLD N EW YORK — A woman whose al-legation of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein led to criminal charges in Southern California took the stand in his criminal trial in New York City on Wednesday, accusing him of groping her while masturbating in a Los Angeles hotel room. Lauren Young, a Pennsylvania native who was 22 at the time of the alleged 2013 attack, is the last of six women to testify against Weinstein in Manhat- tan, where the fallen Hollywood mogul faces five counts of sexual assault and life in prison if convicted. Young, who had not told her story in public before, is one of two women whose allegations led Los Angeles County prosecutors to file nine charg- es of rape and sexual misconduct against Weinstein in early January. In court Wednesday, Young said she had been living in Los Angeles for two years when she first met Weinstein in February 2013 in the restaurant of the Montage Beverly Hills hotel. Young said she put on her best dress for the occasion. “I was excited to network and pitch my ideas,” she said. Young said a recent acquaintance, who was also present at the Montage that night, arranged the meeting with Weinstein to talk about Young’s unfin- ished script. After talking briefly at the restau- rant over drinks, Weinstein told both women that he needed to go up to his room because he needed to prepare to accept an award with Quentin Tar- antino later that day, Young said. The mogul asked if they could continue the conversation there. Young said that once they entered Weinstein’s hotel room, she unwitting- ly followed the producer into the bath- room, with the other woman trailing behind her. As Young stepped into the bathroom, she said, she looked into a mirror and saw the other woman closing the door, leaving Young along with the producer. Weinstein entered the shower, turned it on and started undressing, she said. “It was as quick as I’ve ever seen anyone undress,” Young said. As Young attempted to leave, she re- alized that the other woman was block- ing the door from the outside, she said. “That’s when I realized this was set up, she put me in here,” Young testi- fied. As Young approached the door, Wein- stein moved closer to her and blocked her from leaving, she said. “I just couldn’t believe what was happening to me,” she said. “I was re- ally worried and scared that they were going to hurt me or something.” Young said Weinstein then backed her toward the sink, and she turned away because she didn’t want to look at his naked body. Weinstein then began to undress her as Young said “No” re- peatedly, she alleged. Her voice cracked in court as she re- called how she told the producer that she wasn’t interested and that she had a boyfriend. Weinstein then forcefully grabbed and pinched her breast with one hand while masturbating with the other, Young said. She said Weinstein at- tempted to touch her vagina, but she blocked him with her hands. Weinstein left the bathroom after ejaculating onto a towel, Young said. She fled shortly afterward, giving the other woman an “evil look” as she left. Young said she was never sexually attracted to Weinstein and did not ex- press any romantic interest in him. She did not have any other encounters with him after the alleged incident at the Montage, she said. Authorities in Los Angeles and New York have not confirmed that Young is the same woman identified as “Jane Doe No. 2” in Southern California fil- ings, but Young’s description of the assault was the same as the alleged attack laid out in court papers made public in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles County district at- torney’s office has also confirmed that one of the accusers in their case would be testifying as a prior bad acts wit- ness in the New York case. In Los Angeles County, the accu- sations made by Young and an Ital- ian model led prosecutors to charge Weinstein with forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force and sexual battery by restraint on the eve of his New York trial. He faces up to 28 years in state prison if convicted of all counts in California. Some have accused Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey of timing the filing of the charges for maximum political gain as she faces a tough reelection bid against for- mer San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and former public de- fender Rachel Rossi. Legal experts have also warned that by first telling her story in New York, Young will be much more susceptible to cross-examination in Los Angeles, where Weinstein’s defense team will have months, if not years, to search for ways to undermine her story. Weinstein’s attorneys have denied the mogul did anything wrong and claimed each encounter described by witnesses in the New York case was consensual. Cross-examination began late Wednesday. — Los Angeles Times Weinstein accuser details alleged Los Angeles hotel attack BY LAURA NEWBERRY AND JAMES QUEALLY JOHN MINCHILLO / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Harvey Weinstein is on trial in New York and faces charges in California that could see him sentenced to 28 years in prison if he is found guilty. K IRK Douglas, the intense, muscu-lar actor with the dimpled chin who starred in Spartacus, Lust for Life and dozens of other films, helped fatally weaken the blacklist against suspected Communists and reigned for decades as a Hollywood maverick and patriarch, died Wednesday, his family said. He was 103. “To the world, he was a legend, an ac- tor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a hu- manitarian whose commitment to jus- tice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to,” his son Michael said in a statement on his Instagram account. His granite-like strength and under- lying vulnerability made the son of il- literate Russian immigrants one of the top stars of the 20th century. He ap- peared in more than 80 films, in roles ranging from Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life. He worked with some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, from Vincente Min- nelli and Billy Wilder to Stanley Kub- rick and Elia Kazan. His career began at the peak of the studios’ power, more than 70 years ago, and ended in a more diverse, decentralized era that he helped bring about. Always competitive, including with his own family, Douglas never received an Academy Award for an individual film, despite being nominated three times — for Champion, The Bad and the Beautiful and Lust for Life. In 1996, the Academy of Motion Pic- ture Arts and Sciences awarded him an honorary Oscar. His other awards included a Presidential Medal of Free- dom and a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute. He was a category unto himself, a force for change and symbol of endur- ance. In his latter years, he was a final link to a so-called Golden Age, a man nearly as old as the industry itself. In his youth, he represented a new kind of performer, more independent and adventurous than Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and other giants of the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s, and more willing to speak his mind. Reaching stardom after the Second World War, he was as likely to play cads as he was suited to play heroes, as alert to the business as he was at home before the camera. He started his own produc- tion company in 1955, when many ac- tors still depended on the studios, and directed some of his later films. A born fighter, Douglas was especially proud of his role in the downfall of Holly- wood’s blacklist, which halted and ruined the careers of writers suspected of pro- Communist activity or sympathies. By the end of the ’50s, the use of banned writers was widely known within the in- dustry, but not to the general public. Douglas, who years earlier had reluc- tantly signed a loyalty oath to get the starring role in Lust for Life, provided a crucial blow when he openly credited the former Communist and Oscar win- ner Dalton Trumbo for script work on Spartacus, the epic about a slave rebel- lion during ancient Rome that was re- leased in 1960. “Everybody advised me not to do it because you won’t be able to work in this town again and all of that. But I was young enough to say to hell with it,” Douglas said about Spartacus in a 2011 interview. “I think if I was much older, I would have been too conserva- tive: ‘Why should I stick my neck out?’” Douglas rarely played lightly. He was compulsive about preparing for roles and a supreme sufferer on camera, whether stabbed with scissors in Ace in the Hole or crucified in Spartacus. Critic David Thomson dubbed Doug- las “the manic-depressive among Holly- wood stars, one minute bearing down on plot, dialogue and actresses with the gleeful appetite of a man just freed from Siberia, at other times writhing not just in agony but mutilation and a convincingly horrible death.” Douglas’ personal favourite was the 1962 Western Lonely are the Brave, which included a line of dialogue from a Trumbo script he called the most per- sonal he ever spoke on screen: “I’m a loner clear down deep to my very guts.” The most famous words in a Douglas movie were spoken about him, but not by him. In Spartacus, Roman officials tell a gathering of slaves their lives will be spared if they identify their leader, Spartacus. As Douglas rises to give himself up, a growing chorus of slaves jump up and shout, “I’m Spartacus!” Douglas stands silently, a tear rolling down his face. As Michael Douglas once observed, few acts were so hard to follow. Kirk Douglas was an acrobat, a juggler, a self-taught man who learned French in his 30s and German in his 40s. Life was just so many walls to crash through, like the stroke in his 70s that threatened — but only threatened — to end his career. He continued to act and write for years and was past 100 when he and his wife published Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood. He was born Issur Danielovitch to an impoverished Jewish family in Amster- dam, N.Y. His name evolved over time. He called himself Isidore Demsky until he graduated from St. Lawrence Uni- versity. He took the name Kirk Douglas as he worked his way through the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, choosing “Douglas” because he wanted his last name still to begin with “D” and “Kirk” because he liked the hard, jagged sound of the “K.” Douglas was a performer as early as kindergarten, when he recited a poem about the red robin of spring. He was a star in high school and in college he wrestled and built the physique that was showcased in many of his movies. He was determined, hitchhiking to St. Lawrence as a teen and convincing the dean to ap- prove a student loan. And he was tough. One of his strongest childhood memories was of flinging a spoonful of hot tea into the face of his intimidating father. “I have never done anything as brave in any movie,” he later wrote. Beginning in 1941, Douglas won a series of small roles on Broadway, served briefly in the Navy and received a key Hollywood break when an old friend from New York, Lauren Bacall, recommended he play opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Mar- tha Ivers. He gained further attention with the classic 1947 film noir Out of the Past and the Oscar-winning A Letter to Three Wives. His real breakthrough came as an un- scrupulous boxer in 1949’s Champion, a low-budget production he was advised to turn down. “Before Champion in 1949, I’d played an intellectual school teacher, a weak school teacher and an alcoholic,” Doug- las once said. “After Champion, I was a tough guy. I did things like playing van Gogh, but the image lingers.” He had long desired creative con- trol and Champion was followed by a run of hits that gave him the clout to form Bryna Productions in 1955, and a second company later. Many of his movies, such as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, The Vikings, Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave and Seven Days in May, were produced by his companies. His movie career faded during the 1960s and Douglas turned to other media. In the 1970s and 1980s, he did several notable television films, including Vic- tory at Entebbe and Amos, which dealt with abuse of the elderly. In his 70s, he became an author, his books including the memoir The Rag- man’s Son, the novels Dance With the Devil and The Gift and a brief work on the making of Spartacus. “We are living in a town of make- believe,” he said in 2014. “I have done about 90 movies. That means that every time I was pretending to be someone else. There comes a time in your life when you say, well, ‘who am I? I have found writing books a good substitute to making pictures. When you write a book, you get to determine what part you are playing.” Douglas also became one of Holly- wood’s leading philanthropists. The Douglas Foundation, which he and Anne Douglas co-founded, has donated mil- lions to a wide range of institutions, from the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to the Motion Picture & Television Fund. As a young man, Douglas very much lived like a movie star, especially in the pre-#MeToo era. He was romantically linked with many of his female co-stars and dated Gene Tierney, Patricia Neal and Marlene Dietrich among others. He had been married to Diana Dill, but they divorced in 1951. Three years later, he married Anne Buydens, whom he met in Paris while he was filming Act of Love and she was doing publicity. He would later owe his very life to Anne, with whom he remained for more than 60 years. In 1958, the film produ- cer Michael Todd, then the husband of Elizabeth Taylor, offered the actor a ride on his private jet. Douglas’s wife insisted that he not go, worrying about a private plane, and he eventually gave in. The plane crashed, killing all on board. Douglas had two children with each of his wives and all went into show busi- ness, against his advice. Besides Michael, they are Joel and Peter, both producers, and Eric, an ac- tor with several film credits who died of a drug overdose in 2004. Kirk Douglas’ film credits in the ’70s and ’80s included Brian De Palma’s The Fury and a comedy, Tough Guys, that co-starred Burt Lancaster, his longtime friend who previously appeared with Douglas in Seven Days in May, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and other movies. A stroke in 1996 seemed to end his film career, but Douglas returned three years later with Diamonds, which he made after struggling to overcome speech problems. “I thought I would never make an- other movie unless silent movies came back,” he joked. In 2003, Douglas teamed with son Michael; Cameron Douglas, Michael’s 24-year-old son; and ex-wife Diana Douglas, Michael’s mother, for It Runs in the Family, a comic drama about three generations of a family, with a few digs worked in about the elder Douglas’s parenting. In March 2009, he appeared in a one- man show, Before I Forget, recounting his life and famous friends. The four- night show in the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City was sold out. “I’ve often said I’m a failure, because I didn’t achieve what I set out to do,” Douglas said in 2009. “My goal in life was to be a star on the New York stage. The first time I was asked by Hal Wal- lis to come to Hollywood, I turned him down. ‘Hollywood? That trash? I’m an actor on the Broadway stage!’” — The Associated Press Star of Spartacus, Lust for Life dies at 103 ‘An actor from the golden age of movies’ KIRK DOUGLAS OBITUARY HILLEL ITALIE WALLY FONG / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Born Issur Danielovitch, actor Kirk Douglas chose his screen name because he liked the hard, jagged sound of the ‘K.’ A_16_Feb-06-20_FP_01.indd A14 2020-02-05 10:09 PM ;