Creative Artists Agency on Tuesday sought to dismiss a complaint from an actor who had alleged that the talent agency failed in its fiduciary duty to protect her from being sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein.
Actor Julia Ormond said in her lawsuit filed in October at the Supreme Court of New York that CAA set up a meeting with the now-disgraced producer in 1995 to discuss a film project. Following the meeting, Weinstein sexually assaulted her, she said. Ormond said that her agents, Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane of CAA, discouraged her from reporting the incident.
CAA in its legal filing said that Ormond did not tell Lourd, Huvane or CAA about the assault until she approached the agency with a demand letter this year. Weinstein’s attorney has denied the allegations.
“CAA has deep sympathy for Plaintiff as one of the women who, as alleged, suffered at Weinstein’s hands,” CAA said in its legal filing. “However, in suing CAA, Plaintiff places blame on the wrong defendant.”
CAA said that while it is now widely alleged that Weinstein committed multiple sexual assaults, the agency did not have knowledge of those incidents back then. The agency also said that the business relationship between CAA and Ormond does not meet the legal standards to trigger a duty to warn or protect her.
“On the face of the Complaint, CAA had no knowledge of Weinstein’s history of sexual assault at any time relevant to Ms. Ormond’s claims, and CAA’s alleged failure to act was not, as a matter of law, a cause of the harm Plaintiff suffered,” CAA said in its filing. “Even a heightened fiduciary duty does not require a party to warn or protect another person from harm that is not foreseeable.”
According to her complaint, Ormond had met Weinstein in 1994, prior to signing on with CAA in 1995. The agency in August 1995 helped Ormond’s production company get a film production agreement with Miramax, where Weinstein served as co-chairman, her lawsuit said. To secure funding for a project that involved going to Africa, CAA helped arrange a business dinner for Ormond and Weinstein in New York, the lawsuit said.
“That was the sum total of CAA’s involvement in the events that took place in December 1995,” CAA said.
Ormond said in her lawsuit that, after the dinner, Weinstein insisted on discussing the project at the Manhattan apartment Miramax provided for the actor.
Once there, Ormond, who was “inebriated” to the point she could not put the keys in the door, said that despite her protests, Weinstein “stripped naked,” forced her to give him a massage, climbed on top of her, masturbated and then forced her “to perform oral sex on him.”
In Ormond’s October lawsuit against Weinstein, she also named CAA as defendants, alleging negligence and breach of fiduciary duty, as well as Miramax and its onetime parent company Walt Disney Co., accusing them of negligent supervision and retention.
The Walt Disney Co. in a court filing on Tuesday also asked for the court to dismiss the complaint, saying that Ormond’s lawsuit does not sufficiently allege that Weinstein was a Walt Disney Co. employee, or that the company knew of Weinstein’s prior alleged misconduct or that it could control Weinstein’s behavior.
Miramax also filed a motion to dismiss the complaint.
Ormond’s lawyers said that they will oppose these motions and are confident she will prevail.
“As we allege in the complaint, CAA, Disney, and Miramax knew that Harvey Weinstein was a predator before he attacked Ms. Ormond, and they did nothing about it because Weinstein made them money,” Ormond’s attorneys said on Tuesday.
Ormond is suing under the Adult Survivors Act, which was passed in New York in 2022 in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It establishes a one-year “lookback” window for survivors of sexual assault that occurred when they were over the age of 18, regardless of when it took place.
“The men at CAA who represented Ormond knew about Weinstein. So too did Weinstein’s employers at Miramax and Disney,” Ormond’s lawsuit states. “Brazenly, none of these prominent companies warned Ormond that Weinstein had a history of assaulting women because he was too important, too powerful, and made them too much money.”