Days after claiming to HuffPost that Harvey Weinstein once masturbated in front of her, TV journalist Lauren Sivan sat down with Megyn Kelly to tell her story for the first time on camera.
“I was at a dinner in New York City one night with a bunch of friends. I sat down at a table at an empty seat and he came up behind me and said, ‘I think you’re in my seat,'” the former Fox News host, 39, recalled on Megyn Kelly Today on Monday, October 9. “He was very polite, very warm, very conversational. He asked me what I did. We started talking about news, we started talking about politics, he was complimenting me and telling me how impressed he was with how much I knew.”
Sivan, who was working as a local news reporter at the time, claimed she later went with the executive, 65, to a restaurant that he owned. “And that’s where he cornered me, in this vestibule, and leaned in and tried to kiss me, which I immediately rebuffed,” she alleged. “I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. I had no idea that’s what this was. I’m sorry. I have a very serious boyfriend and I’m not interested.’ And I thought it would end there. But that’s when he blocked the entrance — or exit for me. And said, ‘Well, then, just stand there and be quiet.'”
The George Washington University graduate then reiterated the claims she previously made to HuffPost. “He immediately exposed himself and began pleasuring himself, and I just stood there dumbfounded,” she alleged. “I was so shocked. I could not believe what I was witnessing. … It was disgusting and kind of pathetic, really, to stand there and look at this man.”
Sivan claimed that the Oscar winner called her at work the day after the alleged incident and offered to see her again. “I said, ‘Absolutely not,'” she recalled. “And I’m pretty sure I just hung up the phone quickly after.”
The journalist said she decided to come forward after feeling disgruntled by Weinstein’s apology in The New York Times‘ recent bombshell report, which detailed nearly three decades of sexual harassment allegations against him. The producer’s former attorney Lisa Bloom told the Times that her client denies “many of the accusations as patently false.” He was fired from The Weinstein Company by its board of directors on Sunday, October 8.
Kelly, 46, and Sivan were colleagues at Fox News before Kelly joined NBC News earlier this year.
