Michael Bloomberg, as New York City mayor, honored Harvey Weinstein at a 2013 ceremony where the now-disgraced movie producer cracked sex jokes and praised the current 2020 presidential candidate for helping his movie production company after it fell on tough times, according to video that surfaced Friday.
“The reason Bob and I became fond of independent foreign films is because when we were 14-year-old boys and our hormones were raging, we saw an ad for the Mayfair movie theater…and it said ‘the 400 blows,’ and we thought it was something else,” Weinstein said at the June 10, 2013 event, which was held at Gracie Mansion.
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Bloomberg was honoring Weinstein and his brother Bob as part of a “Made in New York” campaign led by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.
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Twitter personality Comfortably Smug published a snippet of the video on Friday in which Weinstein made the sex joke. The 67-year-old producer was charged on May 25, 2018 with raping two women in New York years earlier. He was charged on Jan. 7 with sexually assaulting an actress in Los Angeles on Feb. 17, 2013. He is currently on trial in New York.
While allegations against Weinstein did not become public until 2017, rumors reportedly floated around celebrity and political circles about his misconduct with women. (RELATED: Hillary Clinton Says She Had No Way Of Knowing About Weinstein Allegations, But Her Campaign Was Warned)
The full version of the Bloomberg event, which has been on YouTube since 2013, also shows Weinstein thanking the 2020 presidential candidate for helping his movie company.
Weinstein expressed gratitude that Bloomberg “dropped a lot of things” in order to help his company after it fell on difficult financial times during the recession that began in 2009.
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“We’ve had tremendous years, but about four-and-a-half years ago there was a bump in the road,” said Weinstein.
“I called our mayor, and I just said, ‘you know, things are a little topsy-turvy here at the company, you know, we’d be moving jobs to California and we don’t want to leave New York City.’ And the mayor, extremely busy as he was with so many more important things, dropped a lot of things and got it done for us.”
“The mayor’s there in a big way. The mayor was there in a visual way,” Weinstein continued.
“And I don’t think Bob and I would be on this stage if the mayor wasn’t there for us, so thank you mayor.”
A Bloomberg campaign spokeswoman noted in a statement that the event was held before allegations against Weinstein were publicly known.
“This video is from four years before the truth about Harvey Weinstein was known, when he was known for helping raise tens of millions of dollars for 9/11 responders and for helping to spur Lower Manhattan’s rebirth,” Julie Wood, the campaign spokesman, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement.
“When Mike was Mayor, New York’s film industry almost tripled in size and employed over 100,000 people a year, as film companies and film production came back to New York,” she added.
“This video shows New York City thanking Weinstein for his role in that, and again, it was four years before the truth about Harvey was known.”
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