There’s at least one woman in America still willing to star in a Harvey Weinstein production.
Public relations specialist Sallie Hofmeister, a former journalist once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is unwavering in her role as the public face of the embattled Hollywood producer.
Friends who described Hofmeister as a staunch feminist, generous friend and promoter of young professional women, say they are disappointed that she has become the public “apologist” for Weinstein.
“All I can say is how much are they paying her to be Harvey’s mouthpiece?” said a Hollywood insider who has known Hofmeister for more than 20 years. “I hope she’s making a fortune because this is really embarrassing.”
Hofmeister would not disclose her salary. “That’s confidential, of course,” she said in an email.
Hofmeister, 60, a senior executive for powerhouse PR firm Sitrick & Company, is part of an elite coterie of spin doctors and legal muscle that Weinstein has assembled to defend himself against a deluge of abuse allegations, including possible criminal charges that he raped “Boardwalk Empire” star Paz de la Huerta in 2010.
Hofmeister arrived on the scene shortly after Hollywood actresses Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd came forward in a bombshell Oct. 5 report in The New York Times that accused Weinstein of alleged sexual abuse.
Two days after the report, Weinstein’s lawyer Lisa Bloom resigned, calling her defense of Weinstein “a colossal mistake.” Hofmeister began to appear in news stories as the producer’s spokeswoman beginning on Oct. 10.
Michael Sitrick, who founded the high-powered firm that hired Hofmeister in 2013, told us that Weinstein’s lawyers contacted him Oct. 7, but that he wasn’t able to take the account personally because he was dealing with “a serious family illness issue when the call came in.”
Sitrick, once called “the Ninja Master of the Dark Art of Spin” by Gawker, immediately called Hofmeister, who he described as “highly principled and highly ethical.”
He said his decision to assign her the Weinstein account had nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman. She was simply the first person who came to mind, he said, adding that if she hadn’t picked up the phone, he would have reached out to a number of male executives at his firm, which has represented Johnny Depp, Hulk Hogan and companies such as Exxon and American Apparel when they were mired in controversy.
Following last week’s New Yorker story that detailed how Weinstein used former Mossad agents and high-powered lawyers to investigate his accusers, Hofmeister denied the accusations and called them a “fiction.”
“Sallie Hofmeister … stop,” wrote a woman on her Facebook page. “Please stop. You are selling your soul for a paycheck and raping the victims with your words. We, as women, must do better than that.”
Another Facebook friend asked last week, “how does Sallie Hofmeister live with herself defending this predator piece of s–t?
Based in Los Angeles, Hofmeister — who said she has “a long standing partner,” and was described by one pal as having a “heart of gold” — grew up in upstate New York. She held various high-profile reporting and editing positions. For 17 years, beginning in 1995, she covered Hollywood power players as a business reporter and then business editor — the first woman to hold the position — for the LA Times. In 1996, she was nominated for a Pulitzer for leading the paper’s coverage of Disney’s $19 billion purchase of Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which created the largest entertainment company in the world at the time.
But she grew disenchanted with journalism when she saw colleagues getting laid off, a friend told us. Hofmeister left the LA Times in 2012 just as incoming editor-in-chief and publisher Davan Maharaj began another purge at the paper.
A year later she joined Sitrick & Company.
Why take Weinstein on as a client?
“The firm has known Mr. Weinstein’s attorneys for some time and worked with one of them for more than two decades. We greatly respect these lawyers and they asked for our help in making sure the coverage is as fair and accurate as possible,” Hofmeister said.
Sitrick added that all statements on the Weinstein matter are cleared by Weinstein’s elite team of lawyers before they are issued to the press. He repeated Weinstein’s assertions that “any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied.”
Sitrick dismissed the hate he and his colleague have had to face lately.
“It’s easy to criticize someone when you don’t know the facts,” he said.