Disgraced Hollywood film producer, Harvey Weinstein, 67, has reached a tentative compensation deal worth $44m to resolve more than a dozen civil lawsuits filed by women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.
According to an attorney in the case and a person familiar with the deal, he told NBC News that the arrangement was discussed on Thursday at a hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, where the amount of the proposed settlement wasn’t disclosed.
Robert Feinstein, an attorney for the committee of unsecured creditors of Weinstein Co., the independent movie studio founded in 2005 by Weinstein and his brother, Bob Weinstein, told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath that the parties planned to meet with the case’s mediator next week to finalize details.
“The end goal of that mediation is to do a global settlement of the class action and all the tort claims against the Weinstein Company,” Feinstein said.
“I don’t want to overstate the likelihood, because there’s still some challenges to the plan,” he said, but he said that the offer was “globally approved by the mediation parties” and that “I think we owe it to the process to give this a try.”
The proposed deal would pay the women $30 million, reserving $14 million to cover legal fees, according to a source familiar with the negotiations who spoke to NBC on condition of anonymity.
More than 15 misconduct lawsuits have been filed against Harvey Weinstein or the company, but the disgraced Hollywood film producer has since denied sexually assaulting two women and is due to go on trial in New York in September.