Madonna was pleasantly surprised when Harvey Weinstein was exposed as an alleged serial sexual predator because the disgraced producer had reportedly "crossed lines and boundaries" with her decades ago.
The movie mogul had been one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood for years before his career was left in tatters as dozens of women, including actresses Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, and Gwyneth Paltrow, came forward and accused him of varying degrees of sexual misconduct in the autumn of 2017.
He has since been charged with rape and other sex crimes in New York, where he is due to stand trial in September (19), while police investigations have also been launched in Los Angeles and London.
Now Madonna, whose 1991 documentary Truth or Dare and her 2011 directorial debut W.E. were both distributed by Weinstein's firms, has offered up her thoughts on the scandal, admitting she had been "well aware" of the producer's reputation after previously experiencing aspects of his bad behaviour first-hand.
"Harvey crossed lines and boundaries and was incredibly sexually flirtatious and forward with me when we were working together; he was married at the time, and I certainly wasn't interested," the pop veteran shares in an interview with The New York Times.
"I was aware that he did the same with a lot of other women that I knew in the business. And we were all, 'Harvey gets to do that because he's got so much power and he's so successful and his movies do so well and everybody wants to work with him, so you have to put up with it.' So that was it."
Madonna, who didn't offer up specifics about her reportedly inappropriate interactions with Weinstein, admitted she found his downfall "pretty surprising", because she never thought movements like the ongoing #MeToo campaign against sexual misconduct would become so mainstream during her lifetime.
"When it happened, I was really like, 'Finally,'" she recalls. "I wasn't cheering from the rafters because I'm never going to cheer for someone's demise. I don't think that's good karma anyway. But it was good that somebody who had been abusing his power for so many years was called out and held accountable."
