This October can be considered the month in which the career and life of veteran film producer and studio executive Harvey Weinstein went to the dogs. It started with a New York Times article that accused him of engaging in “casting couch” practices with actress Ashley Judd, and from there the story ballooned to epic proportions. As more and more women – film stars and staff of studio The Weinstein Company alike – started coming out to denounce some indiscretion or other that the mogul had attempted with them, Weinstein’s star fell like a rock and he was even expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

By now the number of female complainants against him has reached over 40.

The first of many

Many quarters of Hollywood would have it that there is an open secret regarding Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax Pictures with his brother Bob in 1979 before they started The Weinstein Company in 2005. Rumors that he was a regularly engaging in acts of sexual harassment and outright assault on his female staff and actresses in his movies have been making the rounds of gossip media for years. But the expose of Ashley Judd in the New York Times has given courage to many more women to start confessing their own episodes with Weinstein.

The initial charges against Weinstein were thus far of the harassment sort.

But days after the Times article, and the sharing of horror stories by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie among the first batch of accusers, The New Yorker slammed the producer next. And the women who were in that second wave, like Rose McGowan, were now saying that Weinstein outright raped them and bought their silence.

The number of women professing to have been victimized skyrocketed in their wake.

Avalanche of accusations

One sensational story was of Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who participated in a NYPD sting where she met with Harvey Weinstein while wearing a wire transmitter that recorded his admission of having groped Gutierrez.

Unfortunately, the New York district attorney felt the evidence was insufficient to press charges. All in all, the over 40 women who are now calling the former co-boss of The Weinstein Company into account have detailed between them a chilling portrait of the studio mogul and his indiscretions from 1980 to 2015.

Just this weekend, a week and a half or so after the October 5 article appeared in The New York Times, Weinstein, who had been ousted from his own studio and become a pariah, checked himself into the same rehab clinic that was used by the infamously promiscuous golf superstar Tiger Woods. Meanwhile, the latest Weinstein Company film, “The Current War” with Benedict Cumberbatch, is being held from release by the studio until perhaps next year.