What Harvey Weinstein’s Wife Georgina Chapman Really Knew — and Her Next Moves

Over the course of their nearly ten-year marriage, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and fashion designer Georgina Chapman appeared to be the ultimate power couple. “Their relationship started out with the understanding that if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” a source close to both tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story.

Weinstein helped fund the launch of Chapman’s fashion label Marchesa in 2004, using his clout as a producer to compel actresses in his movies to wear her designs.

While Chapman, 41, was aware of her husband’s notorious temper, even apologizing “many times for his verbally rough behavior,” according to the source, she wasn’t aware of Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct. “She never would have stayed married if she’d known,” says the source. “She was never with Harvey when he behaved like this.”

On Oct. 10, Chapman announced she was leaving Weinstein. In a statement to PEOPLE, she said, “My heart breaks for all the women who have suffered.” She has since met with divorce lawyers. “The past week has been a never-ending nightmare for Georgina,” says the source.

Surrounded now by relatives and close friends, Chapman is attempting to “focus all her energy on her two young children to try to protect them from everything that’s going on,” says another friend. She’s also trying to salvage Marchesa, which had to cancel a presentation of its latest collection and was recently dropped from a collaboration with Helzberg Diamonds.

Harvey Weinstein was one of Hollywood’s most feared producers. Now scores of women say he harassed and even assaulted them. Subscribe now for a look inside the mogul-sized scandal that took down a Hollywood predator – only in PEOPLE.

Also in PEOPLE’s new cover story, some of Weinstein’s alleged victims talk about the courage it took to come forward — and multiple sources also detail the climate of fear and abuse around Weinstein, 65, who has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex as more than 40 women have stepped forward with accounts of sexual assault or harassment.

 

Weinstein “has never done anything in his life that was consensual,” says one source who worked with him for years. “He makes people do things. He assaults people in every way.”

Describing the work environment, another source says, “It was human harassment at every level. Mass intimidation, constant threats — to men and women — about losing your job. It was mocking people about their physicality, about their age. One of his favorite lines was, ‘I’ll fire you on the cover of Variety.’ ”

While a producer source contends most people around him knew he was cheating on both his first wife, former model Eve Chilton (they split in 2004 and have three daughters) and Chapman, with whom he has a daughter, 7, and a son, 4, few at his company realized what allegedly was truly going on with the women he met.

“I don’t know why no one saw it, why we didn’t know. No one really wanted to think about what was happening behind closed doors,” says the source who worked with him for years. “We were naive. We thought his abuse stopped in the office.”