Kristen Stewart Says a Saudi Prince Offered Harvey Weinstein $500,000 for 15 Minutes Alone with Her
By Sari Moon
“I walked into a room and he was there and I was like, oh my god.” — Kristen Stewart
This happened at Madison Square Garden the night of the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief in December 2012. The prince paid the $500,000 in cash, in advance, and MSG chairman James Dolan locked it up at the venue. The money went to the Robin Hood Relief Fund. Stewart was 22.
She says she had no idea any of it was happening, and had been sidestepping the same man for a while as he tried to reach her through other channels. Then she showed up to a fundraiser she’d been invited to and he was there. “I’ve just been fully harpooned,” she recalled thinking. She describes being coerced into what she calls a well-intentioned lie, money for a good cause built on not telling her the truth. If someone had just asked, she says, she probably would have said yes: “Okay, fuck it… I’m down… as long as there’s people around.”
Her security was with her the whole time, and the meeting itself never felt dangerous. “It was a very weird situation, but it was not a threatening situation,” she said. Her issue was with the setup, not the man in the room: “You could have gone about this in a different way, you you psycho.” She called the non-disclosure “a Harvey Weinstein move.”
Weinstein had told his own version years earlier, at TIFF in September 2013 while promoting the 12.12.12 documentary. In his telling it was a jaunty negotiation: he brought Stewart the offer, she asked “How much?”, and he pushed the prince up to $500,000. Stewart’s fuller account came six years later, on Howard Stern in November 2019.
Like what you read? Follow Thought Catalog on Facebook, and check out more on our website.
