From the Magazine
October 2018 Issue

How Jill Messick’s Suicide Reflects the Tragedies of the #MeToo Era

As the accusations against Harvey Weinstein multiplied, one Hollywood producer found herself implicated in a web of complicity. Jill Messick’s story illustrates the complexities of a toxic culture, and of the movement dedicated to fixing it.
A photo collage featuring photos of Jill Messick with her daughter and on Oscar night.
Left, Jill Messick with her daughter, Ava, on the set of Baby Mama. Right, Jill Messick with Robin Jonas on Oscar night, 2012.

It was last October that the news hit, and it came in a one-two punch: first in an exposé in The New York Times, and then a few days later in The New Yorker. Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s prestigious studio head, was allegedly a serial sexual predator. Actress Ashley Judd led the way in speaking out, the first of 87 women who subsequently came forward with allegations of abuse, assault, and rape against Weinstein, their tales spawning a movement that united victims of sexual assault across multiple fields started by the activist Tarana Burke, under the hashtag: MeToo. Among the movement’s most powerful voices was actress Rose McGowan, who detailed her own alleged sexual assault at the hands of Weinstein in her memoir, Brave, released in January, and highlighted the producer’s machinations in trying to silence her in a New Yorker article about his “army of spies.” It was a chilling story, and hard not to listen.

Over the course of her narrative, McGowan introduced the public to a woman no one outside the movie business had heard of, producer Jill Messick, her manager for a period in the 1990s. The portrayal was not a flattering one. Messick appeared to be a Weinstein enabler, in silent cahoots with the man the actress called “the monster.” In McGowan’s memoir, about which I interviewed her for Vanity Fair’s February issue, she describes the 1997 Sundance Film Festival premiere of her film Going All the Way. Weinstein, who was in the audience as a prospective buyer, was seated some rows behind her and Messick, and a scene in which McGowan appears topless came on the screen. “I wanted the ground to swallow me up,” wrote McGowan, who hadn’t yet met Weinstein. “It had been really hard shooting that scene in the first place and I sat there remembering how I had cried after filming it. I slid farther down in my seat. I noticed my manager,” whom she names earlier, “turning and nodding in the direction of the studio head. When I replay the chain of events in my head, I’ll always be chilled by that nod. I wondered what the nod meant. Now I know.” The next morning, at a breakfast meeting in his suite at the Stein Eriksen lodge in Deer Valley, Utah, Weinstein, according to McGowan, led her into the Jacuzzi room, took off her clothes, carried her into the tub, and forcibly performed oral sex on her. (Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.)

In the rush to identify Weinstein’s cast of enablers, the press seized on Messick’s alleged role in the drama. An October article about McGowan on the front page of The New York Times left some readers with the impression that Messick was at best insensitive to Weinstein’s alleged behavior, and at worst complicit in that involving her former client. When she was on tour promoting her memoir, McGowan, spurred by her interviewers, continued to bring up Messick’s role in her suffering. In a typical exchange, on Good Morning America, McGowan relayed how Messick, soon after the incident, got a job at Miramax, where she worked for the next seven years as a producer. “You do the math,” she said. Weinstein, for his part, seized the opportunity to turn Messick into a weapon of exculpation. In late January he released an e-mail that Messick had sent him the prior spring, months before the world heard the litany of accounts against the former Miramax executive. In the e-mail, Messick recalls that at the time, McGowan told her that the sexual encounter was consensual but that she later regretted it. To some, it tinged McGowan’s account with doubt; to others, it proved Messick was covering for a rapist. “Sucks to be Jill Messick,” tweeted a member of #RoseArmy, her Twitter brigade. “Please give back your woman card.” One week later, Messick died by suicide.

Left, Jill Messick with Baby Mama’s Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. Right, Messick (second from left) with John Goldwyn, Fey, and Michael McCullers on the set of Baby Mama, New York City, 2007.

Photographs courtesy of Universal Pictures.

It is impossible to know what, if any one thing, drives a person to take her own life. Messick, as friends and family attested, had long struggled with bipolar disorder. But her family believes that her involuntary appearances in the Weinstein narrative brought her to the brink. Jill, they wrote in a statement, “became collateral damage in an already horrific story.” As her inner circle grieved and tried to comfort her two teenage children, they also scrambled to salvage the reputation of a woman they believe was caught between two diametrically opposed forces—McGowan and Weinstein. Far from being an enemy of women, they insist, Messick was supportive, full of life, passionate about her work, and driven to carve out a place for women’s voices in a man’s world.

The #MeToo movement has ended the careers of dozens of powerful men. It has resulted in scores of just investigations, resignations, firings, bankruptcies, and lawsuits. In this case, however, its momentum arguably played a role in the taking of a woman’s life. While the movement has had the important effect of giving women the strength in solidarity to come forward with their stories of abuse, it has also created a public court—one that was bound to become fraught with contradictions. Messick’s death, while the result of several factors, is a tragic case study in the complexities of the movement.

Born and raised in Southern California, Messick (then Jill Sobel) attended U.S.C. before heading straight to the independent-movie business, then ruled by the court of Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax. After a stint at the Gersh talent agency, she went to work at Cary Woods Productions, one of the hottest small production companies in the 90s, responsible for indie hits such as Kids and Scream, which were distributed, respectively, by Miramax and its horror division, Dimension. Producer Cathy Konrad, then president of the company, recalls that Messick had street smarts, great taste, and a knack for spotting new talent.

Within the company, Messick helped develop an internal management agency that nurtured the careers of actors who starred in their films, in particular two breakout female hipsters with dark edges: McGowan and Chloë Sevigny. Messick was more than a professional advocate for them. “Jill was the first guiding force I had in Hollywood,” Sevigny said in a statement. “She was my mentor—I slept on her couch.” Messick and McGowan were close, too, and bonded in a way that smart, intense young women in thrilling, yet toxic, environments can.

In 1996, Messick left the production company to pursue talent management at Addis-Wechsler, and Sevigny and McGowan followed her. Founded by Keith Addis and Nick Wechsler, the firm epitomized the wild and woolly moviemaking culture of the decade. There was ample partying and drugs; executives slept with assistants, and the young women rolled with it, according to a former female staffer. She says, “We all felt, You put up with certain things to get to play with the big boys. We kind of wore it as a badge of honor.” Looking back now, she adds, “I’m kind of ashamed. Did we not have any self-esteem?” (Addis acknowledges that there was no non-fraternizing policy at the time.) Jill was then engaged to Kevin Messick, already a producer with some success (he went on to make the Jack Reacher movies, starring Tom Cruise), and stayed out of the drama. At Addis-Weschler in those days, Miramax was considered the only game in town, and Weinstein was God.

In 1997, both Messick and McGowan, then 29 and 23, respectively, had an early career coup when McGowan’s movie Going All The Way, was headed to Sundance. As the hipster ingénue du jour, McGowan was followed around the festival by an MTV crew.

Her account of Messick’s actions at the festival began with the screening in which Messick, who barely knew Weinstein, allegedly nodded that signal of collusion. Those close to Messick say this notion is absurd. Messick did arrange a breakfast meeting between Weinstein and McGowan on the following morning at his hotel, at his request. When McGowan arrived at the restaurant, the maître d’ told her that Weinstein asked that she go to his hotel suite, where he was stuck on the phone—a story that now resonates as being frighteningly familiar.

Jill Messick and Sarah Green on the set of Frida, in Mexico, 2001.

Photograph courtesy of Robin Jonas.

Afterward, distraught, McGowan says, she told Messick what had happened. Messick hugged her, but then, McGowan wrote, “[Messick’s] instinct was to squash everything, which just freaked me out more.” But according to Keith Addis, Messick walked McGowan into the offices of Addis and Nick Wechsler so she could tell the bosses what had happened, thinking that they could deal with it. It was a reasonable attempt at protocol in a company that had no protocol to speak of. Addis recalls that “it was the white-bathrobe story. He was inappropriate. He made her feel extremely uncomfortable.” He adds, “She never said ‘rape.’” (McGowan declined to comment for this story.) According to Addis, he and Wechsler told McGowan and Messick that they’d handle it. They spoke with Weinstein shortly thereafter, and he promised them that he would seek psychiatric help. The company hired a law firm to discuss legal action with McGowan; eventually the actress accepted a settlement of $100,000 from Weinstein.

Then came the real betrayal, according to McGowan: Messick went to work for Miramax shortly after the incident. It was a plum job: V.P. of development reporting to Meryl Poster, Miramax’s co-president of production, who was one of the most powerful and exacting women producers at the time, and Messick’s track record made her a catch. “Anyone who knows me knows I’m a tough boss,” Poster says. “Jill was professional, dependable, reliable. She brought a lot of interesting projects in. She followed through on things. She was really good with talent. She had a good eye for that.”

Among those at Miramax, the picture painted by McGowan simply did not square with the woman they knew. In the view of her colleagues, Messick likely perceived Weinstein’s behavior in the same way many other mid-level executives did: that it was creepy and inappropriate but didn’t rise to the level of criminal behavior. “We’ve all been searching our souls, asking who knew what, asking what could have been done,” says Jack Lechner, an executive V.P. at the time. “For the vast majority—and it may sound unbelievable to many people—we didn’t know. We knew he was cheating on his wife, you couldn’t miss that. We all knew he was abusive and bullying, because he was abusive and bullying to all of us.” Should Messick, as some have suggested, have refused the job? To make that judgment would presume Messick should have been held to a higher standard than the many others who continued to work with Weinstein.

It would be fair to say that throughout her career Messick championed women’s stories and female filmmakers. Her advocacy for women in film was put to the test with Frida, the passion project of a young Salma Hayek about her hero, the mid-20th-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Messick, the studio executive on the movie, had just given birth to her first child, Jackson, when filming started, but she made the difficult decision to go to Mexico to support Hayek, while her husband stayed home with the baby. As Hayek wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times last December, her dream production soon became an excruciating experience due to Weinstein, who allegedly abused her in a series of unimaginable ways. After she turned down his multiple sexual requests, she wrote, he turned on her viciously. At the time Hayek did not tell her colleagues that it was her rejection that triggered his rage. As a producer and star of the film, she desperately wanted to get it made (she eventually bowed to his demand for a scene involving full-frontal nudity and sex with another woman), and feared Weinstein would kill the project if she spoke up. (Weinstein has publicly disputed Hayek’s account, and declined to answer numerous questions for this article.)

It was up to Messick to negotiate with Weinstein on behalf of the team, which included several women. After a test screening at which the movie scored 85, which was usually considered excellent, Weinstein had a fit, claiming the score wasn’t high enough, and threw the scorecards in director Julie Taymor’s face. The movie was all but dead. Messick went to work on what seemed an impossible ask—bringing Weinstein back to the table. “She always navigated the frustrating and hostile environment at Miramax with elegance and grace,” Hayek wrote on Instagram after Messick’s death. “She was an excellent executive,” says one of the filmmakers. “In no way did she bend to the male power structure. She stood up for the team.” The film was nominated for five Academy Awards and won two.

Messick left Miramax in 2003 to head up Lorne Michaels’s film company, where one of her first coups was teaming with screenwriter Tina Fey on Mean Girls. In 2008, Messick followed up that movie’s incredible success with Baby Mama, starring Fey and Amy Poehler. Her kids visited the set, where they got to meet all the cast and crew and to watch their mom, hands-on, at her really cool job. On the outside, Messick was the picture of the woman who had it all.

But throughout, unbeknownst to many around her, Messick was quietly battling bipolar disorder. For decades, she was under the care of psychiatrists and therapists, trying out different combinations of medications, while her husband provided emotional support. For most of her career, she managed her struggle, though there were pockets of deep depression along the way. “When I look back at how much pain she was in,” says Rosalind Wiseman, the author of the book on which Mean Girls is based, “I feel like women do this. We just keep going. We just fake it till we make it.”

In 2011, Messick left Lorne Michaels’s company and found that career opportunities were drying up. Suddenly she was out of the producing loop and began to slowly lose her footing, professionally and personally. In 2013, her mental state took a turn for the worse. Usually calm and composed, Messick started behaving in a more animated, over-the-top manner. Friends and family members were concerned; it was if somebody had stolen her and replaced her with someone else. They soon learned this was the manic side of her disease, something they hadn’t witnessed before, and it eventually contributed to her divorce and a temporary distance from her children.

Messick still had the strength of mind to know she had to do something to get better. Gradually, she began taking steps to put her life back together; she held on as doctors recalibrated her medications. Once stabilized, she slowly renewed contact with her children. Though she and Kevin divorced, he stayed in her life. Around 2014, she began trying to rebuild her career and was making progress. An idea she had had years earlier, to make a movie based on the video game Minecraft, was finally, maybe, coming to fruition, and she was in negotiations with Warner Bros. Messick had begun reconnecting with the dozens of people she’d come to know well in the business.

In the spring of 2017, according to a friend, Messick, like so many others who’d gone through Miramax, called Weinstein to ask him to put in a good word with certain people. He said sure, and then asked if she’d do something for him. Rose McGowan, he explained, had been giving him trouble and he wanted her off his back. Would she mind providing him with an account of what McGowan had told her regarding his encounter with the actress? Ben Affleck was doing it, Weinstein said, and lots of other people too. He promised it was for his lawyers’ understanding, just to be on the safe side. Messick, unaware of the shocking allegations that were soon to break about Weinstein, agreed. A couple of months later, according to sources close to Messick, Weinstein reached out and made her an offer: a monetary award of $50,000 if she disparaged McGowan. She refused in no uncertain terms and moved on with her job search. By early fall, she was pursuing a great opportunity, as the head of Queen Latifah’s production company. Life was looking up.

Then came the season that destroyed her. In early October, after The New York Times and The New Yorker broke the allegations about Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse, Messick, like most former colleagues who had worked at Miramax, found the news sickening. Two weeks later, she herself became the main subject of a follow-up story in the Times titled REFUSING WEINSTEIN’S HUSH MONEY, McGOWAN CALLS OUT HOLLYWOOD. The article featured numerous pictures of McGowan and one of Messick. It quoted Messick’s former assistant as saying that McGowan hadn’t felt supported at the time and that both she and McGowan were shocked that Messick had gone to work for Miramax. According to a friend, Messick said she was blindsided by the article and was never given a chance to talk to the reporter. A Times spokesperson told me that the paper attempted to contact Messick several times, without success, and that “we did not characterize Ms. Messick’s actions; we reported the facts.” The article was picked up by other outlets, several of which magnified Messick’s role.

Intervening on Messick’s behalf, a friend contacted reporters at the Times, told them about Messick’s mental health, and gave them her version of events. As it happened, a second, longer article in the Times, on Weinstein’s complicity machine, barely mentioned Messick, except to report that she had declined Weinstein’s offer of money. Messick felt she could breathe again; maybe she’d weathered the storm.

Messick with her son, Jackson, on the set of Hot Rod, in Vancouver in 2006.

Photograph courtesy of Kevin Messick

But McGowan’s version of Jill Messick would not go away. In late January she was left a message by Good Morning America, informing her that they were doing a segment on McGowan, who was promoting her memoir, Brave. The staffer wanted to know: “Is it true that during a screening of Going All the Way at Sundance in 1997 you nodded at Harvey Weinstein during a topless scene of Rose McGowan? We need an answer by tomorrow morning.” In a few days’ span, McGowan appeared on Good Morning America, Nightline, and The View. During each segment Messick was mentioned in the context of Hollywood’s complicity, or a picture of her was featured.

Some of Messick’s friends urged her to come forward to defend herself. Despite her devastation, Messick felt like she was in a no-win trap. According to Robin Jonas, Messick’s closest friend in the last period of her life and a Miramax veteran, “Jill supported the bravery of these women coming forward to share their truths and expose those who had committed unimaginable acts of treachery. She feared that if she openly pushed back on McGowan’s version of events, it could lead to others’ being unfairly questioned and that her words would be used to halt a burgeoning and necessary movement.” And so she stayed silent.

Messick was sure that this was the end of her career. After all, look what was happening to every man whose name was surfacing in the media, even when there was only a whiff of an allegation—and those were men with power. She was a middle-aged woman, in a recently fragile state, still trying to climb her way back up. She hadn’t received a call from Queen Latifah’s company, and was convinced the job was off the table. She worried that Warner Bros. might pull the Minecraft movie because of all the bad publicity she was getting.

The final blow came on January 30, when Weinstein’s lawyers released the e-mail she had provided to him. It read: “When [Rose and I] met up the following day, she hesitantly told me of her own accord that during the meeting that night before she had gotten into a hot tub with Mr. Weinstein. She was very clear about the fact that getting into that hot tub was something that she did consensually and that in hindsight it was also something that she regretted having done.”

Weinstein gave Messick no warning about the release of this e-mail. Knowing now the accusations against him, she was beside herself to see her words used to defend him, and horrified that she had agreed to provide him with this statement in the first place. Twitter pounced: “She got caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar,” wrote one. “Collusion,” tweeted another.

Friends urged her to hold on and promised it would blow over. But a week later, she was dead. Weinstein never reached out with any condolence. McGowan posted on Instagram: “May your family find some measure of solace during this pain. That one man could cause so much damage is astounding, but tragically true. The bad man did this to us both. May you find peace on the astral plane. May you find serenity with the stars.” The message did not go over well with Messick’s loved ones.

Three hundred people attended Messick’s memorial service. None spoke publicly about the drama she had just endured, but its connection to the larger cultural movement that had seized our collective consciousness wasn’t far from anyone’s mind. Cathy Konrad suspects that the Hollywood in which Messick worked and thrived, the Hollywood we now realize was fraught with abuses, took a psychological toll on her. “We’ve known that these situations that we’ve been in have been uncomfortable, inappropriate, crossing the line,” she says. “But because the greater dome over Hollywood dictates acceptance of said conditions unconditionally, you sort of take it and move on. People are realizing that they took in more toxins than they could handle.”

Jonas is more direct. “It is debatable if this situation was entirely responsible for Jill’s death. However, I feel confident, and it breaks my heart just thinking about it—having talked to her almost every day between October and February—if Jill had not been forced into these seemingly never-ending news cycles of horror, she would still be alive today,” she says. The caution may sound simple, even naïve, but heeding it could be as difficult—and as revolutionary—as #MeToo.

If you need emotional support or are in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the production company of the film Going All the Way. It was Lakeshore Entertainment.