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yesjili I Was a Celebrity Assistant. The Power Imbalance Is Very Real.
Earlier this month, Kenneth Iwamasa, 59yesjili, the live-in assistant to the actor Matthew Perry, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine, the drug that led to the death of his employer. Very few people have firsthand insight into the toxic dynamic that can develop while assisting a celebrity or understand the inherent power imbalance that can arise. I do.
For two months in 1998, I worked as a personal assistant to Harvey Weinstein. I witnessed the many ways in which his celebrity and power warped the behavior of people around him and how, as his assistant, I was considered to be less than a person. While I was his employee, he attempted to rape me. I was silenced for years from talking about it by an NDA, until I was able to speak up in 2019.
Of course, there is a critical distinction between Mr. Perry, an addict, and Mr. Weinstein, a rapist. Mr. Perry wasn’t the criminal that Mr. Weinstein is, and his former employee (and others) are being charged as his enablers, not being put in the spotlight as his victims.
But when I read about Mr. Iwamasa’s indictment, I understood all too well that an assistant to a celebrity can be expected to do whatever is asked of them, regardless of ethics or legality. These requests can range from telling white lies (to, say, an irate spouse wanting to know where your boss is) to procuring illicit indulgences (such as drugs). In the rarefied world of celebrity, assistants are often not really treated like people. They’re more like accessories: barely paid, highly expendable and interchangeable.
Over the past decade, I’ve thought deeply about complicity and culpability. Is it true, as the German theologian Martin Niemöller contended, that those who did not speak out in Nazi Germany were just as culpable as the prison guards? To me, that is a false conflation. As an assistant, you’re in a double-bind: You have almost no power yet you carry a disproportionate amount of responsibility. In a fundamental sense, assistants do not belong to themselves.
Mr. Iwamasa was living full-time with his employer, presumably so he could be of service around the clock. In my time as an assistant, I often thought of myself as a terrified butler. My job was to be both invisible and everywhere all at once. It was to conjure the impossible — and then to make the impossible seem like it never occurred in the first place. That is the alchemy of assisting. If you insert yourself, you’re doing a bad job. You’ve succeeded only when no one notices you or the things that you’ve made happen.
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