Harvey Weinstein's former assistant Rowena Chiu breaks and talks about her NDA

Rowena Chiu finally shared details about her 20-year-old Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with Harvey Weinstein, which she is now happily breaking. She talked about the traumatic sexual assault she experienced while employed by Harvey Weinstein as his assistant when she was just 24 years old.

It was in 1998 when the now-disgraced mogul attempted to rape her while on a business trip. Chiu recalled that Weinstein attempted to rape her during a late-night meeting about movie scripts and productions in his suite. She said that after she declined his request for massages, he pushed her up against the bed and took off her tights. She managed to escape the room before anything further could happen.

She remembered that when he tried to rape her, he told her that he has "never had a Chinese girl before." He also said that he liked Chinese girls because they were "discreet." She considered it a "disgusting" and "racist" statement, which at the time she thought was his way of telling her that what happened should be their "little secret."

Chiu said she confided in Zelda Perkins about the experience, and together they hired a lawyer so they can report him to Miramax. However, Weinstein's team made her and Perkins sign an NDA instead, which silenced them forever until now.

"I'm breaking my NDA right now. He could sue me for every single interview I've ever done for breaking my NDA, but in practice, he's probably not going to. He's got bigger problems," Chiu tells Variety in an exclusive interview over the phone.

Indeed, he does; Weinstein is serving a 23-year jail sentence after being found guilty of sexual assault. Now, she can talk freely about her experience and detail the contents of the NDA. Chiu said she and Perkins were forced to sign the NDA for the sake of their friends and family's safety.

"We fought really hard to have a really simple clause that said Harvey must either travel with one male assistant at any one time. We had to give that clause up because they insisted that we provide them with a list of the names and addresses of our friends and family, which is just evil," she revealed adding, "Why would we give them a list of names and addresses of our friends and family? Now, we all know about Black Cube and The Red Flag list, but even then, I thought that I would literally be putting them in danger."

She said the NDA prevented her and Perkins to communicate and they have never spoken to each other after they signed the contract. It locked them both "from any type of emotional support" and prevented them from talking "about any aspect of our life during this time ever to anybody — not just the media and lawyers and doctors and therapists."

Chiu said the NDA "has always been less about Harvey Weinstein or any one man's behavior — it has been about the system that enables this behavior." She said it should be "banned as a tool to cover up sexual harassment, unequivocally."