Word on the high-end real estate street in the tony, seaside community of Westport, Conn., about 1.5-hours by car northeast of Midtown Manhattan, is that disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein sold his longtime oceanfront estate in a $16 million off-market deal to neighbor Andrew Bentley.
The once high-flying and singularly influential entertainment industry powerhouse purchased the two waterfront parcels that comprise the 5.71-acre spread in two transactions more than five years apart that totaled $8.24 million. In 1994 he and his first wife Eve Chilton paid $4.24 million for the smaller of the two parcels, 2.38-acres with a stately, 8,896-square-foot black-shuttered Colonial that tax records indicate was built in 1909 with contains eight bedrooms and seven full and three half bathrooms, and then, in late 2000, they paid another $4 million for the 3.33-acre vacant parcel next door, which remains undeveloped. Weinstein became the sole owner of both properties after he and Chilton divorced in 2004 and he and his second ex-wife, Marchesa fashion brand founder and designer and “Project Runway All Stars” judge Georgina Chapman, were married on the estate in 2007.
Bentley, who has reportedly hired the local architectural firm Roger Ferris and Partners to “come up with ideas” for the property, including perhaps build a new home of the vacant parcel, owns at least three other plum properties along the same swanky street including a nearly 10,000-square-foot mansion on almost 6.5-waterfront-acres he scooped up in 2013 for $18 million from daytime talk show pioneer Phil Donahue and “That Girl” Marlo Thomas.
Facing years of legal tangles and mountains of attorney fees over dozens of allegations and criminal charges of sexual harassment and rape, Weinstein seems in a hurry to decrease his day-to-day expenditures by liquidating some of the multi-million dollar jewels in the crown of his residential property portfolio. Last year Weinstein sold a contemporary residence in Westport, Conn., for $1.615 million — his mother, Miriam, lived there until her death in late 2016 — and early this year Weinstein and Chapman lost a small fortune on the sale of a secluded bluff top mansion in the Hamptons community of Amagansett that went for $10 million, an astonishing $1.4 million less than they paid for the almost two-acre property in May 2014.
For now, Weinstein and Chapman continue to own a 5,066-square-foot red brick townhouse on a prime block of New York City’s West Village they purchased in 2006, about a year before they were married, for $14.95 million. Weinstein also continues to own a stylishly overhauled 1920s Tudor cottage in West Hollywood, Calif., that was purchased in the fall of 2017 for $1.55 million and recently came up for rent at almost $7,500 per month — it had been occupied by one of his children —and Chapman, who we’ve heard through the real estate gossip grapevine might be eyeing a move to Brooklyn, co-owns a two-bedroom and two-bathroom apartment in New York’s West Village she acquired with her brother, Edward Chapman, CEO of Marchesa, in late 2009 for $1.7 million.
aerial image: Google
