Last week, after years of rumors and aborted attempts to bring it to light, Hollywood’s “open secret” finally became a story fit to print. On Thursday, October 5, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times that they’d “found previously undisclosed allegations against [producer Harvey] Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company.” And earlier this week, following a ten-month investigation, Ronan Farrow reported for the New Yorker that he’d been “told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Times’ revelations, and also include far more serious claims.” Accompanying the piece is a stomach-turning audio clip of Weinstein attempting to coerce model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez into going with him to his hotel room.
Weinstein has been fired, his wife has left him, the Weinstein Company is contemplating a name change, his own brother, Bob Weinstein, has called him “obviously a very sick man,” politicians are passing Weinstein’s donations on to charity, and debates are raging as to who’s been covering for him all these years. Meantime, the list of women going public with their own stories of being harassed and/or assaulted by Harvey Weinstein carries on growing.
“I have been having conversations about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment for more than seventeen years,” writes Rebecca Traister in a piece for New York magazine that attempts to explain why it’s taken so long for this story to break. “Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power. He also employed legal and professional and economic power. . . . For decades, the reporters who tried to tell the story of Harvey Weinstein butted up against the same wall of sheer force and immovable power that was leveraged against those ambitious actors, the vulnerable assistants, the executives whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in his hands.”
In the New York Times, Jim Rutenberg focuses on what he calls “something akin to a protection racket. This is the network of aggressive public relations flacks and lawyers who guard the secrets of those who employ them and keep their misdeeds out of public view. . . . For many journalists, Mr. Weinstein was the white whale that got away.” The late NYT columnist David Carr “twice came close to nailing down a story about abuses committed by Mr. Weinstein. In both cases, the accuser ‘backed out after agreeing to talk.’ There were similar stories of failed attempts involving Kim Masters of the Hollywood Reporter, Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace of New York magazine and Times reporters. As David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, told me on Wednesday, a news organization cannot go after a powerful figure or institution if it does not have the resources for lawyers, fact checkers and experienced editors who won’t be intimidated by the protection racket.”
“Two years and six months ago, the Manhattan district attorney had an opportunity to charge Harvey Weinstein with a sex crime.” For Salon, Leon Neyfakh looks into “what happened after Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office decided not to pursue it. That decision is now under scrutiny, as is Vance’s credibility as an elected official.”
“It is the perverse, insistent, matter-of-factness of male sexual predation and assault—of men’s power over women—that haunts the revelations about Mr. Weinstein,” writes the NYT’s Manohla Dargis. “This banality of abuse also haunts the American movie industry. Women helped build the industry, but it has long been a male-dominated enterprise that systematically treats women—as a class—as inferior to men. It is an industry with a history of sexually exploiting younger female performers and stamping expiration dates on older ones. It is an industry that consistently denies female directors employment and contemptuously treats the female audience as a niche, a problem, an afterthought.”
“If you have ever experienced sexual assault or harassment, you know that one of the cruellest things about these acts is the way that they entangle, and attempt to contaminate, all of the best things about you,” writes Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker. And “most of the women who have spoken up about Weinstein—a group that includes, among many others, Mira Sorvino, Rosanna Arquette, Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie—have spoken with a tone that many women find familiar: a muted sadness, a long-kept knowledge of diminishment, a sense of undeserved yet inescapable remorse.”
“Remember that every time a man commits a violent act it only takes one or two steps to figure out how it’s a woman’s fault,” writes Rebecca Solnit at the Literary Hub.
Megan Twohey has been following up on the Weinstein Company, reporting that Bob Weinstein and company president David Glasser have “told concerned employees in a video conference call that they were shocked by the allegations and unaware of payments made to women who complained of unwanted touching, sexual harassment and other over-the-line behavior . . . But interviews and internal company records show that the company has been grappling with Mr. Weinstein’s behavior for at least two years.”
As for “the allegedly widespread efforts on the part of other executives and staff members at his company to cover up for him,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board writes: “That kind of collusion—and that’s what it is—on the part of colleagues who think they know about sexual misconduct but do not stop it or report it is why sexual harassment and assault are still so prevalent in the workplace.”
Filmmaker and former head of Focus Features James Schamus tells Scott Feinberg in the Hollywood Reporter that “soon, very soon, we need to move past our fascination and horror at the pathologies of this particular predator, and ask, just how is it possible that, for example, a corporate Human Resources department could, for three decades, in essence preside over a factory of abuse? . . . This is the story of one predator and his many victims; but it is also a story about an overwhelming systemic enabling, and until that story is fully told we will fall far short of stopping future depredations on a similar scale.”
IN OTHER NEWS
“Honest Trailers creator Andy Signore has been fired by Defy Media after he was accused of sexual abuse.” Aaron Couch for the Hollywood Reporter: “Stories of sexual harassment have roiled the genre community over the past year, with Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles taking a leave of absence last month after multiple women went public with stories of sexual assault. Devin Faraci exited Birth.Movies.Death as editor-in-chief last October after allegations of sexual assault, while in Los Angeles, the independent film venue Cinefamily suspended its activities in August after executives resigned following sexual abuse allegations.”
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from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2yd5Nvm
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