Weinstein guilt proves we should never listen to celebrities
The former Hollywood heavyweight’s conviction proves once and for all why we should never listen to celebrities telling us how to live our lives
Opinion
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Now that Harvey Weinstein has been found guilty of sexual abuse, one thing is certain — we should never again listen to Hollywood celebrities who try to preach to us about anything.
Forget Ricky Gervais and his speech at the Golden Globes where he rightly said they were a bunch of pampered fools who had no expert knowledge so should just sit down and shut up.
It worked for the Globes but they were completely off the chain at the Oscars, blathering on about everything from drinking milk to climate apocalypse.
And all the time they allowed a monster like Weinstein free rein to terrorise Hollywood.
It was an open secret what he was doing. He was allowed to get away with it because “that’s the way the industry worked” and, crucially, he was a money-man who made movies that other studios had rejected.
It’s not an easy dilemma for all those movie stars.
Do they say they turned a blind eye, which makes them hypocrites and enablers? Or do they say they never heard or saw anything, which makes them self-obsessed fools paddling in a moral cesspool?
In some ways I can sympathise with them. When worldwide fame and tens of millions of dollars are being thrown around, many people would pretend they could see nothing going on.
And, as the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes tells us, being the first one to stand up and point out the bleeding obvious is a tricky thing to do.
But don’t then turn around and tell us how to live our lives.
You had the perfect platform. Every awards ceremoney was the perfect place to point the finger at Weinstein. But it was far easier to gibber on about climate change or milk.
Incidentally,
I have no doubt there will be studios racing to turn the story into a movie. Just because.
But if that is underway, a story about Harvey Weinstein — or as I shall now call him, Hardly A Weinerstein — should not be some earnest drama.
I think the best way to break Weinerstein’s power is to take the piss out of him.
Yes, the pain and anguish of his victims is terrible.
But perhaps seeing him utterly humiliated is better than setting him up as some sort of master manipulator, some supervillain who kept it all hidden from the world.
Weinerstein would probably like that.
Instead, it needs to focus on that he apparently looks like a hideous slug, has no testicles and an astonishingly tiny penis.
Naturally the years he is likely to spend behind bars, where Weinerstein will no doubt truly learn what it means to be an “unwilling participant”, should also feature.
And, while we’re at it, let the film show some of the stars preaching to the world from their awards pulpit while crimes are committed behind them.
We don’t want anyone to come out of the Weinerstein story secretly thinking the bloke was a bit of a hero for making an endless parade of stunning actresses have sex with him.
Instead they should want to vomit into their popcorn when they think of him.