‘Broken’: Why this red carpet moment is so controversial

The arrival of one the hottest picks to take home an Oscars gong today reveals just how stuffed the United States really is.

OPINION

Today, everyone has had their eyes peeled for the arrival of Adrien Brody on the Oscars red carpet.

Ignore the fact that he’s the hot-diggity, odds-on favourite to take home the Best Actor nod for his part in The Brutalist.

No, take a look at the woman on his arm. Her.

She is a statuesque blonde of indeterminate age in the sea of statuesque blondes of indeterminate age inside the Dolby Theatre.

Her name is Georgina Chapman – and if that doesn’t ring any bells, you’re not alone.

But maybe you know her better by her former title – Mrs Harvey Weinstein.

Could there be a more apt moment for her to truly burst back onto the scene than now?

In the annals of #MeToo, Ms Chapman numbers around 887 on the list of Mr Weinstein’s victims, but a victim she was no less.

US actor Adrien Brody and fashion designer Georgina Chapman attends the 97th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Picture: Anegla Weiss/AFP

In 2017, a series of bombshell reports brought Mr Weinstein – then a stereotype-fulfilling, corpulent Hollywood titan – asunder, exposing him as a serial abuser of women.

Women in France and Los Angeles and New York.

Women in hotel rooms and meetings and limos and offices and anywhere with a closeable door.

Surely, sometimes, where not.

In the weeks and months that followed Mr Weinstein’s unmasking, Ms Chapman, the mother of the couple’s two young children, walked away from her decade-long marriage and had her Marchesa fashion brand go, overnight, from red carpet dahhhling beloved by the A-list to being actively boycotted.

There was even a Twitter hashtag.

It all came down to one question – how could Ms Chapman have not known what sort of man Mr Weinstein truly was, given his serial, pathological abuses of power?

A year later, Ms Chapman said she had been “terribly naive” and talked about her rage and confusion. She told Vogue she was “so humiliated and so broken”, an interview during which she broke down repeatedly, at one point sobbing so much an assistant turned up with a box of tissues. The journalist described Ms Chapman, quite simply, as “broken”.

Disgraced US film producer Harvey Weinstein attends a court hearing at the Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on September 18, 2024. Picture: Jeenah Moon/Pool/AFP

A year later, in 2019, she would meet Oscar winner Brody on a trip to Puerto Rico and they have been together ever since. Throughout this year’s award season, he has repeatedly and effusively praised Ms Chapman in his various acceptance speeches.

If the story ended there, we would have a happy-ever-after with today marking the moment Ms Chapman officially soared back into the uppermost echelons of Hollywood and celebrity.

Unleash the cliches about phoenixes.

But it’s not, though, is it? A happy ending, that is.

Widen the lens, and the America that Ms Chapman is emerging back into is one that would have been unrecognisable circa 2017.

As the Oscars get underway, that theatre of several thousand luvvies and luvvy-adjacents is all the resistance America really has right now; the last Obama-ite cultural, social outpost in the United States of Trumpian A.

Watch out for at least one of the winners who will get up and give a speech chock-a-self-important-block of high horse.

But remember 2017? The revelations about Mr Weinstein unceremoniously uncorked a culture-shaking fury, frustration and over-it-ness. A slew of bad and just generally lecherous men who used their power to really lech-with-a-vengeance suddenly came face-to-face with their comeuppance.

Georgina Chapman was ‘broken’ over her husband’s crimes. Picture: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

Brody and Chapman have been dating for five years. Picture: Mike Coppola/Getty IMages North America/Getty Images via AFP

It felt like a great tectonic plate shifting was happening; a clamorous moment that rang bell-like through the culture. There was a tolling – and a lot of men finally had their behaviour catch up with them.

Can I get a hallelujah?

The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 followed a similar course – one incident tapping into existing, vast reservoirs of mass anger and people coming out and giving a loud voice to their exasperation and their outrage. It was a glorious rising up in a country born out of exactly this sort of rising up. (Though the Boston Tea Party never had a hashtag).

Ha. Hahahahahahahahahahha.

When Ms Chapman stepped onto the red carpet today, she represented someone whose life was ripped apart by the actions of a bad man – at a time when bad men are not only ruling the roost, but are more powerful than ever.

This year’s Oscars plays out against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s post-DEI America, where white middle aged men have officially been given permission to go back to being proud of being white middle aged men. You know, after all those horrendous years of their unjust martyrdom at the hands of sharp-beaked, razor-clawed progressives.

This year’s Oscars plays out against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s post-DEI America. Picture: Scott Olson/Getty Images North America/Getty Images via AFP

Finally. Finally after eight long years, post-#MeToo, post-BLM, after years of being forced to unduly suffer because of their gender and race, the Kevins of the world can shrug at ever being forced to consider other people’s perspectives and experiences and feelings; at ever being forced to briefly toy with the notion that maybe the playing field that they enjoyed was not as green and easy for everyone else.

Less than two months since the Trump administration clomped back into the White House, already #MeToo seems like a dim relic of a weirdly naive and distant past. The gains that were hard won have been eradicated and instead, it now appears that whatever ground was made up, it only gave Trumpy men and the blokes of the manosphere licence to feel victimised.

What makes this all so much harder to absorb is that #MeToo was a moment defined by the righteous rage of the masses swelling up and proving to be an unstoppable force. So where is that now? Where is that similar sort of eruption in 2025?

In the six weeks of Trump Two, why have we not seen countless Americans take to the streets to express their fury with their nation’s government being wilfully dismantled from the inside?

Where is their ferocity? The uproar over the administration’s callousness and the cruelty and naked rapaciousness?

Harvey Weinstein and his former wife designer Georgina Chapman pictured on February 24, 2013. Picture: Jason Merritt/Getty Images North America/AFP

We are in the Joker bit of American history – but when, or even will, we ever get to the Fury Road part?

One of the worst things to have seen since January 20 has been America’s strange quiescence to Mr Trump, even from the nearly 75 million people who actively voted to keep him out of office. Why aren’t they in the streets? Why has there been no shred of co-ordinated opposition?

Outside of the Dolby Theatre, whatever happened to the Resistance?

At least Chapman and Brody now sound like they live a pretty idyllic life in upstate New York with her kids, her mother and what sounds like a small menagerie of cats, donkeys, horses and a dog named Ziggy.

He has an art studio. They hike. They cook.

And one day, inevitably, the Weinstein story will be told on screen, where someone like Tobey Maguire will be forced into suffocating prosthetics to prowl and ooze all over the screen.

If Mr Trump is still in office, enjoying his third or fourth term, will he be cast as a villain – or the bigggliest of victims?

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles