Why Time’s Up, Hollywood’s #MeToo advocacy group, is in crisis
In less than four years, #MeToo’s advocacy offshoot Time’s Up is in crisis, with survivors and activists denouncing it as harmful, a vile PR stunt and ‘patriarchy with a dress on.’ What went wrong?
At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, A-listers from Chris Hemsworth and Dwayne Johnson to Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Oprah Winfrey walked the red carpet in all-black designer suits and couture gowns. Through their monochrome dress code, Hollywood’s biggest stars were signalling their solidarity with whistleblowers whose explosive allegations of sexual misconduct by entertainment industry powerbrokers such as Harvey Weinstein had shaken the film industry to its core.
During the awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Winfrey won the Cecil B. DeMille Award for outstanding contribution to film, and her acceptance speech culminated with a rousing rallying cry for gender justice. Winfrey’s nine-minute address earned three standing ovations as she spoke of “a new day … on the horizon” for women and girls, and said of sexual harassers, “Their time is up!”
The actor, producer and talk show legend was referring to Time’s Up, the organisation that had just been set up in Hollywood to combat workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. In the wake of the #MeToo-inspired cascade of sexual assault and harassment allegations about key film and television industry figures, more than 300 Hollywood women – among them producer Shonda Rhimes (Bridgerton, Grey’s Anatomy) and actors Reese Witherspoon and Eva Longoria – launched Time’s Up in January 2018. The non-profit group’s objective was as lofty as it was ambitious: to achieve “safe, fair and dignified work for women’’ across the globe.
Donors to the organisation included JJ Abrams, Steven Spielberg’s Wunderkinder Foundation, Meryl Streep, Winfrey, Cate Blanchett and Taylor Swift. With all that star wattage, virtually overnight Time’s Up became one of the world’s best-known women’s rights groups. As New York Post columnist Maureen Callahan wrote recently: “After Harvey Weinstein was outed as a serial predator and rapist in October 2017, Time’s Up, along with #MeToo, exploded. In Weinstein’s wake powerful men fell like dominoes … before the year was out.” Callahan also noted that Winfrey’s Golden Globes speech was so impassioned, “for a brief time, a presidential run seemed likely”.
Yet less than four years on from that historic moment, Time’s Up is in crisis, with sexual harassment survivors and activists denouncing the #MeToo offshoot as harmful, a vile PR stunt and “patriarchy with a dress on”. Media outlets from the Los Angeles Times to The Wrap website are asking whether Time’s Up can survive after it seemingly prioritised its powerful allies – including the ex-governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo – over women who claimed they had been harassed or abused. After Time’s Up ties to the Cuomo administration were revealed last month, actor Rose McGowan, a trenchant critic of the organisation, declared on Instagram: “I told the world they are a lie 3+ years ago. I was mocked and harassed by so many who want to believe the illusion. Wake up. Hard truths are inconvenient and uncomfortable.”
McGowan, who received a settlement from Weinstein after she accused him of rape, has attacked Time’s Up as “a vile PR stunt” and a front for Hollywood interests including the influential Creative Artists Agency, which, like many film industry players, had a long association with the now-jailed movie producer.
Time’s Up’s chief executive and president Tina Tchen, a lawyer who was chief-of-staff to Michelle Obama, and Time’s Up Legal Defence Fund chairwoman Roberta Kaplan both resigned last month following revelations Cuomo’s administration had sought their advice after the former governor initially was accused of sexual harassment. An investigation by New York Attorney-General Letitia James found Cuomo had sexually harassed 11 women. The Democrat, who had been seen as a future presidential candidate and who emphatically denies mistreating women, also resigned last month.
James’s investigation found that Kaplan, a Time’s Up co-founder and lawyer, had reviewed a draft letter designed to discredit the ex-governor’s former aide, Lindsey Boylan, after she accused him of harassment. James’s report said: “Ms Kaplan read the letter to the head of the advocacy group Time’s Up [Tchen], and both of them allegedly suggested that, without the statements about Ms Boylan’s interactions with male colleagues, the letter was fine.” The letter ultimately was not published but was part of a wider effort by Cuomo’s supporters to undermine Boylan, according to James.
As Kaplan resigned, a group of sexual harassment survivors sent a collective letter to Time’s Up’s board, claiming the organisation had prioritised its “proximity to power over mission” and “has abandoned the very people it was supposed to champion”.
Within a fortnight, Tchen fell on her sword after The Washington Post published text messages showing she had told her colleagues to “stand down” from commenting publicly on Boylan’s initial allegations against Cuomo.
The resignations kept coming. This month, the entire Time’s Up board, including Rhimes and Longoria, announced they too were stepping down so the “current crisis” could evolve into “an important opportunity for growth and change”. In a statement, the beleaguered organisation said: “Time’s Up is ready for new leadership, and we want to move forcefully toward its new iteration.” Before she stepped down, Rhimes told The New York Times: “The fact that Time’s Up has become viewed as a receptacle for and the focus of men trying to cover up their obscene behaviours is exhausting to me.”
How did it come to this? How did an organisation launched amid near-revolutionary fervour become the target of so much scorn and disillusionment? Last year, The Hollywood Reporter made the prescient observation that Time’s Up faced “an existential question of whether to be guided by the interests of the Hollywood community that founded it, or the needs of less powerful women”.
In a controversy reflecting that tension, Time’s Up and Winfrey were criticised last year for their reluctance to publicly support On the Record, an HBO Max documentary about sexual abuse allegations made by mostly African-American women against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.
Shortly before the film’s release at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Winfrey, an executive producer, pulled out of the project, citing “creative differences” and “inconsistencies” in the accounts of one of Simmons’s alleged victims.
When a publicist asked Time’s Up to sign an open letter of support for Simmons’s alleged victims, the organisation refused, arguing that “Time’s Up does not sign on to promote films or any other specific projects”. Yet other women’s groups had signed the open letter, including the National Women’s Law Centre in Washington, which houses the Time’s Up Legal Defence Fund and offers legal and other assistance to sexual harassment complainants.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, for many in the film industry, “Time’s Up’s refusal to support the film and seemingly align with Winfrey, one of the founding donors to its Legal Defence Fund, exposed an inherent conflict of interest – that the group is largely funded by Hollywood powerbrokers. That perception has dogged the organisation since its inception … when it accepted a $US2m founding contribution from CAA, then still taking heat from its decades-long association with the convicted mogul (Weinstein).”
As the On the Record controversy made international headlines, Winfrey admitted to Associated Press that Simmons, co-founder of hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, had “attempted to pressure me” to abandon the documentary. However, she reiterated that the real reasons she walked away from it were alleged inconsistencies in the claims of Simmons’s accuser Drew Dixon, and the fact she (Winfrey) and the filmmakers were “not aligned” in their “creative vision”.
Dixon, a former recording industry executive, responded: “I feel like I’m experiencing a second crime. I am being silenced.” Following the revelations about Time’s Up’s links to the Cuomo administration,
Dixon tweeted that the organisation was “worse than a joke” and harmful. She added: “If the most prominent #MeToo advocacy group won’t stand up to powerful abusers, what’s the point?”
Simmons has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women, according to Rolling Stone, USA Today, The New York Times and other American media outlets.
The one-time godfather of hip-hop repeatedly has denied the allegations and has stepped aside from his business interests. He has said these “horrific accusations” have “shocked me to my core and all of my relations have been consensual”.
For its part, the non-profit has said it offered unwavering legal support to Simmons’s accusers and that it was “inaccurate to suggest that Time’s Up policy not to do publicity for creative projects suggests that we have not supported the survivors”.
The Simmons and Cuomo cases were not the only issues that have roiled the non-profit’s leadership. In March, 18 members of its healthcare arm resigned en masse following claims a board member had failed to report a co-worker’s claims of sexual harassment. In 2019, its inaugural chief executive, Lisa Borders, resigned after less than four months in the job when her 36-year-old son was accused of sexual misconduct.
While the #MeToo offshoot initially came under fire for its large executive salaries, it does have runs on the board. Its Legal Defence Fund has connected thousands of sexual harassment complainants, including Weinstein’s victims, to legal and PR advice. And Tchen was instrumental in forcing the organisation behind the Golden Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, to reform after its ethical lapses and startling lack of diversity – it had no black voting members – were exposed.
As Tchen resigned, she said she had “spent a career fighting for positive change for women”, but that her Time’s Up role “has become a painful and divisive focal point, where those very women and other activists who should be working together to fight for change are instead battling each other in harmful ways”.
Tchen’s statement was heavily criticised on social media, with another alleged Cuomo victim, Charlotte Bennett, tweeting: “@TinaTchen goes out the same way our former Governor did – listing her accomplishments, pointing the finger at others, and attempting to justify her inexcusable behaviour. Good riddance.” However, Time’s Up’s outgoing board members praised Tchen, pointing out that she “has accomplished enormous changes in the two years she has served as our president”.
The question now is: Can the women’s rights group, launched with such fanfare and an illustrious rollcall of famous backers, survive? Sharon Waxman, chief executive of entertainment website The Wrap, says the organisation – at least in the form it was originally envisaged – is finished: “There are useful programs in place (at Time’s Up) to help survivors of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace,” she argues on her website. “But with the resignation of virtually the entire Time’s Up board of directors … the idea that a group of powerful Hollywood women, united in their purpose to protect women from all walks of life from a pervasive culture of sexual predation, has died.”
Longoria, however, says Time’s Up needs to continue, as there is “so much more work to be done”. Despite stepping down from the board, the former Desperate Housewives star told Variety: “It’s okay to make mistakes in the efforts to topple the patriarchy … We have to continue. We’ve been under thousands of years of a patriarchal society. It’s not going to topple in the three years that Time’s Up has existed.”