Harvey Weinstein: A-list of hypocrites share the guilt

Cartoon: Eric Lobbecke

I encountered Harvey Weinstein once or twice. Since I was not a young woman with acting ambitions I suppose I can consider myself fortunate, but the experience was still an uncomfortable one.

One particular occasion sticks in the memory: I was running The Wall Street Journal at the time and our reporters were working on an article about troubles on one of the moviemaker’s films. He was, of course, unhappy with the line of reporting and having berated the reporters themselves he demanded to make his case to me before publication, as was his right. I listened dutifully as my speakerphone rattled to the full Harvey.

It was like a sprint through all five of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief: denial initially, disbelief that we could possibly be considering impugning his good name; then anger, fury, a righteous storm of protest at our disrespect; bargaining, a not so subtle hint that maybe if we would go a little easier on him this time we’d get some great future exclusive; next, depression, a self-pitying cry that all this could be happening to him; and finally acceptance, since we both knew the story was absolutely accurate and I was unmoved by his protests. It even ended, as I recall, with a rather fond goodbye from him.

Again, I stress, all I had to manage were Weinstein’s distant verbal fusillades, not the more intimate physical and emotional assault he visited on countless women, but it was in its little way an instructive insight into the man’s modus operandi: bullying, threatening, cajoling, even pleading, for the appeasement of his ego and the satiation of his vast appetite.

Weinstein is behind bars now after his conviction this week on rape and sexual assault charges. He is likely to remain there for years and, despite a sudden accumulation of mysterious maladies — the latest this week was chest pains — he won’t get much in the way of sympathy or leni­ency from the kindly people at New York’s correctional authorities when he eventually receives his sentence.

He faces further potential criminal jeopardy in California, too.

There are countless lessons from the Weinstein story. It was of course the dam whose rupture sent into the public domain a flood of the accumulated history of despicable behaviour by powerful men. MeToo has already accounted for the reputations, careers, fortunes and, in cases such as Weinstein, even the freedom of some of these predators who used positions of authority to demean and humiliate women.

It has launched a global debate on the sexual politics of the workplace and the wider society we have created. It has prompted renewed reflection on the larger question of how we should even approach intimacy in relationships. Weinstein’s lawyer has suggested recently that women might want to insist on a written consent form before they engaged in sexual activity.

Perhaps because of that kind of talk, the MeToo movement has also provoked a debate about whether it may have gone too far and created its own backlash, as its more extreme proponents have gone beyond asserting the rights of women to be treated with respect, equality and decency, to advocating a kind of joyless, hands-off puritanism.

One unfortunate reality, however, is that the reckoning that has rightly been brought to some offenders has not reached everywhere it ought. Weinstein’s lechery, bullying and entitlement was the most open secret in Hollywood for decades. It was even the butt of jokes on national television. Yet there has been no real attempt to hold accountable those many people, in Hollywood and beyond, who aided, abetted or enabled the mogul’s deviancy, or simply looked the other way because it was inconvenient to do otherwise.

There are the many fellow movie producers who were up to similar tricks and who had a vested interest in ensuring that Weinstein’s behaviour not be exposed lest the spotlight widen suddenly and reveal them with their hand up some young actress’s dress. But there are others of less licentious habits, too, for whom Harvey was just too big to fail. Most of these men are still in place, a little chastened perhaps but largely unaccountable. There are also the women, some of the most powerful in the business, who lionised the mogul, even when they had every reason to know full well of his monstrous exploits.

Who can forget Meryl Streep’s notorious Golden Globes speech in which she compared the producer to God? Or all those other fawning actresses who praised the man’s humanity? Others too, it is widely alleged, who, unlike the brave women who came forward to incriminate Weinstein, submitted to his advances in the hope that it would get them a good role. Then there were the countless political figures who looked beyond Weinstein’s behaviour and dignified it with their own hypocrisy because of course he was one of them: the liberal Democrats who control Hollywood uttering their ritual denunciations of inequality and the patriarchy, while conniving at behaviour by a man who treated women like objects created to operate for his own pleasure.

There are the business types and investors as well who had been alerted to the man’s behaviour by mountains of severance payments and nondisclosure agreements but who just valued their tickets to star-studded premieres and parties at Cannes too much to care.

None of these, of course, is as culpable as the producer himself and perhaps few of us would have had the guts to challenge him if we’d had the chance. And it’s surely true that we live in a better world now. It’s just a shame that much of it is still run by people who did absolutely nothing to make it that way.

The Times