After the soap opera of #MeToo, this would be the unhappiest ending
A hundred and seven women said Harvey Weinstein had harassed them, assaulted them or raped them, so why was he only convicted of three – and now just one? It’s not simply a failure of the justice system. It’s because, right from the start, ordinary people saw the MeToo movement for what it was: Tinseltown rubbish.
A new show on Netflix, Baby Reindeer, presents a roiling underworld of monsters. There’s Martha, a fat, aggressive stalker. There’s Darrien, a creepy, drug-taking gay rapist. And there’s Donny, their victim – and our “hero”. A failing comedian, desperate to make it in London, he is harassed in his local pub by Martha and (spoiler) raped by Darrien.
The show’s fourth episode is incredible: obsessed with gaining Darrien’s approval – he’s a hugely powerful comedy writer – Donny is grotesquely “groomed” by him. Explicit, frightening and comically weird - it’s like an episode of Peep Show gone horribly, horribly wrong.
What interests me, though – I kept on stopping it, and thinking, especially during the rape, “I can’t watch any more of this”, and then watching more of it – isn’t the shocking abuse. It’s how Donny unflinchingly presents the flawed, cannibalistic world of comedy, celebrity, narcissism and fame.
In Donny’s world no one is perfect. No one is pure of motive. Victims become perpetrators, and vice versa. Donny himself is grasping, weak, selfish, a liar – I loathed his self-congratulation, his addiction to flattery (and his constant, ugly semi-nudity). He hates being stalked by Martha, but he’s also “obsessed” by her – he dreams of sleeping with her – because of the way she flatters him. He keeps an entire file of her “complimentary” voicemails easily accessible on his phone.
I found it gripping.
It was also kind of interesting to be watching something as toxic as this just as the case against Harvey Weinstein was beginning to unravel. I see huge parallels between Donny’s gross world and his. Weinstein, of course, is a mixture of Darrien and Martha, a powerful, sadistic stalker who, similarly overweight, used flattery and cajoling to attack women.
If you look at the list of scores of women who say Weinstein harassed and assaulted them – although I like to think the better verb is “ate” – it’s long, it’s tireless and it’s sad. He’s a big fat Darrien in a world of Donnys: surrounded by flawed, failed actresses desperate for advancement, waitresses, receptionists.
Some of the accusers were credible; others weren’t. I wonder how many slept with him and then just regretted it (you would). Perhaps some of them, sure, enjoyed the attention, just like Donny: as Donald Trump once put it, “When you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything.” It was, like everything in life, uneven, chaotic, messy. But in the insane bin fire of everything that then happened, that wasn’t how people saw it.
To them, it became horrifyingly black and white: every single woman had to be believed. We were all his rape victims.
This headlong rush to judgment was called the MeToo movement. What a dreadful blow to feminism, that its most important “revolution” this century should be played out in the most trivial, un-nuanced and misogynistic of arenas: Hollywood. Amid screaming lightweights and actresses hauling pet activists to the Golden Globes, dozens of men were marched out and labelled “rapists”, “gropers” and “creeps”. Bad sex became a crime. A list called “Shitty Media Men” circulated, costing innocent men their jobs.
Learning some chef you’d never heard of “went to town” on some woman’s breasts was all part of the entertainment. Who cared if he retired from public life? It so preoccupied the news cycle – it sold so many papers – that when George HW Bush died, the first thing anyone remembered was that, even from a wheelchair, he’d “patted women’s rears”.
Meanwhile, Annabella Sciorra, an actress from The Sopranos, became the tentpole star at Weinstein’s trial, breathing on the stand, “He raped me.”
But Sciorra wasn’t being cross-examined, and wasn’t a key part of the trial. She was simply a bad character witness - a cameo, if you like. Carried away by the stars and the drama, the prosecution brought in several women who, a judge has now ruled, failed to “shed light” on the charges Weinstein faced, so his case has been overturned. Only in America could a case collapse because of too much evidence.
I don’t want to diminish the experiences of anyone who is raped, but I do wonder, why did so many people think they could fix injustice by simply standing up and screaming their heads off? A friend said to me: look at Israel and Gaza - it’s happening again. Everyone’s screaming, but no one’s wanting to change things, so nothing will get done. Abandon due process at your peril.
Here too, I now realise, this is what happens: nothing will get done. At most, Jessica Mann, a former actress nobody has ever heard of, and Mimi Haleyi, a producer, will simply have to stand up yet again and go through the horrific things they allege Weinstein did to them, without the benefit of character witnesses, or public opinion roaring behind them, and Weinstein may win.
If these two charges fail in the retrial – if the retrial even happens – there is only one other rape conviction that stands between Weinstein and freedom. Where does that leave us? In the same place as Baby Reindeer left me: with an acrid feeling of bewilderment and disgust.
A hundred and seven women said Weinstein had harassed them, assaulted them or raped them, so why was he only convicted of three – and now just one? It’s not simply a failure of the justice system. It’s because, right from the start, ordinary people saw the MeToo movement for what it was: Tinseltown rubbish. A marketing exercise for whichever actress/comedian/female TV star wanted to be top of the news agenda that day. It was always a weak case.
At least Richard Gadd, the star of Baby Reindeer, in mining his supposedly real-life experience, grasps the hypocrisy and the lies.
The Sunday Times
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