Is Harvey Weinstein the new Cosby/O'Reilly/Ailes/&c ?

[rubato]

I'm glad that we as a culture are finally addressing this kind of manipulative sexual victimization but the eeeew factor is pretty high:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/h ... tions.html

The number of men who attain wealth, power and public acclaim and immediately used them to manipulate women is distressingly high. But manipulation is on the slippery slope to slavery which is still widespread.


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[RayThom]

Ol' Harvey is a bank roller for many liberal causes. If he says a couple of public acts of contrition and puts himself into rehab he'll be back at the top of his film career within a year. He knows how the game is played when in comes to public perception and awareness.

I'm certainly not going to fall for it but I'm afraid too many people have short attention spans when it comes to personal causes and contributions that fund them. Plus he's anti-Trump... many people love that and forgiveness will be swift.

[dales]

Is Harvey Weinstein the new Cosby/O'Reilly/Ailes/&c ?

Lets not forget Bill Clinton.

[Lord Jim]

I found this particularly interesting : (From the NYT article in the OP)

Lisa Bloom, a lawyer advising Mr. Weinstein, said in a statement that “he denies many of the accusations as patently false.” In comments to The Times earlier this week, Mr. Weinstein said that many claims in Ms. O’Connor’s memo were “off base” and that they had parted on good terms.

Ms. Bloom, who has been advising Mr. Weinstein over the last year on gender and power dynamics, called him “an old dinosaur learning new ways.” She said she had “explained to him that due to the power difference between a major studio head like him and most others in the industry, whatever his motives, some of his words and behaviors can be perceived as inappropriate, even intimidating.”

Lisa Bloom, for anyone who may not know, is the daughter of Gloria Allred, and both mommy and daughter have built their legal careers to a great extent by portraying themselves as champions of women abused by sexual predators...

They have made themselves pretty much synonymous with the defense of women who level sexual assault charges in high profile cases...

For Bloom to take on defending Weinstein, a powerful man being accused of serial sexual assault, would be like Barry Sheck (former OJ "Dream Team" member and founder of The Innocence Project) arguing for the death penalty, or the ACLU filing a brief defending the detentions at Guantanamo...

I really have to wonder what her motive could possibly be...

Is it politics? Is Weinstein a close, long time personal friend? Did he dump an irresistibly huge pile of cash on her desk?

Whatever the explanation, it reveals Bloom to be be a world-class hypocrite...

[BoSoxGal]

Only 3 women accused Clinton of sexual misconduct, and two of them had previously testified under oath that he never made unwelcome advances on/to them.

He is an admitted philanderer, which makes him like almost half of American husbands and wives (if you believe the popularly reported statistics), and a man who entered into a sexual relationship with a much younger woman in his employ - arguably a form of sexual harassment, though the woman claims she pursued him.

I don’t even care for Clinton, but I think it’s not a fair comparison to lump him in with Cosby, Ailes, O’Reilly or Weinstein.

[Scooter]

For Bloom to take on defending Weinstein, a powerful man being accused of serial sexual assault, would be like Barry Sheck (former OJ "Dream Team" member and founder of The Innocence Project) arguing for the death penalty, or the ACLU filing a brief defending the detentions at Guantanamo...

I don't see her "defending" him in the way that you seem be implying. She calls him a dinosaur and says flatly that the power dynamics alone would make his behaviour inappropriate. He is in front of a camera admitting he did wrong and not demonizing his victims as whores who had sex with him for what they could get out of it.

Someone who has made a career out of helping the victims of sexual predators might see that trying to get predators to admit their guilt and to understand how their actions have damaged their victims would be one way of encouraging past victims to come forward and preventing others from being victimized.

[Lord Jim]

Scooter, Bloom is rationalizing and making excuses for Weinstein's behavior in a way she would never do for anyone else...

If some else were making the excuses Bloom is in a similar situation, she would be ridiculing the idea that a man of Weinstein's age and position somehow innocently didn't know it was inappropriate to be offering career advancement in exchange for sexual favors, or to have women in his employ come to his hotel room where they're offered the choice of letting him give them a nude massage or watching him take a shower...

(Especially a man who has previously made settlements in eight sexual harassment lawsuits...one would think that might have provided some educational experience...)

And she'd be right to do so...

[Scooter]

I'm trying to find the words she uses that attempt to excuse his behaviour, but I guess I'm not looking at my screen from the right slant.

[Lord Jim]

I'm trying to find the words she uses that attempt to excuse his behaviour

Let me see if I can help you with that...

By calling him “an old dinosaur learning new ways.” (as opposed to a serial sexual predator, who engaged in inexcusable behavior) she's using exactly the kind of "he's from a different era" language that is frequently used to try to mitigate the moral repulsiveness of the behavior of powerful older men exposed in these situations... (Some of O'Reilly's defenders made the exact same kind of argument; I've seen some of Trump's behavior similarly rationalized.)

Plus her attempt to portray him as somehow being unaware that what he was doing was unacceptable, is ludicrous....

"Oh gee whiz, I had absolutely no idea that it was wrong to have women who work for me to come to my hotel room and ask them to choose between my giving them a nude massage or watching me take a shower. Thanks for cluing me in, Lisa"...

[rubato]

I wonder if this is not be beginnings of a new trend where women speak up more often about sexual abuse? What is similar about all of these cases is the very large number of victims and how few of them spoke up before. Although some got cash payouts.

It could represent a turning point in the feminist movement.


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[Guinevere]

I hope so, I really do. Gretchen Carlson was on NPR yesterday complaining about the confidentiality clauses in the settlement agreements -- but she signed and took the $20MM check from FOX and kept her mouth shut about the details too. The power imbalance is real and effective.

On a positive note Weinstein was fired tonight. He always gave me the creeps and I never did understand why others didn't see that, or remained silent. A friend who used to be in the biz in LA has shared stories about him for a long time.

[rubato]

Taking the money was a corrupt act by Carlson and she should have known it. She must have known that by not speaking she would enable all future acts of abuse. someone who was already worth millions can't make excuses about it.



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[Big RR]

I don't know, a payout like that probably hurt Fox (and influenced their behavior) much more than anything she could say would.

[rubato]

I don't know, a payout like that probably hurt Fox (and influenced their behavior) much more than anything she could say would.

Based on experience, no, it didn't. They paid out many times to cover Ailes and O'Reilly.

She was corrupt, complicit, and a coward.


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[rubato]

Based on history I think the decades of payouts prove they were just the monetization of Ambrose Bierce's definition of apologize:


“Apologize: To lay the foundation for a future offence.”


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[Lord Jim]

She was corrupt, complicit, and a coward.

Gee, how surprising is it that of all the women who have accepted settlements in cases like this, rube chooses to single out Gretchen Carlson?

"What is not surprising at all? Alex"

The whole issue of is non-disclosure clauses in these settlements is far more complex than rube's construction (like most of rube's constructions )

Rube seems to believe that the women who have accepted these settlements, women who did absolutely nothing wrong, had some sort of obligation to accept professional ruin, ridicule, and have to relive these events in public for no compensation or they should be labeled "corrupt, complicit, and a coward"...

Talk about blaming the victim...

Yes, non-disclosure clauses make it very problematic to shine light on them men engaging in this vile behavior, but to blame the victims of this behavior for that is grotesque...(obviously, the non-disclosure clause is the incentive that under the way the current system works, has enabled them to get any justice or compensation for what was done to them.)

If I'm going to characterize anyone as "corrupt, complicit, and a coward" in these cases it would be all the people who were not victims but who had first hand knowledge of what was going on and said and did nothing...

Especially the ones who were established enough in their own right to not have to fear their own professional ruin through retribution by coming forward...

[Guinevere]

To be fair - I mentioned her first and I think Rube was commenting along those lines. But following along his reasoning, it appears he claims anyone who accepts a settlement in these cases is corrupt -- a conclusion I disagree with 100%. As you noted LJ - that's an extreme oversimplification of the problem.

[rubato]

To be fair - I mentioned her first and I think Rube was commenting along those lines. But following along his reasoning, it appears he claims anyone who accepts a settlement in these cases is corrupt -- a conclusion I disagree with 100%. As you noted LJ - that's an extreme oversimplification of the problem.

No, I said if they accept a settlement which includes a clause preventing them from naming names they are corrupt. And they are. They have accepted payment for helping the abuser continue. If they accepted payment as compensation for injury and did not agree to secrecy it is a different situation.


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[ex-khobar Andy]

I posted the following on the NYT story yesterday about Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie accusing Weinstein:

Andrew Louisville 2 days ago
As an older, white, male I have never been sexually harassed nor have I ever, as far as I know, harassed anyone else. But I have been asked by a demanding boss to provide something that was in my power to give but which I was not willing to provide - unethical and potentially criminal behavior in business. I have refused and I have been fired. Not soon enough after the event to make an obvious connection, but I knew and he knew. I could have reported it to some sort of authority, but in the end it would have been my word against his. Was I willing to pit my meager resources against his and the company’s in a battle I was not certain to win? In short no.

I say this not to diminish the experience of young women who are subjected to the sort of sexual exploitation described - but rather to point out that out is part of a larger problem of the providers of employment holding all the cards and having the power to direct those whom they employ to behave in a way they never would, willingly. That is especially true in a country where health insurance is tied to a job. Secondly: I understand well why these women did not report Weinstein’s behavior to authorities. Who would believe one report against a well known publicly respected individual (Weinstein, Ailes, O’Reilly, Jimmy Savile, my boss) who would not hesitate to spend whatever it took to preserve that reputation? In the end, there is not much you can do except to chalk it up to experience and let it go.

572Recommend

I was trying to make two points: one, that this sort of thing (pressure by a boss using his position to get a desired behavior from an underling) happens in contexts besides sexual harassment which does not in any way minimize or excuse Weinstein's conduct; and secondly that, in this situation, I (a reasonably aware and self confident individual and not a young woman trying to make it in a precarious industry) was not able to report this conduct. To expand on this: when I tried to get a few minutes of the company chairman's time to report this, I was denied. I had previously had a very warm relationship with the chairman who recognized that he was not a technical guy and needed us to make the company run smoothly. I was at what might be called the Division Manger level. When I was eventually fired, they gave me the standard two weeks per year of employment severance which was actually quite generous by most companies' standards. I was faced with a choice: accept the non-disclosure agreement and $25K or so; or fight. I went to a lawyer. He listened to my story and told me that I had a 50:50 chance of winning maybe $100K out of which I would have to pay his fees and expenses. There were no witnesses to his (at best) unethical orders. I had a family to support, a mortgage to pay and health insurance to find, and no job to do it with. Besides, if I were to mount a lawsuit, successful or not, there would probably be enough publicity that I would never again find employment in my field. And they had a lot of resources to fight me with; because if I attempted to accuse the senior VP of unethical or illegal behavior it would be seen as an attack on the company's integrity. Right or wrong, I chose not to fight and to take the $ and to sign the non-disclosure agreement.

I don't have much truck with the 'Why didn't they report this?" argument.

[rubato]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/12/amazo ... legations/

Amazon Studios suspends chief Roy Price following harassment allegations

Apparently the turn against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry is spreading. So why is this the instance that is kicking off a social movement and not Cosby/OReilly/Ailes? et al.


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