The Guardian view on Harvey Weinstein: a watershed
The Harvey Weinstein affair cannot be brushed aside as the culture of the casting couch. It is not one more story from the Hollywood fiction factory. It must not be allowed to be another tawdry milestone. It must be the watershed.
Harvey Weinstein has been one of the most prodigiously successful producers of his generation. He has made some exceptional pictures, from Pulp Fiction and The English Patient to The King’s Speech. He has won five best picture Oscars. But on Sunday he was summarily dismissed by the board of the company he had founded with his brother Bob. His sacking followed the New York Times’s reporting of the shocking claims of his predatory behaviour towards young women, of abusive conduct that revealed him less titan than tyrant, a man with a long and dark history of sexual harassment.
The New York Times discovered evidence of payoffs and non-disclosure awards to injured women dating back decades. Its reporters found other women with humiliating tales of intimidation and harassment that are still snowballing. Now the New Yorker has added another chapter, including allegations of rape, to the humiliations and honeytraps, complicity and intimidation. It is an anatomy of how such abuse succeeds, and why it endures for so long. Flattering and demeaning, the producer played on the fear and shame that ensured his victims’ silence. The women describe in agonising detail his refusal to accept their protests, the overwhelming burden of personal responsibility that followed, coloured sometimes by a parallel awe of his filmic talents. They feared his power to break them as well as make them. The New Yorker describes charges that were unaccountably dropped and stories suppressed. Employees, enlisted to help him entrap his victims, report an atmosphere that was morally compromised. His exposure is seemingly the culmination of a lifetime of cruel personal gratification at the expense of vulnerable women that was known about and ignored by scores of industry people. Mr Weinstein has expressed regret for his behaviour but also says he denies some of the allegations.
The hasty sacking of Mr Weinstein was more than a calculated exercise in damage limitation by the directors of a company terrified by the impact of such bad publicity on the bottom line. This time, something is different. It is not by chance that this story emerged now. A cultural shift is under way.The extent of such abuse has become a theme of US corporate and political life over the past 15 months. It is a kind of descant to the bassline of the conduct of the US president, a candidate who won the election despite a stack of sexual harassment allegations against him. Yet at the same time, Donald Trump’s cheerleaders at Fox News reluctantly fired first his key ally Roger Ailes, and then the presenter Bill O’Reilly, after it emerged there had been payouts of millions of dollars to women they had harassed. This June, the Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, resigned under pressure from investors, alarmed at the mounting reports of the extent of sexual harassment embedded in the company culture. Women everywhere in Silicon Valley, including very senior executives, have begun to talk more openly about the way they are treated by male colleagues and business acquaintances.
And now there is Harvey Weinstein, a man who now seen to be as grotesquely brutal to women as he is brilliant at producing films. He was at the heart of a company of which he was the heroic despot, a god with a degree of licence that served to reinforce the sense of entitlement that is the hallmark of the sexual predator. His is a very public disgrace. Yet the clarity of these accounts of abuse, and the contours of the emotional as well as the physical wreckage left in their wake are familiar to every victim. It is a horror story that should be made a compulsory study for every school leaver. This is what sexual exploitation looks like. It is never acceptable.