Weinstein’s behaviour was an open secret

I’m probably the last guy anyone should look to for intelligent thought on anything to do with Hollywood. I haven’t got a clue who won the Oscars at last year’s Academy Awards, or the 10 years before that. I wouldn’t recognize more than a couple of the hunkiest hunks or most mega of starlets, and they’d have to be senior members of the club at that. Cher I would know; after that it gets hazy. As a voice on pop culture, I’m the pits.

Still, the sudden, blistering fall of Harvey Weinstein comes with a gaping incongruity. I keep reading that Weinstein’s loathsome behaviour was an open secret going back decades. The biggest names in entertainment whispered amongst themselves in tones of disgust about the crudities he got up to. Everyone knew about it; women were revolted; he could act in the most abhorrent ways, in front of crowds of witnesses, and somehow get away with it.

He also considered himself a “progressive” and gave big cheques to popular liberal causes. Many of the biggest players in the Democratic firmament benefitted from his money. They feted him, invited him to galas, treated him like the mogul he was.

One of my favourite photos among the many that have accompanied his downfall shows him at a bash with Hillary Clinton in 2012. She’s got both hands on his chest as he grins at the camera lens. The accompanying article notes that he was a big-time supporter of the Clintons. He hung out with Bill and Hillary on Martha’s Vineyard, where they liked to spend summer breaks among the rich and famous. He backed Bill’s defence fund during the Lewinsky fallout. He gave to Al Gore, John Kerry, Al Franken, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren … hardly a glittering figure in the “progressive” pantheon escaped his generosity.

Yet, somehow, none of them ever noticed the rude, abusive behaviour that everyone supposedly knew about. The Clintons, who could sniff out disloyalty in the remotest corners of their political empire and punish it with ruthless efficiency, managed to miss the big story everyone else knew about: that Weinstein was a pig who violated everything they and their gender-sensitive followers considered among the era’s greatest injustices, and were dedicated to eradicating.

Is anyone able to believe that? Does anyone seriously swallow that no one ever told Gore, Franken, Warren or Schumer — all senior, wellconnected liberals with easy access to celebrity America — about that dirtbag Weinstein and the way he treated women?

Weinstein, of course, is far from the only pig in Hollywood, or in politics. The No. 1 pig of our time currently resides in the White House. You could fill pages with the names of political leaders who have fallen victim to their own licentiousness and hypocrisies, and you wouldn’t have to go back too far to do it. That Donald Trump managed to win the election despite his neanderthal character traits demonstrates just how deeply ingrained his backward views remain in an astonishing proportion of U.S. society. Eradicating it should indeed be a crusade for our time.

Yet, if anything, Democratic ties with Hollywood have grown increasingly close since the Clintons arrived on the scene. Fundraisers in San Francisco, Napa, Beverly Hills. Neither the Clintons nor the Obamas could ever get enough of it. When Bill Clinton needed a lift on a private jet he regularly looked to his pal Jeffrey Epstein, who spent 13 months locked up for soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. First thing the Obamas did once they were free of Washington was to head off on a mega-yacht for a South Seas jaunt with some of their closest celebrity pals … Oprah, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen. Is it credible that none of them knew a thing about Weinstein, or had a spare moment to mention it to the president and his wife during their years in office? Could it be that Obama was willing to hunt down and eliminate scores of terrorists across the globe, but quavered at the prospect of challenging Weinstein?

Nah. What the Weinstein affair shows is that left-wing, “progressive” politics remains as wedded to money, as riddled with hypocrisy, and as willing to overlook the most nauseating of behaviour in return for a chance to rub shoulders with some glitz and glamour — and get a fat cheque in the bargain — as the worst of the opponents they so despise and so readily denounce. It’s the smell of the swamp. It’s what motivated so many Americans to cast ballots for a creature like Trump, in the vain hope of draining some of it from Washington.

They’ve been let down in that hope. Trump and Weinstein are soulmates: rich, privileged men who think money and celebrity shield them from responsibility for their actions. Often they’re right. It says something that Weinstein would probably still be running his company if a newspaper hadn’t dug into his sins. His Hollywood friends, “progressive” pals and Democrat acolytes weren’t about to say a word against him.