MeToo victory vindicates brave women who stood up to power
IT TOOK a jury of seven men and five women a little over 26 hours to find Harvey Weinstein guilty on two counts: criminal sexual assault in the first degree, based on the testimony of former ‘Project Runway’ production assistant Miriam Haley, and rape in the third degree, based on the testimony of aspiring actress Jessica Mann.
That verdict will be heard by many as “guilty, but not guilty enough”. But make no mistake, this is still a victory for the six women brave enough to take the stand over the past month – and a victory for MeToo.
The moment actress Alyssa Milano reacted to the first reports of sexual assault by Weinstein on the night of October 15, 2017 with the tweet “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’” was the moment the producer became an emblem of everything MeToo was fighting to highlight and stamp out – from predatory sexual behaviour to abuses of power in and out of the workplace. It was clear that if this went all the way to court, it wouldn’t just be Weinstein on trial, but the entire MeToo movement.
As, one by one, those six women took the stand, however, we were reminded this wasn’t about abstract ideals and the reparations due to every woman who has suffered in silence at the hands of men, but the horrifying detail of these women’s individual testimonies. Miriam Haley hung her head as she recalled the children’s drawings on the walls of the room in which she was assaulted in Weinstein’s New York apartment in 2006.
Jessica Mann was urged to “take a deep breath” hours into a cross-examination in which she recounted how the 67-yearold movie mogul had ripped her trousers off when she had tried to end their consensual relationship and screamed: “You owe me one more time!”
Giving that evidence will have been harrowing. Add to that the exposure of their private correspondence, and the judgments made by a public quick to question “what kind of a woman” accepts meetings with men in hotel rooms and maintains contact with their aggressors after being assaulted (a much higher number than you’d think).
Then there’s the awareness that because of those “bad choices” you may have betrayed not just yourself but a whole movement for which you have become a figurehead. That “they knew what they were getting into” narrative was the reason so many women refused to testify.
Yet one US legal source tells me the verdict will have a powerful impact on victims who have lost faith in the legal system: “We’ve seen an increasing number of women willing both to report sexual aggressions and wave anonymity since the start of MeToo.
“And yes, women still get judged in a way men don’t when they’re up there on the stand, but we’re also seeing both the law and jurors disregard the kinds of things once used to condemn female victims: the short skirts, the decision to go back to a man’s apartment, the drinks had before an assault.”
A greater understanding of those complexities is just one of the positives to come out of MeToo. The phrase was used 200,000 times on Twitter within the first 24 hours after Milano stuck a hashtag in front of it that October night, and more than 19 million times within the first year, prompting the original founder, Bronx-born civil rights activist Tarana Burke, to worry that the slow, steady work she had been doing with young victims of sexual violence under that mantra since 2006 might be drowned out by Hollywood’s drum-beating.
Burke had named the movement MeToo because of a promise she had made herself after a little girl, named Heaven, had approached her in a youth camp for troubled children in Selma, Alabama, and confided “that her stepdaddy was doing things to her”. That Burke didn’t have the courage to help or murmur “me too” had haunted her in the years since.
The activist admitted to me she “spent the first part of that [October] day feeling like the work I had invested my life in was going to be erased by a simple Tweet. And then I realised: my work is happening right in front of me.”
Both of those impulses were proved right. As the full scale of the sexual intimidation and violence taking place in virtually every industry, everywhere, was exposed, MeToo became less about what so many had endured and more of a battle cry.
But it didn’t take long for the movement to start floundering. There was in-fighting in celebrity “survivor” cliques and Burke worried “MeToo seems to have been defined as the public naming and taking down of powerful men”, often without due process.
Today, as one of the most powerful men in Hollywood has been taken down, many of those who said “me too” are being validated.