Weinstein still holds power, even as his twisted hands grasp the walking frame
Harvey Weinstein arrived at court bent over in pain — but the system emerged as truly destroyed, writes Sarah Caden
HARVEY Weinstein hobbled into a New York courthouse last Wednesday. He leaned on a zimmer frame, his swagger gone along with his tan. He looked older, maybe even chastened.
Or so you’d think at first glance.
Weinstein knows the value of a visual, and it was of worth to look like a broken man last week, even if this impression was not borne out by the detail of his proposed Wednesday settlement with dozens of women who have accused him in a class civil action of sexual harassment, rape and everything in between.
Tellingly, Weinstein was surrounded by burly, menacing-looking men. He was protected physically, and in the settlement, it is Weinstein who seems to be protected, too. The reported $25m that will go to the accusers — present and future — will not be paid by him or by the now bankrupt Weinstein Company, but instead by their insurers. A reported $12m of that will go to legal fees and also to ‘‘creditors’’.
Weinstein, who denies all charges against him, will neither explain nor apologise. There is no catharsis or closure to this for the women involved, many of whom entered into this class action reluctantly, many of whom only joined it in order to dispel the fearful reluctance of others to come forward. The money, it has been explained, once it is filtered through various legal issues, will be a paltry sum.
Rejecting it, however, would apparently be a mistake, due to the fact that the Weinstein Company’s bankruptcy means the rejection releases the insurers from liability and they’d then be chasing a broke business. Further, some of the alleged offences fall outside the statute of limitations and this is the accusers’ only shot at justice, though consensus is that this falls far short of that.
Some accusers have already walked away from the settlement, while Genie Harrison, lawyer for a portion of the women, says that this is as good a deal as they can get.
In other words, all evidence seems to suggest, these women just need to accept that this is how the system works — and if they want in on it, they have to go along with it.
Which is, of course, exactly what allowed Harvey Weinstein behave in the way that these more than 30 women allege, as well as many more who were not part of the class action, and also the two women at the centre of a criminal case against him this coming January.
Weinstein, we must remember, denies all of the charges and the claims and insists on the consensuality in situations where he accepts that something sexual occurred.
He says consensuality. The women say they felt they had no choice. They wanted to work in his business, this is how they allege he said it worked. You came to his hotel room. He wasn’t fully dressed. His assistants would hang around for a while and then they’d leave when he said so and that’s when the alleged assaults would occur. He said, they allege, that this was the only way to get ahead, to be in with what was then the most powerful production machine in Hollywood.
And when women tried to expose this alleged behaviour, they have reported payments and NDAs and displays of power that left them under no illusions about their powerlessness in comparison with his all-encompassing power.
Brad Pitt threatened Weinstein if he ever pressured Pitt’s then girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow again. Behind the scenes, Paltrow was instrumental in having Weinstein ultimately unmasked. She is not proud of how she knew that, while Weinstein took Pitt at his word and left her be sexually, she was very much the Oscar-winning poster girl for how wonderful it was to be in with him.
It is more than two years since The New York Times and The New Yorker reported on the alleged long-running sexual misconduct of Harvey Weinstein.
The scandal led to the #MeToo movement — to a universal standing-up of women to be counted as having had to put up with sexual harassment on a major and minor scale for all of their lives, and in almost every facet of their lives.
It caused us to contemplate how women put up and shut up about sexually inappropriate behaviour for generations, purely on the basis that everyone thought this was just what it meant to be female. Not just female in the movie business, but female in the world.
We like to think that we’ve come a long way in two years, that, at the very least, there is a conversation happening, a shift in perspective. There is a hope that women no longer think they have to shut up and put up.
Last Wednesday, to some extent, made a mockery of all of that. Weinstein with his zimmer frame, which he reportedly needs for a back injury sustained in a recent car accident. The prosecuting counsel’s assertion that he has disabled his electronic tag at least 56 times in the last two months, going who knows where for hours at a time. They pleaded for his $1m bail to be increased, which was agreed to and saw it increased to $5m, which Weinstein met with no real bother it seems.
This is a ruined man, remember.
The Time’s Up movement’s reaction to the settlement was that, if this is the best that system can do, then “the system is broken”.
The system, the message seems to be, protects people with power. And Weinstein, we were shown last week, still has power.
The smiling mogul image concealed a bully and an alleged sexual predator. Now the shuffling wan-faced image conceals a man who still holds all the power. The surface is different. The system is unaltered, fundamentally. Power continues to lie in the same hands.
So the hands have been revealed to be ugly. Who cares? We care, right?
Hollywood was always an ugly business with a pretty face. It has always struggled with its ugly side and, unfortunately, this supposed censure won’t help with that.
‘The message seems to be that the system protects people with power...’