Dish detail, Gabriel, or get off the bandwagon
THERE is no disputing #MeToo as a watershed in naming and shaming sexual harassers. That the campaign’s leading lights, such as actress Ashley Judd, who got the ball rolling on the Weinstein scandal, have been anointed Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is a sign of its having captured the zeitgeist. But it is also true that some allegations of inappropriate behaviour have been so threadbare and melodramatic that they look suspiciously like rampant attention-seeking or, at worst, a weapon for derailing the movement and stripping it of credibility.
Actress Heather Lind’s description of how the wheelchair-bound and decrepit George Bush fondled her backside while they posed for a photograph with his wife Barbara Bush provoked a backlash and a debate about whether every uninvited gesture is tantamount to threatening behaviour.
There have also been complainants boasting such delicate constitutions that you’d almost wonder how they survived the rough and tumble of the schoolyard. But possibly the most surprising person yet to hop on the #MeToo bandwagon is Gabriel Byrne.
OVER recent weeks, the movie star has lashed out, not at the cesspit of Tinseltown – which would be understandable – but at RTÉ, as a byword for sleaze and sexual harassment in the 1970s. Byrne says that the culture in RTÉ was so bad 40 years ago that two producers took bets on who could get a new employee into bed first.
Yes, that’s right, Montrose, the centre of the Irish broadcast industry, whose greatest claim to sexual infamy – up to now, at least – was the Bishop and the Nightie affair.
Now I am too young (for once) to lend veracity or not to this damning indictment of the national broadcaster. Aside from the late Gerry Ryan, who took recreational drugs, I know of no RTÉ figures who enjoyed a ‘party lifestyle’. Nor did Pat Kenny or Bibi Baskin when asked.
Yet according to Byrne, his then girlfriend was regularly humiliated by a lecherous colleague and was powerless to stop him.
‘The climate of abject sexism there was ridiculous and there are still a few people walking around the place, I don’t know what you’d call them… sex pests?’ he said.
Byrne’s failure to give any details about the alleged offences against his girlfriend means he must expect us to take his word for it.
He has worked with two of the most rumoured predators in Hollywood; Kevin Spacey, in The Usual Suspects and that movie’s director, Bryan Singer, who has been sued for allegedly forcing a 17-year-old boy to perform oral sex and then raping him. However, until very recently, Byrne had nothing but praise for them.
But his attack on RTÉ’s sexist culture raises more questions than his silence about Hollywood, which could be excused on grounds of obliviousness.
If he witnessed women being preyed upon in RTÉ , then he should spit out the details, rather than teasing his audience with tantalising half-clues and insinuations.
Preferably, he should take the evidence to the gardaí and let the law take its course. If he has no proof, then he should nurse his grudge in private.
His half-baked accusations are also unfair on RTÉ’s veteran staff members who, despite impeccable service, may now feel the finger of suspicion pointed at them.
They also do a disservice to the campaign which he claims to wholeheartedly support. #MeToo was created to expose sexual harassment, not to garland leading men with the oxygen of publicity.