Desperate for a defense
Harvey Weinstein and his team are attacking the #MeToo movement. It won’t work.
That got ugly fast.
Jury selection began recently in Harvey Weinstein’s New York trial, where he is charged with raping a woman in a New York City hotel room in 2013 and forcibly performing a sex act on another woman in 2006.
The night before jurors would be chosen, Los Angeles prosecutors charged Weinstein with sexually assaulting two more women — one at a Los Angeles hotel; one at a Beverly Hills hotel — in 2013. He faces up to 28 years in prison on charges of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force and sexual battery.
Meanwhile, we’re getting a deeply distressing glimpse of the direction his defense will take.
New York Magazine published a story that says Juda Engelmayer, Weinstein’s publicist, is sending reporters a 57-page PowerPoint filled with opposition research on Weinstein’s accusers. It’s titled “The Proper Narrative for Addressing the Harvey Weinstein Case.”
“The document claims there is ‘no objective support’ for any of the women’s claims because there were no witnesses and ‘no physical injuries — even scratches,’ ” Irin Carmon writes for New York. “Current rape law requires nothing of the sort and hasn’t for at least a half century. On Page 27, in a subsection entitled ‘5 Illustrations Why HW’s Accusers are not Credible,’ it suggests that one woman opening her door to Weinstein ‘in her nightgown suggests that this was consensual, and that her current version is revisionist.’ ”
Vanity Fair published an article headlined, “Who Would Defend Harvey Weinstein?” In it, reporter Maureen O’Connor interviews members of Weinstein’s team of lawyers.
Lead attorney Donna Rotunno who is from Chicago, had this to say: “The pendulum is swinging so far in the overly sensitive direction that men can’t really be men, and women can’t really be women. I feel that women may rue the day that all of this started when no one asks them out on a date, and no one holds the door open for them, and no one tells them that they look nice.”
Holding our own doors strikes me as a fair trade-off for not getting raped at work. (And, for the record, I hold the door for whomever is entering near me and teach both my daughter and son to do the same. It’s good manners, not a romantic overture.)
But that’s not really the point, is it?
The point is Weinstein and his team have been trying — and will continue to try — to turn his trial into an appeal for a twisted nostalgia. They’re trying to tap into a longing for a time when men needn’t be bothered with cues or consent or feelings — theirs, or their conquests’ — because women were there for the taking. And women liked it that way!
But that time was a mirage. It exists only in the imaginations of people who can’t fathom that women are fully formed humans who get the final say in what happens to their bodies. It exists only for people who would willingly conflate romance with rape.
The vast, vast (vast!) majority of women and men know that men can “really be men” without raping anyone and women can “really be women” even if no one is asking them out or holding their doors or telling them they look nice.
The vast, vast (vast!) majority of women and men know that love and romance and intimacy and pleasure have plenty of room to exist and thrive in a space and a culture that also frowns on (and prosecutes) sexual harassment and assault.
The vast, vast (vast!) majority of people know better than to buy what Weinstein and his team are peddling. We know progress when we see it.
In The New Yorker on Jan. 13, editor David Remnick interviewed reporter Ronan Farrow about the Weinstein trial. Farrow won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his Weinstein reporting in the New Yorker, and Farrow’s book, “Catch and Kill,” chronicles the evolution of the bombshell story, including Weinstein’s efforts to silence both his accusers and the journalists with whom they spoke.
“I think there’s a constituency of survivors and activists for whom the case carries profound meaning,” Farrow told Remnick. “It’s a test of a lot of systems that have failed a lot of people for a long time.”
It’s impossible to know with certainty whether Weinstein will be convicted. But the #MeToo movement shouldn’t be measured solely by Weinstein’s fate.
Countless people — women and men; rich and poor; old and young; famous and toiling unrecognized at minimum wage jobs — have learned, maybe for the first time, that they’re not alone and what they endured or are enduring is not OK. They’re telling their stories. They may be whispering them. They may only tell one person. But they’re finding their voices and they’re finding a community.
And there’s tremendous value in that. That’s what progress looks like.
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hstevens@chicagotribune .com Twitter @heidistevens13