Snake is slithering away
Exasperation as Harv case keeps crumbling
WHAT seemed unthinkable one year ago is on the verge of happening: Harvey Weinstein will probably walk.
Last Monday, Weinstein’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the entire criminal case against him, and this alone was a reminder of the mogul’s diabolical mind and showman’s sense of timing. It was one day before the midterms, the outrage cycle focused elsewhere.
#MeToo is a little over 1 year old. In that brief period, famous and powerful men from Matt Lauer (accused of sexually assaulting a colleague) to Charlie Rose (lizardly sexual harassment of much younger female co-workers) to Louis C.K. (allegedly forcing less powerful female comics to watch as he masturbated to completion) to Kevin Spacey (allegedly making a sexual advance on then-14-year-old actor Anthony Rapp) have been taken down. None, aside from Bill Cosby, is in prison, let alone up on criminal charges.
Harvey Weinstein is a monster. And yet, thanks to his team of lawyers, a private investigator known as the real-life Ray Donovan and a DA’s office that’s incompetent at best and complicit at worst, he may go free.
Weinstein clearly expected this outcome from the beginning. Remember his perp walk in May? He laughed and smirked (pictured), then posted $1 million bail and went home.
“The smirk on his face . . . made me physically sick,” tweeted actress Annabella Sciorra, who has accused Weinstein of rape. “Money buys VIP treatment in the justice system, no matter how serious or violent the crimes.”
In fact, more than 80 women in multiple countries have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault or rape over the past 30 years, and of threatening or killing their careers in the process, sometimes worse.
“I will kill you,” was among the threats he allegedly leveled against actress and producer Salma Hayek. “Don’t think I can’t.”
In a piece for the Times last December, Hayek wrote that Weinstein stalked her from film set to film set, showing up unannounced and terrorizing her. If anything seems clear, it’s that Weinstein found a way into an industry that gave him access to beautiful women who would otherwise have nothing to do with him, thus stoking his sadism. Among the times Hayek rejected him, she wrote:
“No to me taking a shower with him. No to letting him watch me take a shower. No to letting him give me a massage. No to letting a naked friend of his give me a massage. No to letting him give me oral sex. No to my getting naked with another woman. No, no, no, no, no . . . And with every refusal came Harvey’s Machiavellian rage.”
Weinstein retaliated by insisting Hayek film an explicit love scene with Ashley Judd or he’d shut down her passion project, a Frida Kahlo biopic.
When the day came to shoot the scene, Hayek writes, she had a nervous breakdown.
“My body began to shake uncon- trollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry . . . I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot . . . I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse.”
Hayek got through the scene. The movie got made. She considers herself among the lucky, she writes, because at least she wasn’t raped.
Weinstein’s horrors range from predatory grossness — recall that poor potted plant downtown — to hiring ex-Mossad agents to spy on accusers and investigative journalists. Nearly everyone in his path, it seems, was at risk.
“I’m worried that he could ruin my life,” a former Miramax employee told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow. French actress Emma de Caunes described Weinstein as “like a hunter with a wild animal” in her 2010 hotel-room encounter with him, one she says she narrowly escaped.
“I now know that everybody — I mean everybody — in Hollywood knows that it’s happening,” she told Farrow.
“He’s not even really hiding. I mean, the way he does it, so many people are involved and see what’s happening. But everyone’s too scared to say anything.”
If the charges against Weinstein are dismissed, will any of his other victims come forward?
It’s hard to see why they would, given Weinstein’s alleged history of surveilling, blackmailing, rumormongering and generally terrorizing his enemies. And then there’s the feckless Cy Vance, who refused to charge Weinstein for sexual assault in 2015, even though the producer was caught in a sting operation. (Weinstein’s attorneys donated more than $55,000 to Vance over the years.)
The current case against Weinstein is falling apart. One of six charges was dismissed on Oct. 11. The prosecutor revealed that a detective on that case allegedly encouraged an accuser to delete information on her phone. Two accusers were shown to have made contact with Weinstein after their alleged assault, according to the defense.
Despite what we now know about sexual assault and rape — that victims, especially of the rich and powerful, sometimes carry on relationships with their victimizers — it won’t matter in the eyes of the law. It won’t matter that Weinstein’s public accusers surpass Cosby’s by about 20 women. It won’t matter that a litany of A-list actresses have told remarkably similar stories of bullying and predation. It won’t matter that sexual predators never stop.
The headline will write itself: Harvey Weinstein gets off. And the outrage cycle will move on.