Weinsteins prosper in silence
His sloppy drunken descriptions of what he wanted to do to me, up against the bar where we’d been drinking with our workmates, mortified me. I told him as much, and his indignant response is seared in my memory.
‘‘Oh, come on, you wouldn’t come to work dressed like that if you didn’t want it.’’ Um, what? I offered my senior colleague a random selection of expletives in response. They sounded brave, but I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. Was that how everyone saw me?
I gave my wardrobe an edit that weekend, worried about the messages sewn into a pencil skirt. Fashion designer Donna Karan, who this week warned women to consider what they were asking for, would have no doubt approved.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I did nothing.
It was an alcoholinduced aberration in the behaviour of an otherwise nice guy. But if that long-ago incident had later proved to be a pattern of lecherous conduct, the whole narrative around Harvey Weinstein suggests that would be on my head.
The focus has leapt alarmingly quickly from the disgraced Hollywood heavyweight’s sins, to the perceived sins of those he abused, for not speaking up, for letting him get away with it. Which is akin to blaming his victims for not protecting his future victims rather than, y’know – just him.
The fact he was infinitely more valuable to the company than they were created the power imbalance that enabled the abuse in the first place, and that contempt for their value was evident to the women who did attempt to seek justice.
There are always those who question what she did to deserve it, allow it or to provoke it.
I ran through that same catalogue of accusations with myself. Was I overreacting? Was I sending the wrong signals? Did I somehow create this situation?
So I said nothing. But someone else did. Another colleague overheard the exchange, told him he’d been out of line and owed me an apology. Someone who couldn’t be accused of being a flirt, of wearing a skirt that was too tight, of wanting to sleep his way to the top.
Other than Weinstein himself, those are the people we should be asking questions of.
Those who repeatedly sent women to his hotel room door. Those who heard the rumours and warned the actresses but not his bosses.
Who saw, but didn’t say? Who knew, but didn’t really want to know?
When the powerful prey on the weak, observers can help correct the imbalance of power, but only when they choose not to look the other way.
When the powerful prey on the weak, observers can help correct the imbalance of power.