Sex scandals nothing new in Hollywood

They’re falling like flies: Harvey Weinstein, Brett Ratner, Oliver Stone, Louis CK (Louis even made feminist comedy, dammit!), Charlie Sheen (again), Kevin Spacey … Not Spacey, surely? Yes, even the (once) fabulous Spacey is toxic, apparently with a habit of plunging his hand down young men’s trousers.

Yet, I have a poster from The Usual Suspects, signed by Spacey; I loved him … now it’s all trash and I wonder who’s next?

For me, it started with Bill Cosby. Like everyone and his dog, my family watched The Cosby Show throughout the ’80s.

The fictional Huxtable family was warm and fuzzy and I remember how Bill was furious when Lisa Bonet – who played his onscreen daughter – went off to act in a sexy movie, because he feared she’d sully the image of his cosy show.

Oh, the irony. My sister was watching reruns of The Cosby Show when the news broke: Cosby was accused of sex crimes, of drugging and raping numerous women.

But actually it started long before that, so long ago that “the casting couch” remains queasy shorthand for all the wannabes supposedly lying down and spreading their legs in return for a part, and what’s a man to do, ’eh?

It started with Charlie Chaplin and his thing for underage girls – we’d call it paedophilia nowadays – and with Errol Flynn, who liked them young, too.

There’s convicted rapist Roman Polanski, who went on to win an Oscar, and later the predatory Casey Affleck, who paid off his victims then won an Oscar, too. And dare I mention the smoke that swirls around Woody Allen?

It started back when early stars were forced to have abortions if they wanted work, because they were cast based on how sexually accessible they were and who would lust someone’s mother?

Teenage Judy Garland was told to “sing from the heart” while a director fondled her “heart”; she was later made to have two abortions.

Tippi Hedren was abused by Alfred Hitchcock on the set of The Birds, and yet was so tied into contract that he could prevent her from working for anyone else in Hollywood – and he did.

So what now for these powerful men, these charmers in the old-fashioned way? Oh, that they’ll never work in this town again, either, yet history – old, recent – suggests otherwise …