How tragic if Harvey can buy his way out of his horrors
So YES, it might be seasonal — but what a dispiriting pantomime the Harvey Weinstein affair has become. This week, many of the actresses, models and ex-employees who accused the disgraced film mogul of a decadeslong trail of sexual misconduct have tentatively agreed to settle with him.
Many feel they have no alternative but to take the money because their claims are outside the American courts’ statute of limitations, which puts a timescale on bringing legal action.
What option do they have? For them, this is the last throw of the dice, their only option to elicit something positive from a terrible negative.
Yet is a big lump of lovely cash really all that these women were fighting for in the end? All that postulating, all the flashy protests, all the MeToo and Time’s Up swaggering hashtaggery?
This movement was supposed to empower more vulnerable women to speak out, supported by the empathy and solidarity of their sisters.
once and for all, the scourge of institutionalised sexual harassment was going to be dragged into the open.
It would never be allowed to proliferate in the shadows again, in Hollywood or anywhere else. The perpetrators would be named, shamed and brought to justice, right? Wrong.
Weinstein’s legal team have put forward a £19 million package deal to end dozens of lawsuits and about half the women involved want to take up the offer. Some separate cases, including one with actress Ashley Judd, will still go to trial in January. However, this latest move means that for the majority of cases, Weinstein gets off pretty much scot-free. He will not have to admit to any wrongdoing. He won’t even have to pay the money himself, as it would be covered by his former company’s insurance policies.
Are the women morally wrong to accept the cash rather than have their day in court? Surely many deserve every comforting penny for the torment and distress they suffered at Weinstein’s crabbed and sweating hands.
Perhaps they are just making a pragmatic decision in the face of insurmountable odds. However, wasn’t there once a principle at stake here, something that was supposed to be so much more important than money?
That is certainly the impression they all gave, way back in the noble beginning. When victim after victim came forward to expose Weinstein’s alleged record as a serial predator and claimed to do so for female empowerment, not personal enrichment.
To make matters worse, the model Emily Ratajkowski was so outraged by this week’s settlement that she wrote ‘F*** Harvey’ on her arm and paraded it on the red carpet for the premiere of her husband’s new film. Is Emily too asinine to grasp the horrible irony in this?
Her stance is right up there with writing inspirational messages on bananas to cheer up glum sex workers.
EMIlY’S dimbulb sloganeering would be funny were it not so pitiful. However, in a happy coincidence for her, this display produced lots of lovely publicity for Uncut Gems, her hubby Sebastian BearMcclard’s new film.
She posed up a storm in a sexy, barelythere dress, while looking suitably furious about that pest Harv. Honestly. All these mixed messages, beefed up by the average starlet’s thirst for publicity, leaves us in a confused place.
Emily often poses, oiled up and starkers, on her social media accounts. This is okay because she says she does not do it for men or male approval and that she owns her body and is at liberty to do with it what she wants.
All true, but a hollow sort of victory, nonetheless. Ratajkowski, like so many she-activists, enjoy all the benefits of feminism but simply will not accept any of the responsibility. And that is a big part of the problem — and the messy juncture now reached.
Weinstein’s reputation and career may be in tatters, but it will be disappointing if the biggest and most highprofile sexual misconduct case now deflates into nothing much more than cash payments and silence.
The old brute certainly seems to be gaming the system in shameless ways. This week he used a Zimmer frame to shuffle into his bail hearing in a new York court. Wearing a jacket three sizes too big, he seemed to be keen on presenting himself theatrically as a shrunken shadow of his former being; a sexless creature to be pitied, not feared.
His claims that he suffered from a bad back put one in mind of Bill cosby, who suddenly went blind just before his big trial for sexual offences last year. But at least cosby ended up in jail.
The way things are going, it is anyone’s guess what might happen next to horrible Harvey.