Crews: Man he accused gets pass
Terry Crews is a hulk of a man, standing at 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing in at 240 pounds. He was a linebacker in the National Football League in the early 1990s, who parlayed his sparkling personality and comic talent into a successful acting career.
Moviegoers likely know Crews from his roles in absurdist comedies like White Chicks and Blended while television fans might recognize him from Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Everybody Hates Chris.
As intimidating, famous and beloved as the actor is, he wants everyone to know that even he felt afraid to come forward with his own story of being sexually harassed last year by a powerful man in Hollywood.
He didn’t want to be “ostracized,” he says
He was a midlevel actor and his alleged assailant was a powerful Hollywood agent with the capacity to potentially squash his career. Crews also didn’t think many people would believe him, he said on Twitter.
But after The New York Times published an exposé on Oct. 5 alleging that film producer Harvey Weinstein used his position to sexually harass and assault aspiring young women, he chose to open up.
Crews alleged that talent agent Adam Venit groped his genitals at a Hollywood party.
The actor wanted to fight him, to strike back, he has said, but feared that the situation would be misperceived since he is a large black man. He didn’t want to end up in jail or lose his career.
Crews’s perspective adds a crucial dimension to the national conversation about sexual misconduct perpetrated by powerful men: that victims feel trapped because they are professionally beholden to someone higher up the ladder, who uses his power against them. In that sense, physical size doesn’t matter. In Crew’s case, being black in America played a role, too.
But he still feels like he’s not being taken seriously. Venit has not commented on Crew’s accusation. But Venit’s employer, the William Morris Endeavor, suspended the alleged groper for 30 days — only to recently welcome him back to the workplace after deciding his alleged transgression against Crews was an isolated incident, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Crews, who was by then watching along with the rest of the country as one big-shot after another got punished with much greater severity, was enraged.
“SOMEONE GOT A PASS,” Crews tweeted about the news Monday.