Editors weigh in on hot topics

Last week at the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.’s annual grants banquet at the Beverly Wilshire, I was one of a very few guests who weren’t laughing at the jokes being cracked onstage by host Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Watching him command the ballroom and the audience lap it up, all I could think of was how the box office star turned California governor turned aging actor had been outed as a serial sexual harasser in the pre-#metoo era.

I was working at the Los Angeles Times when we published an Oct. 2, 2003, front-page story in which six women described having been groped and humiliated by Schwarzenegger on movie sets, in studio offices and in other settings over a three-decade period. Schwarzenegger vehemently denied the allegations and accused the paper of running a politically driven smear campaign on the eve of the Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall election, in which he was the frontrunner. His campaign spokesman insisted Schwarzenegger hadn’t engaged in any improper conduct toward women and that our article was prompted by Democrats wanting to hurt his chances of winning. Of course, that was absurd.

His attitude toward women had been an issue on the campaign trail, and the story came after a seven-week investigation into his behavior on and off movie sets from the 1970s through the early 2000s. A story that ran in Premiere magazine in 2001, titled “Arnold the Barbarian,” became the subject of widespread conversation in the industry about Schwarzenegger’s alleged bad behavior.

When the Times was investigating its 2003 story, one of my colleagues was trying to chase down a lead that Schwarzenegger had a child out of wedlock while married to Maria Shriver. She couldn’t confirm it at that time. But eight years later, a week after it was announced that he and Shriver were separating, he publicly admitted that he had fathered a son illegitimately with the housekeeper who worked for the couple at their Pacific Palisades estate.

Cut to last year. In the wake of #Metoo, guess who had another confession: “Looking back, I stepped over the line several times,” he told Men’s Health magazine. “i feel bad about it, and I apologize.”

Call me silly, but I find it hard to consider his apology — or laugh at his jokes.

Watching him command the ballroom and the audience lap it up, all I could think of was how Schwarzenegger had been outed as a serial sexual harasser in the pre-#metoo era.”