Comment in The Sunday Times
The bit players who exposed Harvey Weinstein’s abuse shame the silent stars of Hollywood
Camilla Long
Sunday March 15 2020, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
"We are used to horrible stories about movie moguls. We’re inured to the violence with which these porky tyrants ply their miserable trade. We believe, for some bizarre reason, that with genius must come horror — why wouldn’t one of the producers of Pulp Fiction nut and spit and molest his way through life? Just look at the film — it is savage.
But there is one thing I will never, ever, get used to, and it is the way Harvey Weinstein thought he could talk to people. Even last Wednesday, after he was sentenced to 23 years in prison, it was horrifying to hear the actress Kate Beckinsale recall how he’d screamed she was a “stupid f****** c***” for “ruining” the premiere of one of his films and not even a good one. For once she’d been reluctant to wear a plunging hooker dress to the party, because it was less than a month after 9/11.
“If I am throwing a red carpet, you get in a tight dress, you shake your ass, you shake your tits [and] you do not go down it looking like a f****** lesbian,” he screamed at a playdate, of all things. “It’s my f****** premiere and if I want pussy on the red carpet, that’s what I get.”
What’s remarkable isn’t what Weinstein said or did; it’s what Beckinsale didn’t do or say after this encounter. She didn’t stop working with him, or publicly avoid him, or come anywhere near denouncing him, however much she insists she “told” people. She somehow managed, like the malfunctioning Hollywood lifer she was, to get to the point of being used to it, accepting it, even applauding it, by aligning herself with all the other beautiful empty glossy people who salivated over this appalling fat freak for so many years, only to desert him the moment it looked as though his company was tanking and journalists were closing in.
If there is one thing we can learn from Harvey Weinstein, it’s that celebrities will literally do anything to put themselves first.
Dame Emma Thompson, for example, who led the self-serving pile-on 2½ years ago, appearing on Newsnight claiming she had witnessed his “bullying” on the “business” side of things just days after the allegations emerged. I remember watching the programme and thinking: did she want to end his “pestering”, or was she distancing herself from him to look good? And what about the magazine editor Tina Brown, who later said she had had “PTSD” from working with him but in decades of running Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and so on never thought to publish a single sentence revealing his behaviour? And there is the Tina tribute act Hillary *******, who failed to denounce him while taking money from him for her political campaign, not to mention the many powerful women and men — especially men — who all knew, because we all knew.
Even I knew, and I was a lowly features assistant at Tatler magazine. We knew he cheated on his wife and “persuaded” socialites to have affairs; we knew where he did it (Hotel du Cap). Brad Pitt knew — why didn’t he do anything? Meryl Streep and Quentin Tarantino knew — they could have made life difficult for him, but they didn’t. All I see with Weinstein is a bunch of people who said nothing for years but now claim they’re social justice warriors.
In the end the real dirty work was left to women who had already lost everything: the lowly PAs and bullied production assistants, including the hairdresser/aspiring actress Jessica Mann, who described her many confusing encounters with Weinstein during the court case, including what she described as his “deformed” and “intersex” mangina. Or Mimi Haleyi, a former production assistant whom Weinstein assaulted at home in what “looked like a kid’s bedroom with drawings on the wall”.
If you want to know who the good guys in this are, it isn’t the “dozens” of women who settled out of court for $25m or the vociferous self-seeking celebs. It’s the “civilians”, as Liz Hurley might call them, the women you haven’t even heard of, who, day in, day out, put up with Weinstein and somehow found the courage to expose his disgusting behaviour. They took out the trash.
Yes, the sentence is harsh and possibly, in the words of his lawyer, “not fair”. But if you want to know why he got such a huge tariff, think of it not as a punishment, but a dog whistle to Hollywood and other places. It isn’t so much to deter people from behaving like Harvey Weinstein, a total one-off in criminal terms. It’s to encourage ordinary people to speak out and stop the toxic cycle of celebrity silence."
