Like a lot of wronged women, Monica Lewinsky now is reassessing her “affair” with Bill Clinton through the lens of the MeToo movement.
It was “an abuse of power … 100 percent,” she said Saturday night in a speech in Australia.
The former White House intern, who was just 22 when the president seduced her, said she had “clung so steadfastly to this notion that [it] was a real, consensual relationship, [but] as we started to have public conversations that were different about consent, as we started to recognize abuse of power in different ways, these structures started to crumble around powerful men who have been able to engage in [bad] behaviors and be lauded and celebrated.”
Lewinsky is right that some rich and powerful men now are being held accountable for past sexual wrongdoing that once was condoned by everyone in their privileged social stratum.
But, on the other hand, many of these men still don’t seem to comprehend that the music has stopped on the sexual free-for-all of previous decades, nor do many of their celebrity enablers and sycophants who turned a blind eye for decades.
A few days earlier, and half a world away from Lewinsky’s Sydney address, Harvey Weinstein was seen canoodling with a nubile actress in a Soho nightclub and reportedly being feted by fans as if he hadn’t a care in the world while awaiting trial in Manhattan Supreme Court on two rape charges.
Also last week, in France, a fourth woman emerged to accuse Oscar winner Roman Polanski of raping her at a Swiss ski resort in 1975, when she was just 18.
The allegation emerged as his latest movie, about the Dreyfus Affair, was showered with prizes at the European Film Awards.
Polanski has been a fugitive from US justice since he skipped bail after being charged over the drugging, rape and sodomy of a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s Los Angeles house in 1977.
Despite pleading guilty to statutory rape before he fled, Polanski has been staunchly defended by Hollywood liberals, including Weinstein and Woody Allen, ironically enough, as well as Meryl Streep and Whoopi Goldberg.
“It’s a shocking way to treat a man who went through the Holocaust and his wife’s murder,” wrote Weinstein in 2009, at a time when he himself was riding high on the wings of impunity in the land of the casting couch.
In interviews for “An Officer and A Spy,” which opens in France this week, Polanski has been likening himself to his protagonist, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer falsely accused of being a German spy two decades before World War I.
“I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done,” Polanski had the gall to say.
Yes, it was a big week for MeToo denial. But it wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the late predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Sure enough, a TV news producer was sacked last week over suspicions (which she denies) that she leaked the hot-mic video of ABC News anchor Amy Robach complaining that the network spiked her Epstein scoop, which implicated Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.
The thread that links all these libidinous men is the power of the progressive Hollywood establishment and the protection racket that fuels it.
As long as they paid homage to favored causes, abortion, LGBTQI rights, open borders, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party, these men bought themselves protection from scrutiny and negative publicity.
Weinstein was so certain that this unspoken contract would hold when he first was accused of being a serial sexual predator that he whined about his virtuous acts as if they would expunge any heinous behavior.
Look at all the good things I’ve done, he wailed, pointing to his fraudulent feminist documentary “The Hunting Ground,” marching in an anti-Trump women’s protest, employing Barack Obama’s daughter Malia as an intern, and hosting a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.
Epstein, too, supported obligatory progressive causes, including the Clinton Foundation and elite universities.
These men only managed to keep their offending in plain sight for so long because they were darlings of the liberal establishment.
After Weinstein was fired in disgrace in 2017 from the company he founded, Oscar winner Streep issued a disingenuous statement, saying she had no idea that her friend had allegedly spent almost three decades forcing himself on young actresses and paying off at least eight accusers.
If the stories were true, said Streep, she didn’t think the media “would have neglected for decades to write about it.”
But of course, every day we see evidence that elements of the media were complicit in the liberal protection racket.
They will go after Brett Kavanaugh with every forensic tool at their disposal over flaky allegations that fall apart at first glance. They persecuted the Covington Catholic High School boys with manic vigor, trying to prop up a false story of racism they wanted so much to be true that they ignored all evidence to the contrary.
They melt down at Donald Trump’s hypothetical “p—y grabbing” and scream about Twitter micro-aggressions from conservatives.
Yet they give a free pass to the atrocities of their ideological fellow travelers, turning a collective blind eye at best, or at worst, stifling and spiking stories.
Yes, the protection racket around powerful abusers is starting to crumble. But until celebrity enablers admit their role, justice will never be done.
Labour pain looms in UK
Donald Trump urged his friend Brexit leader Nigel Farage earlier this month to join forces with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Britain’s upcoming election.
Good advice, but there are real fears in London that Farage’s Brexit Party will split the conservative vote on Dec. 12 and allow the anti-Semitic socialist Jeremy Corbyn to come through the middle.
To give you an idea of how extreme Corbyn is, on Friday, four senior former Labour MPs urged a vote for the Conservatives, calling Corbyn a “disgrace to the Labour Party and a disgrace to this country.”
“I think Jeremy Corbyn is completely unfit to lead our country,” said Ian Austin. “Decent, traditional, patriotic Labour voters … should be voting for Boris Johnson this election.”
Unless Farage and Johnson make a peace deal, Britain’s answer to Bernie Sanders could become the accidental prime minister, and that’s bad news for everyone.
Blexit fans: Owens for prez in 2024
Readers applauded Candace Owens and her Blexit movement encouraging black Americans to exit the Democratic Party.
“Candace Owens would be the perfect replacement for Trump when he leaves office in 2025,” writes Steve. “Or when Donald Jr. leaves 8 years later. That would really cause Democrat heads to explode!”
Jesse agreed: Owens is “smart, witty, charismatic, and unafraid to see and call out the Democrats for who they truly are … The black and Hispanic vote is what will put Trump over the top in a big way in 2020. They are finally back to work after all these years of the Dems keeping them down with their paltry handouts.
“Nothing would make me happier than seeing the first woman (and woman of color at that) President being a Republican.”
Amen.