The latest revelations that arrived Tuesday about Harvey Weinstein, as detailed in an investigation in The New Yorker and two separate reports in The New York Times, have upped the ante of the allegations against him. There are three women who have now accused the Hollywood fixture of rape, in addition to at least 10 more who have accused him of sexual assault or harassment, and huge industry names like Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow have been added to the list, by their own accounts. (“Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein,” a spokesperson for Weinstein said.)
A slow trickle of celebrities denounced Weinstein in the days after the Times’s initial report last week, starting with longtime outspoken critics like Rose McGowan, who tweeted in 2016 about being raped by a studio head and who, as The New York Times reported last week, reached a settlement with Weinstein in 1997 after an incident in a hotel room. Then there was Meryl Streep, Judi Dench, and Lena Dunham, the latter of whom called for the men who are close to Weinstein, almost all of whom had initially remained silent, to denounce him explicitly. Since then, George Clooney has given a lengthy interview to the Daily Beast, followed by a statement from Ben Affleck. And the latest apologia came from Hillary Clinton, for whom Weinstein has raised about $1.5 million in campaign donations. “I was shocked and appalled by the revelations about Harvey Weinstein,” she wrote. “The behavior described by women coming forward cannot be tolerated. Their courage and the support of others is critical in helping to stop this kind of behavior.”
Clinton’s statement, like those from the other celebrities who were not victimized by Weinstein but have spoken out against him, employ the same three elements: Firstly, they didn’t know. Some had heard rumors; some, like Clooney, had witnessed other aspects of Weinstein’s volatile behavior themselves, but not what was described in the assault allegations. Secondly, they championed the women who came forward with their stories. And, third, they all want to make sure the abuse doesn’t happen again in the future, whether by Weinstein or others like him.
This final desire is the one that seems the hardest to put into explicit terms. What will it take to prevent those who use their clout and large amounts of cash from hurting the vulnerable, the less powerful, or women, in general?
One of the only concrete admonitions to detractors, or pledges by supporters, has been that we must “believe women,” an imperative that crescendoed in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election as more and more women came forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault. This shorthand—“believe women”—became a rallying cry, an attempt to right a history rife with shame, retribution, derision, and punishment women have endured after coming forward with stories of sexual harassment and rape that have plagued male-dominated industries from film and television, to politics, to college campuses, and Silicon Valley. We must be reminded to “believe women” because there is so little incentive to come forward, given how statistically unlikely it is that accusers are brought to justice, which perpetuates a culture of victim blaming. Put another way, we must “believe women” now, because for so long, we haven’t.
But the subtext of nearly every celebrity statement on the subject of Weinstein’s particularly consistent pattern of abuse is that, actually, it was incredibly easy to believe. “If you’re asking if I knew that someone who was very powerful had a tendency to hit on young, beautiful women, sure,” Clooney said, though he says he never had any knowledge of the behavior outlined in the accounts by victims. Jessica Chastain tweeted that she was “warned from the beginning.” And it wasn’t just in Hollywood that Weinstein’s crimes were known: Members of the media had been aware of them for years, whether they chased a story they couldn’t pin down, had their reports met with the might of Weinstein and Miramax’s legal and advertising powers, or had their sources mysteriously evaporate. The growing list of increasingly high-profile victims and witnesses speaking out is the very idea of an “open secret” made flesh.
This is where “believe women,” as a corrective, falls short. Many, many people believed the stories of abuse and assault about Weinstein when they heard them. Almost every one of the victims, whether they, according to their stories, simply had to endure a meeting with Weinstein in a bathrobe, were cajoled into giving a massage, tried unsuccessfully to fend off a physical assault, or were demeaned for their appearance, told a mother, a friend, or a coworker who believed them. Some of them told the human resources department at Miramax, and they were believed: Emily Nestor, a front desk assistant, reportedly heard from a senior executive after a friend of hers complained over Weinstein’s behavior. (The executive told her he had, privately, an “epic” fight with Weinstein on her behalf, according to The New Yorker.) And, most damningly, the NYPD believed the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez enough to outfit her with a wire in her second encounter with Weinstein, after he allegedly groped her.
But belief is not action; belief is not protection, or prosecution, which Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., the DA who would take on Gutierrez’s case, decided not to do to Weinstein, even after the police recorded the studio head saying he was “used to” groping whomever he wanted, regardless of invitation, and that he was sorry. Just as Miramax human resources declined to put a stop to the practices that enabled Weinstein to be alone with female employees, in hotels and elsewhere. Some people who heard about the women whom Weinstein hurt stood up for individuals whom they personally knew, like Brad Pitt, who confronted Weinstein about his inappropriate advances on Pitt’s then-girlfriend, Paltrow. But did Pitt tell anyone else?
“Believe women” makes it sound like people heard the accusations against Weinstein for more than 30 years and shouted them down. In reality, people heard them and passed them around in whispers, and didn’t do much of anything about it. Among women, this open secret amounted to a kind of shield, in which some knew better than others to avoid Weinstein, like Jolie, who said she “chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did.” But many, many women were left to fend for themselves. And those who went without protection were usually younger, and more vulnerable: his young employees, hungry for an edge or advancement and willing to write off inappropriate behavior as idiosyncratic genius, or the cost of doing business; aspiring actresses, just starting out and unsure what was appropriate and what wasn’t from a studio head. Nobodies, in Hollywood speak, for whom no one cared to intervene.
Nearly everyone associated with Weinstein benefitted from his immense power in the entertainment industry and his personal wealth; why else would such an intolerable personality be tolerated? That is the reason that people, men and women, believed he was capable of the rumors or reputable reports that they heard and did nothing about it. Complicit parties deeply enmeshed in the kind of power Weinstein wields cannot be counted on to risk their stake in it.
Asking our society to “believe women” attempts to shift the onus of justice from accusers but falsely pushes it onto individuals to “do the right thing” and “speak up.” We know that is not the way power works. What the Weinstein fallout shows us is that institutions must have the integrity to organize and rally around victims when great profit or reputation is at stake. If we’re up in arms about a man like Harvey Weinstein, we need to look to the way the board of his company and its human resources department worked to stifle claims. We need to examine how nondisclosure agreements and private arbitration may have been employed to keep women silent. The decision by Cyrus Vance not to prosecute Weinstein for assaulting Ambra Battilana Gutierrez is only the most obvious failure among many from a system that should have protected those at the bottom of the hierarchy, and did the opposite.