The Human Stain: Why the Harvey Weinstein Story Is Worse Than You Think

[EasyAce]

It goes much deeper than one big creep.
By Lee Smith
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-human-stain-why-the-harvey-weinstein-story-is-worse-than-you-think/article/2009995

The New York Times last week broke the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s
long record of sexual harassment. Actresses including Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd came
forward to detail Weinstein’s depredations, and so did former employees of the man who founded
one of the most important independent film companies of the last 30 years, Miramax. The details
were so jarring and the trail of abuse so long, that it was impossible to read the story and not
come away wondering: How did no one know what he was doing?

But of course people knew about Harvey Weinstein. Like the New York Times, for instance. Sharon
Waxman, a former reporter at the Times, writes in The Wrap how she had the story on Weinstein
in 2004—and then he bullied the Times into dropping it. Matt Damon and Russell Crowe even
called her directly to get her to back off the story. And Miramax was a major advertiser. Her
editor at the Times, Jonathan Landman, asked her why it mattered. After all, he told Waxman,
“he’s not a publicly elected official.”

Manhattan’s district attorney knew, too. In 2015, Weinstein’s lawyer donated $10,000 to the
campaign of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance after he declined to file sexual assault
charges against the producer. Given the number of stories that have circulated for so long,
Weinstein must have spread millions around New York, Los Angeles, and Europe to pay off
lawyers and buy silence, including the silence of his victims. But he had something else
going for him, too. He knew his victims would be reluctant to go public because it might
suggest that some of their success, their fame even, was a function of their inability to protect
themselves from being humiliated by a man who set the bar for humiliating others at the
precise level of his own self-loathing . . .

. . .  Sure, reporters hadn’t been able to get any stars to go on the record. But that means
the story journalists were pursuing wasn’t really about Weinstein’s sexual depredations. It
means that what they wanted was a story about actresses, junior executives, or assistants
who had been humiliated, maybe raped, and chose to remain quiet in exchange for money
and/or a shot at fame.

Of course no one was going to get that on the record—very few journalists would even want
to publish a story like that. But journalists always had the actual story of how a Hollywood
producer humiliated and sexually assaulted women. How? Because he victimized journalists . . .

Weinstein is violent, vindictive, and litigious—as well as sexually abusive—facts that the
entertainment and political media knew for years. No one wanted to publish that story. But
that’s not the same thing as “not being able to nail it down.” “Nailing it down” would have
amounted to nothing more than printing a collection of facts under a byline.

The real issue, as Traister notes, was that “there were so many journalists on his payroll,
working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine.” Traister
is referring to Talk, the magazine Weinstein started at Miramax with Tina Brown. The catchword
was “synergy”—magazine articles, turned into books, turned into movies, a supply chain of
entertainment and information that was going to put these media titans in the middle of
everything and make them all richer . . .