Even though I’ve twice said that the Weinstein story fills me with a sense of exhaustion, I’m writing about it at least one more time—not because of Weinstein himself, but because of how much his tale says about the use of power and intimidation to instill fear and shame in some victims and potential victims, and how it can compromise other people to become confederates in that process. Since writing yesterday’s post on the subject, I’ve read the Ronan Farrow expose on Weinstein that appeared in The New Yorker, and I suggest you read it, too.
I think I may have an answer, or at least a partial answer, to the question of why this story came out now. Weinstein stories appeared almost simultaneously in both the New Yorker and the NY Times, with the latter article coming out first. Farrow himself has said that he’s been researching the Weinstein article for ten months. He first shopped it to NBC, where he’s employed, but they didn’t run it (read this for a discussion of why; the answer, at least according to that article, appears to have been intimidation and fear). After NBC wouldn’t run it, Farrow shopped it to the New Yorker and they decided to go with it. NBC says they declined it because it wasn’t well-sourced enough (it was a different and earlier version than was ultimately published in the New Yorker), but I very much doubt that was the reason. Farrow has also said that he was threatened with a lawsuit by Weinstein.
Farrow has a personal reason for relentlessly pursuing the story, and that personal reason’s name is Woody Allen. Allen didn’t just have sex with Ronan’s sister Soon-Yi when she had barely reached the age of legal majurity (he later married her), resulting in enormous family upheaval and estrangement, but Farrow’s sister Dylan has alleged that Allen sexually abused her (Dylan, that is) as a child. It’s no surprise that the Weinstein abuses—which Ronan Farrow, with his Hollywood connections, had to have heard about for quite some time—pressed a button for him. He’s a determined guy, and he wasn’t going to back off from this no matter who threatened him with a lawsuit.
As far as the Times story goes—I believe that the Times got wind of the Farrow story brewing, and they didn’t want to be scooped by Farrow and The New Yorker. So they got their own story together—somewhat more hurriedly—and ran with it. I also believe that Farrow may have been particularly good at getting the women to talk because of his own activism on behalf of his sister Dylan, and his understanding of the phenomenon of sexual abuse in situations in which there is a potential abuse of power.
There is also speculation that the person who turned Weinstein in to the Times was none other than Weinstein’s own brother:
Bob Weinstein, who co-founded The Weinstein Company with his brother and who currently serves as a board member, has reportedly been trying for years to unseat Harvey Weinstein as the sole head of the studio.
‘Bob’s wanted Harvey out for years,’ a former staffer told Page Six.
The source claimed that ‘the two brothers are becoming increasingly suspicious of each other.’
It has even been suggested that Bob Weinstein ‘may have even fed this story’ to the Times as a means of orchestrating Harvey Weinstein’s downfall…
A statement issued by four board members said that The Weinstein Company will be run in the meantime by Bob Weinstein and David Glasser, the president and COO.
I suppose it’s possible; it would certainly make a good movie plot. But I hold with my theory that it was Farrow who led the charge, and the Times that followed. I think that if Weinstein’s brother did feed information to the Times, it was probably because he smelled the blood in the water as a result of rumors that Farrow was getting the women to tell him their stories.
The Farrow article describes a repetitive pattern of behavior by Weinstein. The exact details differ in each of the cases, but Weinstein’s alleged modus operandi is similar in each. Get the woman alone—by subterfuge, if necessary. Touch her on a breast or other private place, and/or expose yourself. Ignore repeated “no’s” and keep on going. Sometimes force was not necessary. The woman’s isolation, the overwhelming size and strength of Weinstein, and the fear (either of an implied danger or through an explicit threat) of career repercussions and/or legal action and/or other forms of reputation assassination was enough to induce some women to surrender.
I say “surrender” rather than “agree” or “cooperate” because that is what it seems like to me. The women felt overpowered by a hostile force that could harm them greatly. Their “no’s” were completely ignored by the physically overpowering Weinstein, and they stopped saying “no” after a while because of increasing fear and hopelessness as well as shame.
This was not a playful domination game for them. This was the real thing, and the danger they felt was real as well. They were not on dates gone bad—they weren’t on dates at all. These were meetings for ostensible professional reasons, prior to Weinstein’s turning the tables on them.
As I was reading the article I realized that some of these accounts had the ring of familiarity. Because of my training, I’ve had to read a great deal of information about child abusers, and that’s what I started thinking about. These women were not children, of course, but they were uniformly young and new to the profession at the time of the assaults, and Weinstein held all the power cards, both physical and professional and in the realm of media and public relations as well.
Child abusers often choose certain children they see as particularly vulnerable in some way, and then they groom them by being nice to them so that by the time of the sexual advance the abuser knows how to coerce the child—either through flattery or threat or lies or whatever will do the trick. Legally, children cannot give consent, but they often surrender out of fear and/or confusion. The women Weinstein came on to were adults and could have given legal consent, but they felt a similar fear and confusion.
A different classic ploy of child abusers—in this case, those who approach children they’ve never met before—is to tell the child they’ve lost a puppy, and then to ask the child to help them look for it. A puppy! What could be more enticing? The child eagerly starts to assist in the search, and is led to an isolated spot where the assault occurs. In the accounts in the Farrow article, a meeting about a part in a movie was the puppy Weinstein held out to get the women into a compromising position (often through trickery in which the meeting started out including other people but ended up being just with Weinstein), and all the rest followed. In his case, though—unlike the child abusers—not only was the woman an adult, but there really was a puppy, at least in the metaphoric sense. The “puppy” was the movie role—and maybe other future movie roles, as well as fame and fortune—and the woman knew it. That puppy was what led the women to take an initial meeting with him, and then Weinstein used his tried and true methods of coercion mixed with fear afterwards.
There are differences in how far it went for each of the women Farrow interviewed. Some, like Mira Sorvino, successfully fended off his advances (she came up with a clever ploy to accomplish this). Sorvino believes she paid a price professionally as a result of her refusal, and I’m inclined to believe her. Some submitted one time and never again placed themselves in a position in which they were near Weinstein. One recent victim went to the police and later wore a wire in a talk with Weinstein (an audio has been made public). At least one of the Weinstein accusers, Asia Argento, later developed a consensual sexual relationship with him that seems to have been motivated in part by shame and resignation and in part by what he could do for her.
I think what was going on with Weinstein—in addition to the abuse of power to satisfy his own desires—was his ability to rationalize to himself what was happening. I think the following statement Weinstein is said to have made to a young woman named Emily Nestor, who was seeking a job on the production end of things, may express Weinstein’s way of changing his own internal narrative to salve whatever he might still possess that could be called a shred of a conscience:
In Nestor’s account of the exchange, Weinstein said, “Oh, the girls always say no. You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman.
Weinstein may have thought himself so powerfully irresistible that no woman could actually say “no” to him and mean it. Or he may have been lying to Nestor, and the knowledge of doing something sexual to these women against their will was one of the things that most turned him on.
Rosanna Arquette is an actress who described an incident to Farrow in which she refused Weinstein’s advances. When he kept pressuring her, describing how he’d helped the careers of other women who’d given in, she reports having said to him, “I will never be that girl.” Arquette believes her career suffered as a result, and she kept silent out of fear that he would further harm her.
What causes one person to say “I will never be that girl”? And what causes others to become “that girl,” sometimes much against their better judgment? Inner strength, a sense of morality, courage, all those things we seek to instill in people are often sorely lacking or just aren’t powerful enough to overcome fear and/or ambition.
People who worked for Weinstein and who knew that he was arranging such meetings and in some cases helped him to do it weren’t sexually compromised themselves. But they were morally (and even spiritually) compromised. Farrow talked to some of them, too, and it seems to me that they have been feeling considerable amounts of guilt and shame, and saw talking to him as one small way to expiate at least some of their own guilt.
Who on earth thinks Weinstein is the only one? He may have gone further than most, but it isn’t for nothing that people say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
[NOTE: For those who are curious, here was my take on the October 2016 disclosure of the Trump “pussy” remarks.]
