Ronan Farrow, New Yorker: From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories
Multiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.
Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The English Patient,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God.
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Update: For more details on this story .... 'My heart breaks for the women who have suffered': Harvey Weinstein's wife announces she is LEAVING sex abuser movie mogul as he 'flies to Europe for sex addiction rehab' (Daily Mail)
WNU Editor: Regular readers of this blog know that one of my "main beefs" with the main stream media is not what they report .... but what they choose not to report. The Harvey Weinstein story is a perfect example of this. This story has been known for years and not one main stream media news outlet wanted to touch it .... from the New York Times a decade ago to NBC this year .... Ronan Farrow on Harvey Weinstein Story: ‘I Was Threatened With a Lawsuit’ (Variety). This avoidance of a big story raises a very important question .... why did all the news editors and media outlets make the decision to stay away. Sadly .... the answer lies in the culture of Hollywood and its ties to politics. I predicted on Saturday that this is more of a political story rather than a Hollywood one .... Why The Harvey Weinsten Story Is An Important Political News Story In The U.S. (October 7, 2017) .... and after a long delay the politicians are now coming out of the woodwork to prove my point .... After delay, Clinton and Obamas rip Weinstein (The Hill). Harvey Weinstein would never have gotten away with any of this if it was not for his connections .... and this is not an isolated incident .... there is a long history and culture of systematic sexual abuse coming out of Hollywood .... and it has to stop. What should be done next? President Obama's Department of Education investigated hundreds of schools to expose and punish schools that had a culture that enabled sexual assault .... and punished them they did. The U.S. military was also put under the spotlight for having a culture of abusing women in the ranks .... and due to the efforts of female politicians who felt that the males in the military would not be up to the job, have been successful in pointing out how big of a problem it is. I say the same should be done for Hollywood .... via through the Justice Department and/or Congressional hearings. And while I know that many politicians are going to feel uncomfortable putting Hollywood under this spotlight .... someone has to step up, because the men in Hollywood have not .... and (I predict) will not in the future.
Update: This is interesting .... The New Yorker article was written by Ronan Farrow, who is the son of Mia Farrow .... and whose father is Woody Allen (he is estranged from his father). He has also gone on record supporting his sister Dylan Farrow’s accusations of improper behaviour by their father. I have said it a few times on this blog .... concerning children whose fathers are Jihadists .... but I can also say the same thing about children who experienced or witnessed sexual abuse within their own family. They either become like the father (or in a few cases like their mother) and repeat the same crimes, or they spend their entire life trying to stop such abuse. Ronan Farrow is clearly dedicated to stopping this abuse .... and kudos to him, his work, and the enormous risk that he had to take to expose the most powerful man in Hollywood who had political connections straight to the top.
1 comment:
"They either become like the father (or in a few cases like their mother) and repeat the same crimes, or they spend their entire life trying to stop such abuse." Same with children that grow up in an alcoholic family. Interesting book on the subject - Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome by Wayne Kritsberg.
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