The enablers were of all sorts.
Corporate board members who declined to investigate allegations of his sexual behavior and now claim the news comes as “an utter surprise.”
Assistants who acted as “honeypots,” joining meetings between Mr. Weinstein and his intended victims to give them a sense of security — and then leaving the predator to his prey.
Reporters who paid him tribute with awards, did his bidding with fawning coverage, or went after his enemies with hit pieces.
A lavishly paid Italian studio executive whose real job, according to former Times reporter Sharon Waxman, was “to take care of Weinstein’s women needs.” (A lawyer for the executive reportedly denies the allegation.)
.. Mr. Weinstein’s depredations were an open film industry secret, the subject of an onstage joke by Seth MacFarlane at the 2013 Oscar nomination announcement. Everyone laughed because everyone got it.
Some of his victims, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, became Hollywood powers in their own right but never publicly rang an alarm until this week.
The actor Ben Affleck, who owes his start to Mr. Weinstein, is an overnight laughingstock because he acts surprised by the producer’s behavior. He won’t be the only celebrity doing his best Claude Rains “shocked, shocked” impression.
.. Irwin Reiter, a top Weinstein Company executive, sought to console one of the office assistants harassed by Mr. Weinstein by saying the “mistreatment of women” was a longstanding company issue and that “if you were my daughter he would not have made out so well.” But Reiter never went public.
.. In recent years, notes New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister, Weinstein has “lost power in the movie industry” and is no longer “the indie mogul who could make or break an actor’s Oscar chances.” Lame horses get shot.
.. he was just another libidinous cad in a libertine culture that long ago dispensed with most notions of personal restraint and gentlemanly behavior. “I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” Weinstein wrote in his mea culpa to The Times last week. “That was the culture then.”
.. That line was roundly mocked, but it contains its truth. Like those other libidinous cads — Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — Weinstein benefited from a culture that often celebrated, constantly depicted, sometimes enabled, seldom confronted, and all-too frequently forgave the behavior they so often indulged in.
.. The old saw that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing was never truer than it was in Weinstein’s case.
Rose McGowan Attacks Ben Affleck Over Harvey Weinstein: ‘You Lie’
actress Rose McGowan accused Ben Affleck of lying on Tuesday about his knowledge of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment and assaults of women.
.. Ms. McGowan, in a tweet and a subsequent email exchange with The New York Times on Tuesday night, said she had told Mr. Affleck that Mr. Weinstein had behaved inappropriately with her.
.. Mr. Affleck has not responded to Ms. McGowan’s tweet. He did not respond to requests for further comment.
The Times emailed Ms. McGowan to confirm that she was asserting that Mr. Affleck knew about Mr. Weinstein’s mistreatment of her because she had told him, and that she was accusing Mr. Affleck of lying because his statement did not acknowledge awareness of Mr. Weinstein’s behavior.
“I am saying exactly that,” she replied to The Times. She wrote nothing further.
.. Mr. Affleck, in his statement posted to Twitter Tuesday, wrote that he was “saddened and angry” and that new reports of more serious assaults — which include accounts of forced oral sex — “made me sick.”
.. While several prominent actresses spoke out on Monday against Mr. Weinstein, Mr. Affleck was one of a small cadre of prominent male figures in Hollywood with ties to Mr. Weinstein who criticized him on Tuesday after the new reports in The Times and The New Yorker.
Matt Damon, Mr. Affleck’s longtime friend and film collaborator, said in an interview with Deadline on Tuesday that he “never saw” Mr. Weinstein harass or abuse women and that he would have put an end to it if he had.
.. Several directors with close ties to Mr. Weinstein, such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, have not responded to requests asking them to comment about what it was like to work with him.
.. Mr. Affleck later dated Ms. Paltrow, though it is not known whether she relayed news of the incident to him.
.. George Clooney has also weighed in on the controversy, telling The Daily Beast in an interview that was published Monday night that while he was aware of rumors that young actresses had slept with Mr. Weinstein to get roles, he had been unaware of any misconduct or the settlements Mr. Weinstein had reached with women.
Jennifer Garner’s Good-Girl Image Has Become Her Business
Jennifer Garner hasn’t been a major movie star in years. So why are gossip magazines so invested in her?
.. good girls praise their husbands and their children on social media. They don’t cuss publicly. They have two glasses of wine, max. Good girls might have a job, but nothing in a power position. Good girls have domestic hobbies. Good girls don’t wear earrings that are too big or skirts that are too short or heels that are too high. Good girls use Match.com or eHarmony but never Tinder. Good girls might not be regular churchgoers, but they definitely believe in God. Good girls got him to put a ring on it. Good girls go to bars only in packs of other good girls. Good girls don’t want to talk about that one time they ended up in bed with someone they didn’t know. Good girls aren’t necessarily liberal or conservative, but they don’t think it’s very nice to talk about politics on Facebook. Good girls are legion. They’d never dream of making another woman feel bad about herself. And yet they so often do.
.. Fox argued that the idea of the “good girl” was one of three ways of controlling women’s submissive place in society.
- The most extreme and obvious way is through seclusion, in which women are not allowed entrance into the male spheres of society.
- The second is protection, in which women are allowed access, but only with a male chaperone or guide.
- The third, Fox argued, is normative restriction, in which women are ostensibly free, but still highly controlled — only the control comes from within, through the internalization of how a proper, acceptable, happy woman should act, look, and speak.
- And the primary way women have historically and contemporarily restricted themselves is through adherence to the idea of the “good girl.”
.. Girls are also surrounded by suggestions that they self-objectify — but only for show, and never for their own pleasure. Like Garner’s character in Alias, a good girl might put on lingerie to play a character, but only so long as she knows, and everyone else knows, that she remains a good girl beneath.
.. In order to maintain her brand’s viability — and bankability — Garner must continually prove her goodness. When her husband cheats on her with the nanny, she decides to fight for the family. When he continues to date the nanny, the family continues to go on vacations together — because it’s better for the kids. Goodness, at least in its American puritanical form, is all about suffering: The amount you endure, with a smile on your face and a “bless his heart” when asked about your husband’s back tattoo, is a testimony to just how truly good you are.
.. When she finally filed for divorce after nearly two years of separation, “sources” emphasizedthat she wasn’t ready for dating because Affleck was the love of her life. All of Garner’s decisions — including the one to have Affleck live in their pool house, and then nearby — were purportedly in service to “the important important thing: their children.” See: the invitation for Affleck to accompany Garner when she goes to speak in the Bahamas, because, as one source told Us Weekly, “Jen feels it most beneficial for the kids to have their father present.” When the news broke that Affleck’s affair predated the dissolution of the marriage, she stayed in “mama-bear mode … putting the kids’ happiness first”.. “She will always appear to be taking the high road,” Lainey Gossip explains. “Pleasant, keeping to herself, working on fitness with a friend.”.. White female celebrities are a tough sell right now, but Garner — who has managed to market herself as both conservative and liberal, a good girl but not a good girl tainted by relation to Trump — fills a specific need... The company employs a complex algorithm, tested across its titles and others, to determine which celebrities sell magazines at a given moment. They wouldn’t have put Garner on the cover if the data didn’t suggest that she sold. (The cover’s sales were up 18% over the week before)... The cover photo was not from Garner and Affleck’s recent trip to the Bahamas, but from a previous trip, two years ago, after they first publicly announced their divorce. Affleck may have accompanied Garner to the Bahamas with their children, but the magazine needed a photographic suggestion of their uncoupled happiness — so they just photoshopped a different color shirt on him and let the headline do the suggestive work.Garner regularly provides evidence of her good-girl-ness, but when she doesn’t, the magazines and paparazzi and headline writers and “sources” do the work for her... Garner might not be trying to tell other women how to live their lives, or shaming them for their inability to perform a certain type of femininity. But the salience of her image quietly does that work, regardless.