Last October, when a friend sent me a text that simply read, “OMG Harvey”, I thought she was talking about the hurricane that had devastated Houston two weeks previously. But then another friend e-mailed me: “How much do you know?”
As it turned out, quite a lot.
It had been almost 20 years since I’d sat opposite a friend in a café in Paris and watched her go to pieces as she told me how Hollywood’s most powerful film producer, Harvey Weinstein, had set up a meeting with her in his hotel and then exposed himself. There had been other friends, since, too. Awful, horrible stories.
My own story, which I outlined in this paper almost exactly a year ago, was tame compared with those of my friends. There was an offer to engage, followed by a loose threat that, if I turned him down, neither I nor my husband [the actor Ioan Gruffudd] would ever work again. That’s not rape. That’s not even attempted rape. But it did support the hypothesis that we all believed about Weinstein and the very thing he was denying – that for years he had been blacklisting people who didn’t agree to sleep with him.
I wanted people to know this. I wanted to support the women who had done the unthinkable – the ones who had been the first to jump – who had told their difficult stories with no guarantee at all that anybody would support or believe them.
The Telegraph gave me a deadline for the next day, and I just wrote – almost without thinking. I called my husband in Australia to tell him what I was doing and he was distraught. “But why?” he kept asking. We were a family that was entirely dependent on the entertainment industry to survive, he kept saying. What about the backlash? I knew all this. But how would I forgive myself if I just sat and waited it out – and it failed and everything went back to normal?
The backlash came quickly, although it was less upsetting than I had thought. Almost all of the attacks were on me, not my husband or kids, by which I was relieved.
After the dust had settled, though, a gnawing feeling began to kick in. I’d told my story. I’d insisted that others were telling the truth. But Weinstein was still on the loose – admittedly fired from his company and in a retreat somewhere in Arizona, but free. And, most frustratingly, nothing substantial seemed to have been altered in Hollywood. Character breakdowns from casting directors still called for actresses to be “sexy” (as well as having been to law school, being able to fly three types of helicopters, teach yoga class and not be older than 23).
Change takes time, it’s true. But the slow pace of it and the feeling that, in the end, nothing had been achieved, was highlighted by the “more of the same, but worse” that seemed to be happening on the Hollywood A-listers stage.
A group named Time’s Up, which raised a lot of money for victims’ funds, asked everybody to wear pins on the Golden Globes red carpet in February, showing they were “against sexual harassment”.
They also requested that all the women wear black as a mark of ... actually, I’m not sure what it was a mark of, because nobody really explained it.
Actress Alyssa Milano brought back Tarana Burke’s 2006 hashtag #MeToo, a stroke of genius if there has been one in this whole affair, since suddenly the movement was no longer confined to Hollywood and women everywhere were able to tell their stories.
But while Weinstein had, or has, at least 100 accusers, and witnesses to boot, as the #MeToo frenzy took off people with fake names and avatars (and perhaps grudges to bear) began throwing virtual stink bombs into the public arena.
And this is where I feel we’re stuck. The criminal court of law, with its promise that a person is innocent until proven guilty, has gone by the wayside. What we have now is Twitter and Facebook, the court of public opinion where anybody, for any reason, can ruin a reputation forever.
Just read any thread on Twitter to see how this works. Not every witness is credible. This system is going to catch the wrongly accused, along with the justly accused.
What to do? Well, we need to stop making it a partisan affair, for a start. It’s not a man’s problem. Or a women’s problem. If Hollywood is the microcosm from whence this discussion began, then I can say that, as much as I have come up against men who have made it clear I won’t get past them without giving them what they want, I have also come up against women who have said I won’t get past them simply because they don’t like me.
Anywhere you have a system of power, you have the opportunity for abuse. And the internet has given us the power to speak out against that abuse. Because of anonymity; because of the sheer numbers involved.
All we’ve done so far is open the door and let people in. People without power now have a voice. Let’s use it. Let’s sit down at the table with kindness, and work out where to go from here. – The Daily Telegraph..