Harvey Weinstein the serial sexual harasser.

[canada-man]

 

[canada-man]

 

[Insidious Von]

Bob Weinstein is in tears over his brother's depravity. Being a flinty eyed businessman, is Irv in tears over his brother or getting the bum's rush from Amazon Prime?

 

[mandrill]

Bob Weinstein is in tears over his brother's depravity. Being a flinty eyed businessman, is Irv in tears over his brother or getting the bum's rush from Amazon Prime?

Well, he must have known and there is no record of him trying to dump his brother before all this came to light. So......

Harvey is apparently going to have a show down with the battered rump of what's left of the corporate board on Tuesday wherein he will threaten to sue their asses into next year unless they grovel and reinstate him. Now that he's been at rehab for the weekend, he's ready to come back.

 

[canada-man]

 

[explorerzip]

Harvey Weinstein: Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik accused of 'victim blaming' in New York Times op-ed. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...big-bang-theory-hollywood-women-a8001416.html

This is the problem of standing on a soap box. It's a lot easier to knock you down.

 

[Underthegun]

It's particularly easy to knock you down when your 'words of wisdom' are anything but. How can someone who is supposed to be 'smart' be so stupid?

 

[Phil C. McNasty]

I dress modestly. I don't act flirtatiously with men as a policy

Maybe thats because nobody WANTS to see you dress flirtatiously????

 

[explorerzip]

It's particularly easy to knock you down when your 'words of wisdom' are anything but. How can someone who is supposed to be 'smart' be so stupid?

It seems to me that the more education people have, the more "right" they feel they are. Which makes it more difficult to have a meaningful debate with them. "I have a phD so how can I possibly be wrong?"

 

[Smallcock]

I don’t think Harvey raped any of the women. I think those that had sex with him all agreed to sex with him in a sober state of mind.

However, I do think that he coerced them, sexually assaulted them, and threatened their careers if they did not agree to sex.

As a practical matter, the distinction is less relevant here because in both cases, he has no business being in business. Sexual assault is serious crime in itself.

 

[Frankfooter]

I don’t think Harvey raped any of the women. I think those that had sex with him all agreed to sex with him in a sober state of mind.

However, I do think that he coerced them, sexually assaulted them, and threatened their careers if they did not agree to sex.

As a practical matter, the distinction is less relevant here because in both cases, he has no business being in business. Sexual assault is serious crime in itself.

Sarah Polley just published a commentary that's in the NYT and the Star. Its really the best statement on the industry and what its like to go through it that I've seen.
Its worth reading.

Sarah Polley says Harvey Weinstein said a ‘close relationship’ with him would help her career because ‘that’s how it works’


One day, when I was 19 years old, I was in the middle of a photo shoot for a Miramax film when I was suddenly told it was time to leave. I was wearing a little black dress, showing a lot of cleavage, lying seductively on my side and looking slyly at the camera. The part I had played in the movie, Guinevere, could not have been more removed from this pose. My character was an awkward girl, bumbling, in fact, who wore sweatshirts and jeans, and had little sense of her sexual power. But this was how they were going to sell the movie, and at a certain point, I was tired of being a problem, which is how a female actor is invariably treated whenever she points out that she is being objectified or not respected.

I was pulled out of the photo shoot abruptly. The publicist said that we needed to be in Harvey Weinstein’s office in 20 minutes.

“Are we done here?” I asked. “No” was the answer. “But Harvey wants you there now.”

In the taxi, the publicist looked at me and said: “I’m going in with you. And I’m not leaving your side.” I knew everything I needed to know in that moment, and I was grateful.


When I got there, Mr. Weinstein wasted no time. He told me, in front of the publicist and a co-worker beside him, that a famous star, a few years my senior, had once sat across from him in the chair I was in now. Because of his “very close relationship” with this actress, she had gone on to play leading roles and win awards. If he and I had that kind of “close relationship,” I could have a similar career. “That’s how it works,” I remember him telling me. The implication wasn’t subtle. I replied that I wasn’t very ambitious or interested in acting, which was true. He then asked me about my political activism and went on to recast himself as a left-wing activist, which was among the funniest things I’d ever heard.



I indicated that he was wasting his time. We probably wouldn’t be friends or have a “close relationship.” I just didn’t care that much about an acting career. I loved acting, still do, but I knew, after 14 years of working professionally, that it wasn’t worth it to me, and the reasons were not unconnected to the tone of that meeting almost 20 years ago.

On sets, I saw women constantly pressured to exploit their sexuality and then chastised as sluts for doing so. Women in technical jobs were almost nonexistent, and when they were there, they were constantly being tested to see if they really knew what they were doing. You felt alone, in a sea of men. I noticed my own tendency to want to be “one of the boys,” to distance myself from the humiliation of being a woman on a film set, where there were so few of us. Then came the photo shoots in which you were treated like a model with no other function than to sell your sexuality, regardless of the nature of the film you were promoting.

I’ve often wondered how I would have behaved in the meeting with Harvey Weinstein had I been more ambitious as an actor. I was sitting in front of a man who wielded enormous power. If you were interested in being in movies directed by interesting filmmakers, he wasn’t someone you wanted to alienate. How would one have left that meeting, or those hotel rooms, which have been described by others, with that relationship intact, when he displayed such entitlement and was famous for such anger? I was purely lucky that I didn’t care.

Shortly afterward, I started writing and directing short films. I had no idea, until then, how little respect I had been shown as an actor. Now there were no assistant directors trying to cajole me into sitting on their laps, no groups of men standing around to assess how I looked in a particular piece of clothing. I could decide what I felt was important to say, how to film a woman, without her sexuality being a central focus without context. In my mid-20s, I made my first feature film, Away From Her.

While working on Away From Her, I had the privilege of working with Julie Christie, who, while maintaining her vision for her character, was deeply committed to collaboration and could shift her performance on a dime when given direction. It was an amazing gift for a director, still learning the ropes. I realized that in the past, whether I’d known it or not, some part of me had been afraid of direction. I vowed to go back to acting with my new-found understanding of collaboration. I would be more pliable. I was excited to give my whole, unfettered self to a director, the way Julie Christie had done for me.

But I had forgotten a key ingredient of the acting process. Most directors are insensitive men. And while I’ve met quite a few humane, kind, sensitive male directors and producers in my life, sadly they are the exception and not the rule. This industry doesn’t tend to attract the most gentle and principled among us. I had two experiences in the same year in which I went into a film as an actor with an open heart and was humiliated, violated, dismissed and then, in one instance, called overly sensitive when I complained. One producer, when I mentioned I didn’t feel a rape scene was being handled sensitively, barked that Dakota Fanning had done a rape scene when she was 12 — “And she’s fine!” A debatable conjecture, surely.

I’m not naming names in all of these instances. And that invites criticism for some reason. Which is funny, because when women do name names, they are criticized for that, too. There’s no one right way to do any of this. In your own time, on your own terms, is a notion I cling to, when it comes to talking about experiences of powerlessness.

I haven’t acted for almost 10 years now. Lately I’ve thought of trying to rediscover what once made it seem worthwhile. It’s a beautiful job, after all, built on empathy and human connection, and it seems strange to turn your back on something you did for so long. But for a long time, I felt that it wasn’t worth it to me to open my heart and make myself so vulnerable in an industry that makes its disdain for women evident everywhere I turn.

Several years ago, I approached a couple of successful female actors in Hollywood about an idea I had for a comedy project: We would write, direct and star in a short film about the craziest, worst experience we’d ever had on a set. We told our stories to one another, thinking they would be hysterically funny. We were full of zeal for this project. But the stories, when we told them, left us in tears and bewildered at how casually we had taken these horror stories and tried to make them into comedy. They were stories of assault. When they were spoken out loud, it was impossible to reframe them any other way. This is how we’d normalized the trauma, tried to integrate it, by making comedy out of it. We abandoned the film, but not the project of unearthing the weight of these stories, which we’d previously hidden from ourselves.

Harvey Weinstein may be the central-casting version of a Hollywood predator, but he was just one festering pustule in a diseased industry. The only thing that shocked most people in the film industry about the Harvey Weinstein story was that suddenly, for some reason, people seemed to notice. That knowledge alone allowed a lot of us to breathe for the first time in ages.

Here is an unsettling problem that I am left with now: Like so many, I knew about him. And not just from my comparatively tame meeting with him. For years, I heard the horrible stories that are now chilling so many people to their core. Like so many, I didn’t know what to do with all of it. I’ve grown up in this industry, surrounded by predatory behaviour, and the idea of making people care about it seemed as distant an ambition as pulling the sun out of the sky.

I want to believe that the intense wave of disgust at this sort of behaviour will lead to real change. I have to think that many people in high places will be a little more careful. But I hope that when this moment of noisy sisterhood dissipates, it doesn’t end with a woman in a courtroom, being made to look crazy, as these stories so often do.

I hope that the ways in which women are degraded, both obvious and subtle, begin to seem like a thing of the past.

For that to happen, I think we need to look at what scares us the most. We need to look at ourselves. What have we been willing to accept, out of fear, helplessness, a sense that things can’t be changed? What else are we turning a blind eye to, in all aspects of our lives? What else have we accepted that, somewhere within us, we know is deeply unacceptable? And what now will we do about it?

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/com...lp-her-career-because-thats-how-it-works.html

 

[Phil C. McNasty]

I don’t think Harvey raped any of the women. I think those that had sex with him all agreed to sex with him in a sober state of mind

I disagree. I think he might have jumped a few of them (but perhaps not all of them).

I also dont think the girls fought back too hard because their "careers" were at stake. Either way, coercing girls into sex is IMO the same thing as rape, you are doing something that the girls dont really want to do

However, I do think that he coerced them, sexually assaulted them, and threatened their careers if they did not agree to sex

How is that different from rape??

 

[Smallcock]

I disagree. I think he might have jumped a few of them (but perhaps not all of them).

I also dont think the girls fought back too hard because their "careers" were at stake. Either way, coercing girls into sex is IMO the same thing as rape, you are doing something that the girls dont really want to do

How is that different from rape??

The difference is that there is still a choice to proceed or not to. While it may be difficult under the pressure, plenty of women stopped Harvey in his tracks at his not-so-subtle advances and did not have sex with him.

 

[Insidious Von]

Sarah Polley has been working in the industry for a long time. She was 7 when she first appeared in Terry Gilliam's, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

She's always followed her own tunes, she dropped out of the entertainment industry for awhile. Now she's back writing the critical CBC/Netflix hit Alias Grace. After Hulu scored a major hit with The Handmaids Tale, Netflix wanted a piece of the Atwood action. It's a match made in heaven, Canada's most talented female impresario (Polley) and Canada's most talented actor (Sarah Gadon).

Polley, Gadon and Rachel McAdams have all chosen to live in Toronto instead of Hollywood. They don't want to be covered in slime.

 

[Phil C. McNasty]

^^^^^^ I wanna sleep with the pearl necklace girl and Sarah Polley herself as well

 

[Insidious Von]

I don't know who the pearl necklace woman is, the Sarahs are sitting on opposite sides.

Sarah Gadon has the stuff to win multiple Oscars, check out Fassi and Viggo in the first two minutes of this clip.

 

[Frankfooter]

Sarah Polley has been working in the industry for a long time. She was 7 when she first appeared in Terry Gilliam's, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

She's always followed her own tunes, she dropped out of the entertainment industry for awhile. Now she's back writing the critical CBC/Netflix hit Alias Grace. After Hulu scored a major hit with The Handmaids Tale, Netflix wanted a piece of the Atwood action. It's a match made in heaven, Canada's most talented female impresario (Polley) and Canada's most talented actor (Sarah Gadon).

Polley, Gadon and Rachel McAdams have all chosen to live in Toronto instead of Hollywood. They don't want to be covered in slime.

She is really smart, both from that article and her work.
Its a great insight into the situation.

 

[Phil C. McNasty]

Sarah Polley was in that zombie movie. She's a great actress as well as a producer

 

[Insidious Von]

Sarah Polley hasn't done any acting work in 6 years which is a shame since she's so expressive. There's an 8 year age gap between Polley and Gadon. And they're both Toronto lasses - suck it USA.

Obviously this trailer is for American audiences - no mention of the CBC. Winnipeg's Anna Paquin is also in the cast.

 

[Galseigin]