According to Piers Morgan – and Wide Awoke does not relish opening with those words – Harvey Weinstein believes he will eventually be forgiven by Hollywood. The disgraced film producer – who has been accused of sexual assault and rape by more than 80 women, with criminal cases against him opened in New York, London and Los Angeles – appears to think that his time is not up. And perhaps time is the great healer if you happen to be a powerful white man who can complete a $58,000 (£42,000), 45-day sex rehab programme early and still muster the energy to deny all accusations of non-consensual sex. Less so when it comes to the women who have broken their silence … but this isn’t about them.
In an interview with GQ, Morgan claims he spoke to Weinstein “in the clinic in Arizona, for about an hour”. Weinstein denies that they discussed business or Hollywood and released a statement saying “my priority is my family”. According to Morgan, Weinstein is “fighting”, which one presumes is a euphemism for coming and going freely from a facility where his day reportedly begins with “waking up early, checking in with his east coast lawyers, then visiting a juice shop, where he orders coffee and a green detox mix with kale and cucumber”.
It is the language deployed with such unthinking ease when men talk about men that is telling. Morgan refers to Weinstein as “a fascinating character”, an age-old way of excusing all sorts of bad behaviour under the guise of critical appreciation. In the #MeToo age, this covert form of defence is sadly making a comeback. For Morgan, Weinstein is less a man accused of multiple rapes and more the “apocalyptic symptom of the whole thing: the casting couch finally brought to judgment”. A description that denies Weinstein’s responsibility so apocalyptically, he is reduced to both symptom and inanimate object. In such arguments the “system” becomes the bad guy and the individual a mere product, as though powerful men don’t establish and run the systems which in turn enable them.
In the meantime, as Weinstein reportedly makes efforts to produce a documentary telling his side of the story and an interview between two men about some of the most serious and sustained sexual assault allegations of our time is trailed in a men’s magazine, the more pressing question gets buried. Why, more than a month after Weinstein was reported to be “on the verge of arrest” by the NYPD, has it still not happened?
