Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Harvey Weinstein scandal exposes abuse by the powerful that has always existed

Fionnuala O Connor
Fionnuala O Connor Fionnuala O Connor

By now the Harvey Weinstein story is into the familiar third stage of such shockers. Women lined up their memories, some very recent, each encouraged more to speak out, and some in return have suffered the usual smears; might they have ‘invited’ assault?

Weinstein has made his ludicrous responses; partial admission, partial denial, ‘let me obtain treatment’. So a criminal over many decades hides out in an expensive ‘rehabilitation clinic’ and the media cycle rolls on.

Last weekend’s Late Late Show chat sparked by the Weinstein story won itself a grabby anecdote, promptly published in the Irish Independent. A now deceased ‘professional broadcaster’, the only description offered, apparently liked to remove his clothes below the waist, while in radio studios beside young women reading scripts into the microphone. Occasionally? Habitually? This is RTE we’re talking about? The frequency was not included in the anecdote, nor other details. Cue embarrassed giggles, effort by the host to emphasise how unfunny this was. Tell us where it occurred? ‘I will not’, the story-teller chuckled, though at the outset she had dated her reminiscences to her teens, some 50 years back.

But she wanted to leave the viewers a lasting thought. Sexual harassment had certainly not been widespread then. ‘It wasn’t everywhere.’ But oh indeed it was.

While this ‘professional broadcaster’ by the sound of it suffered no worse than covert mockery, escaped arrest and kept his job, adults, some of them ordained clergy, were abusing children in Church and state-run institutions every day and night. A state of undress in the studio was squalid enough.

Ignored by management, winked at by technicians? What happened in Letterfrack, Artane, Goldenbridge, so many places, was another level of depravity.

Abuse by those with power of those with less or none has always existed, everywhere. To belittle it is to help abusers keep on abusing. Sexual abuse of the powerless happened and still happens because people, predominantly male, can behave like this with near-total impunity.

It isn’t unchangeable. Male-dominated managements mean more men than women need to speak out, behind closed-doors, in meetings, over drinks, on the corridor as some funny-man leers; no more rape jokes, anywhere.

It should never be up to bullied, harassed girls or women, boys or men with neither status nor security, to be the whistle-blowers; because that goes against common sense, and because too many women and girls still see themselves and value themselves through ‘the male gaze.’ Innate in many females, self-blame is common enough in young males now also; ‘did I give the wrong signals?’ The fault is in the abuser.

How crass to wonder why someone raped or assaulted does not immediately complain, tell a boss, go to police. Anyone who says that with genuine puzzlement must never have known the shock of assault, fear, paralysing shame and embarrassment that swamps so many.

The old-style 11-plus arithmetic question comes to mind, answerable only by the class maths whiz. If it takes a Hollywood starlet X years to out Harvey Weinstein as a serial predator and so propel established stars into the limelight to say ‘he did it to me too’, how long will it take for us to hear even a representative sample of waitresses who never did get the audition call but still were assaulted? How long before another ‘chamber-maid’ – and how that title oozes contempt – outs another Dominique Strauss-Kahn?

Retaliatory strikes against the accusers won’t work this time, nor will saying the film business runs on sex, directors have always been like this. There are too many accusers to be rubbished, a pattern of smug sameness. It won’t be belittled. The third scandal-aftermath phase is not going so well for Weinstein, or for the less well-known power-trippers beginning to be identified in his wake.

One note in the condemnation that jarred was the derision of his appearance as fat, ‘ugly’; his ‘pock-marked face’; he ‘lumbered in and out of limousines’. From the tide of abuse revelations over recent decades we have surely learned that abusers fit neatly into no physical type. There are conventionally-handsome predators, ‘good-looking’ rapists. Weinstein’s reported weepy, self-pitying references to his own looks, his alternate bullying and pleading, were all part of his kit.

The ‘era of wilful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behaviour and workplace harassment in our industry is over’, says the pompous Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, the Oscars-awarding body, as they expel Weinstein. Not true in their industry, nor anywhere else. But denial has become a little more difficult.