Living in a Media World

Earlier today, movie producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced in New York to 23 years in prison for sexual assault and rape. Here’s an updated account of his victims’ search for justice and how this story played out in the news media.

Harvey Weinstein

During 2017, attention to the issue of sexual harassment and abuse, both sensational and serious, became the major cultural story for our media. As Secret 3 points out, the stories moved this issue from the margins of society to the center. While there are many points on the timeline we could highlight as the start of the media’s focus on sexual harassment and abuse, there is no doubt that it exploded when multitudes of women started coming forward and telling their stories of mistreatment at the hands of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

On October 8, 2017, following the news that he had paid financial settlements to eight women to drop their claims, The Weinstein Company fired Weinstein from the movie production company he helped found. And while this may have been the point where most people started paying attention to the story, it certainly wasn’t the beginning. According to the New York Times, the accusations and rumors about Weinstein dated back for three decades. It wasn’t as though these stories weren’t known about by reporters; they simply weren’t reported.

In November 2017, the New York Times started keeping track of the number of men who have been fired or forced to resign over accusations of sexual misconduct since Weinstein was fired.  As of February 8, 2018, the Times count had reached seventy-one. The paper also had a second list of twenty-eight men who had faced charges of sexual misconduct but who had only been suspended or received similar lesser punishment. The list was a who’s who of the powerful behind and in front of the scenes in the entertainment business, industry, and politics. Among them were former Today Show host Matt Lauer and CBS CEO Les Moonves.

So, this leaves us with a question:

Why, after years of neglect, did the press, in all its varied forms, suddenly start paying attention to these accusations and the women making them?

While the story of women being sexually harassed and abused by powerful men had been slowly breaking further and further into the media for several years, the real explosion came when actress Ashley Judd went public with her story from two decades earlier.

Judd told the New York Times in early October 2017 that she went to what she thought was a breakfast meeting at a hotel. She was instead sent up to Weinstein’s room where he greeted her wearing a bathrobe and suggested either he give her a massage or she “watch him shower.”

It is at this point that we see the basic elements of the narrative coming through. Judd had to figure out how to get out of the room without alienating one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood.

The Times goes on to report that Weinstein reached “at least eight settlements with women,” paying them to drop their claims and keep their silence. When all of these stories started surfacing, Weinstein said in a statement to the Times:

I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I’m trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.

Judd had previously talked about what had happened with Weinstein back in 2015 with Variety magazine, but she didn’t name him.

Judd told Variety she felt bad because she didn’t do anything about it at the time:

I beat myself up for a while. This is another part of the process. We internalize the shame. It really belongs to the person who is the aggressor. And so later, when I was able to see what happened, I thought: Oh god, that’s wrong. That’s sexual harassment. That’s illegal. I was really hard on myself because I didn’t get out of it by saying, “OK motherf—er, I’m calling the police.”

The common theme between Judd and the other women who say Weinstein abused or harassed them was that women didn’t speak out because they didn’t know each other; they didn’t live in the same cities. But while they didn’t talk about it publicly, they did talk about it among themselves.

So what kept these women’s stories from getting published?

• Many of the women were embarrassed that this had happened to them and sometimes wondered whether they were responsible for it.
• They still wanted to work where they worked. They wanted the access the abuser gave them.
• They were afraid they would get blacklisted in some form if they spoke out (something that happened with several of Weinstein’s victims).
• They were afraid they wouldn’t be believed.

On Monday, Feb. 24, 2020, Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in New York City of  two felony sex crimes: that he had forced oral sex on a a production assistant in 2006 and that he had raped a former actress in a hotel in 2013. He was acquitted of charges that he is a sexual predator.

On March 11, 2020, Judge James Burke sentenced Weinstein to 23 years in prison sexually assaulting the two women. His sentence could have ranged from a minimum of five years up to 29 years. Weinstein is 67 years old and is reportedly in poor health.  His attorney used the argument that anything more than five years would be essentially a life sentence for the former movie producer.

Weinstein is still facing charges in Los Angeles for alleged assaults on an unnamed Italian actress and a model. Numerous other women have given their accounts of assaults from Weinstein, but in many cases the statute of limitations has expired on their charges.

He is also facing charges in Los Angeles for rape and assault.

You can read a more complete account of how sexual harassment and assault became the story of 2017-2018 here.