Price Point 037: What Percent of Hollywood's #MeToo was Real?
And how much wasn't?
This is a bit of a break from our normal programming. We will be back soon with more on the business of showbiz.
This is about the culture of Hollywood. It occurs to me that you may wonder what my thoughts are on #metoo. It’s the elephant in the room. It’s an important topic. Let’s discuss it.
Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in maximum security prison for a rape he didn’t commit. He spent 22 years branded as a level 2 sex offender. In March of this year, the State of New York awarded Broadwater $5.5 million, essentially in exchange for his life. His accuser was Alice Sebold, who went on to become a best selling author. The only two pieces of evidence against Broadwater were Sebold’s identification at trial — after picking out another man man in an earlier police lineup — and microscopic hair analysis, now deemed to be junk science. Sebold’s apology is here; an excerpt:
I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you, and I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will.
Well, ok then!
In January, Eleanor Williams was convicted on nine counts of perverting the course of justice and will spend 8 years in prison for falsely accusing a group of men on social media of rape and trafficking. Mohammed Ramzan, one of her victims, said that her accusations made his life “hell on Earth.” His business was ruined, he received “countless” death threats, and he tried to take his own life. Accussee Jordan Trengove spent 73 days in custody and the word “rapist” was spray painted across his house. He also tried to end his life. Her accusations were completely invented. Williams made quite an effort to frame the men. She had six burner phones to simulate their communications. She gave the police a list of 60 women who had been pimped out by Ramzan’s “gang” (when interviewed, the women had no idea what she was talking about). She claimed that she had been trafficked by Ramzan to Amsterdam and sold at a brothel to the highest bidder when in reality, Williams and her sister had gone to Amsterdam to celebrate Williams’ 18th birthday. Williams grew a Facebook community of over 100,000 members and its own line of merchandise. Fun while it lasted.
In February Ashley Morgan Smithline recanted her accusations against Marilyn Manson saying that “I succumbed to pressure from Evan Rachel Wood and her associates to make accusations of rape and assault against Mr. Warner that were not true.”
The serious part of the Armie Hammer case has fallen apart as Efrosina Angelova’s DMs and Fatal Attraction-ish travel plans have been uncovered.
One of Brett Kavanaugh’s three accusers, Judy Munro-Leighton, recently recanted her testimony and both she and Julie Swetnick received criminal referrals for lying to the Senate.
Amber Heard represented herself as a victim of domestic abuse and tried to destroy Johnny Depp’s career and life. Her characterization of the situation was revealed in court to be a sham.
In October 2017, Moira Donegan created the Shitty Media Men list, an anonymous list of accusations against men in the media industry. In a New York Magazine piece on the case, one woman recalls contributing to the list as “the most fun thing I've ever done in my life” (discussed in this Reason piece by Kat Rosenfield). Novelist Claire Vay Watkins said of a man whom she claims did not assault her:
I am saying a … refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer … is of a piece with sexual entitlement.
Donegan and Watkins would not do very well on cross examination in front of American juries. After delaying trial as long as possible, Roberta Kaplan, Moira Donegan’s defense attorney (more on Kaplan below), realized that the case was finally headed to trial and of course, she settled, giving the plaintiff six figures. Fun while it lasted.
Stanford employee Jennifer Gries lied about two rapes this year.
I could go on at length just with stories from this year. These things happen all the time. Am I saying that there are not legitimate cases in this area? I am not. But, unfortunately, as we can see, what makes this area complicated is that completely false accusations of men by women are not rare. And in the era of social media they appear to be getting less rare.
To a certain kind of person, getting attention, getting sympathy, getting power, and perhaps getting revenge on the world in general or on a particular ex in some way, whether or not against a specific person who specifically harmed you, is attractive. Perhaps, to a certain kind of person, if you can do it just sitting at home at your computer, it can be “the most fun thing you’ve ever done in your life.”
This is a very interesting article on the subject by Cambridge psychologist Rob Henderson.
Henderson observes that “there are social predators among us. In whatever milieu they find themselves in, they will enact the strategies that maximize … rewards” and “individuals with Dark Triad traits might find that the best way to extract rewards is by making a public spectacle of their victimhood.” Dark Triad traits are: “narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and disregard for others).” A study that Henderson cites finds that “Victim Signaling” is highly statistically correlated with Dark Triad traits (r^2=.35).
As Anne Applebaum explained from a more general point of view in an essay on MeToo and the New Puritanism, “Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.”
Ronan Farrow published a book called Catch and Kill. His work and that of the New York Times epitomized the quality journalism with high standards for documentation and proof that our system relies on. His investigation into Harvey Weinstein was what you could call a “clean kill.”
The frantic work of his West Coast competitors I would compare more closely to the people who spray-painted “rapist” on Jordan Trengrove’s house. It was over-eager. It was agenda-driven. It was reckless. It did unnecessary harm. These are not clean kills.
In the end, the core of #metoo was about justice and was well handled. But there was another part that exploited the crisis of #metoo to serve more selfish interests, and which came in disguise as the first part. I think that the legitimate part of #metoo can be preserved without the grift part, and that something should be done about the grift because it is unjust.
Hollywood is different from tech and finance world.
Hollywood people talk about salary. Tech people talk about equity.
In tech they don’t start meetings with gossip. In Hollywood, they do.
In Hollywood, people always pass on an opportunity explicitly with an email or phone call. In finance, they just ghost you. Bad manners.
One more difference — in tech, people generally won’t try to kill you. If some project or negotiation or whatever doesn’t work out, people just move on and go to one of the 1,000 other tech companies.
But in Hollywood, the combination of frantic insecurity, world class narcissism, self-loathing, living in a liminal space between reality and fantasy, loneliness, traffic on the 405, and total, gnawing desperation, creates a strong desire for retribution over career slights, social slights, and sometimes just over nothing at all. And if you give such people a powerful, anonymized tool to carry this retribution out, they’ll think for a frame or two, as a warm Santa Ana ruffles their hair…
And they’ll take it.
Throwing #metoo into Hollywood was like throwing a crate of pistols into a prison yard.
Cancellation is a serious punishment, so this phenomenon is worth examining. Those in the cross-hairs of MeToo allegations experience profound negative effects that reverberate through every aspect of their lives. The professional damage is almost always total: they lose careers and incomes. It profoundly endangers every relationship they have, and they often find themselves isolated. The accused also witness the public destruction of their professional reputations and even the invalidation of their prior achievements—a kind of modern damnatio memoriae enforced by the media.
One can certainly imagine sins that warrant such serious consequences, but I would suggest that for anything that deserves this sort of punishment, we have the criminal law. As a society, we have agreed on the infractions that we want to seriously penalize and deter, we have made them crimes, and we have rules associated with prosecuting crimes. In most MeToo allegations we are talking about infractions that aren’t crimes but that bear a criminal penalty managed by a private, extra-legal cancellation system in the United States.
Who created the ground rules for this new social cancellation system?
Is it as just as our actual justice system?
Are the facts in this form of extra-judicial system rigorously established?
FIRST, MY STORY
This will likely seem incomplete or evasive if I don’t recap my own experience. I have already written about my story here and here. Don’t worry. It’s PG. No one ever touches anyone or goes on a date or has an affair or even curses. If I am not the most innocent of all metoo people, with the least credible and most tepid case, I don’t know who is.
For completists, my whole bio is here.
I joined Amazon in Seattle in 2004 when Amazon sold CDs, DVDs and books. I conceptualized, hired the team for, and launched the digital video business and then pushed the idea that we should get into original content and predicted that everyone would do that. It was a controversial proposal that eventually prevailed. I was right. I started Amazon Studios, went full time to that, and built it from zero.
On July 10, 2015, I was the head of Amazon Studios and I think I was the head of Prime Video Global Content (or maybe that came slightly later). But I was certainly the head of original content at that point.
I was at Comic-Con going from a large dinner party after the premiere screening of our new show Man in the High Castle (MITHC) to another party. I called an Uber. Note, I did not work on MITHC directly. We had many shows and teams around the world. In any case, Isa Dick Hackett, whom I had never met prior to that night (we had met briefly at the dinner) and another person, a male Amazon exec, piled in. I thought of Isa Dick Hackett as an employee of her own company in San Francisco from whom Scott Free, Ridley Scott’s company had licensed some rights. So, to me, she is sort of a random producer. There was party banter in the car joking about dating apps and dating, which was something people did at Hollywood parties at the time (joke, that is).
We arrived at the party five minutes later, got out of the car, took a selfie and went into the party.
Later, Hackett came up to me to ask if my colleague and I were gay, which is how aggro and sexed up the chat in the Uber had been, I guess. We joked around a bit and said no. She seemed a little annoyed that we were not gay (she is). Sorry to disappoint. End of story. I would note that each time we spoke, she came up to me.
At some point, Hackett complained to someone that the joking in the Uber was too spicy for her taste (I surmise) and per standard procedure Amazon did a very thorough investigation. I was admonished and warned but kept on.
Amazon has a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment so … no harassment apparently. Which clearly there had not been.
That was all in 2015, during the Obama administration.
Facts about our interaction:
Isa Dick Hackett and I have never been alone.
There was nothing confidential happening.
There were no whispers in anyone’s ear.
There was never any sort of proposition or come on.
The three of us were going to a party and there was a 100% chance that we were going to go to the party.
There was no proposal to steal a more private moment at a more opportune time.
I made zero effort to spend time with her at the party.
There was no follow up.
There was nothing sexual about it.
There was at no time any mention of any bodily parts.
I had never met her and did not think of her as an employee. I thought of her more like an agent — someone who had some rights.
I should have been informed in advance that she had sued all her siblings and Google!
At Amazon, we had a great couple of years after 2015, continuing to win awards, spin up the movie department and commission some excellent shows. Hackett brought us another show and we bought it. She offered us an overall deal with her company, which we declined because we were probably going to get a look at everything they developed anyway. At the beginning of 2017, everything was going well. The studio was on a roll. We had won the first Best Series Globe or Emmy for any streaming service. We had won the Golden Globe for best comedy two years of the past three and I had a feeling Marvelous Mrs. Maisel would win us a third (it did). We had won the Annie Award for best animated preschool series three years out of the past three. Fleabag premiered and was very well received (it went on to win the Emmy for best comedy). Catastrophe had received a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. We had just won three Oscars — for Screenplay, Actor and Foreign Film. We kept winning best Series Emmys and Annie awards for our animated series such as Tumble Leaf. Every department was winning the top awards in their categories.
Kim Masters Article
In 2017, Kim Masters wanted to write a story about the 2015 Comic Con imbroglio. She came to Amazon with a number of issues for comment. (When journalists are going to do a story about you they typically reach out to you for comment before they publish.)
Masters claimed that we had never produced a show that was a “cultural moment.” Hmm. Transparent? Globe best series? AFI top 10? Made trans issues much bigger?
Masters claimed that none of our shows would pass the Bechdel Test. Really? How about all of our shows?? Literally what we were known for was shows created by women that won awards.
Masters asserted that we lacked shows run by women. Obviously completely absurd. We had arguably the highest-rate of female creator-showrunners of any studio in Hollywood. I think she had written an article about someone else and just dusted it off for me.
Obviously this was a “hit piece.” These and other generic falsehoods that had nothing to do with us made it clear to me that Kim Masters was approaching this story in bad faith and was willing to flirt with falsehood. We were not arguing about me. I was a stand in for her whole vision of Hollywood.
Masters’ article was rejected by numerous publications including the The Hollywood Reporter and The New York Times.
A short version was finally published in The Information in August 2017. No one made much of a fuss about it because… normally a minor mislaid joke would be settled with an apology.
Masters had to leave it all there or create a new story with bigger implications.
A few months later, in October, Harvey Weinstein blew up. Crisis. Kim Masters has spoken several times about her disappointment that someone else had beaten her to the punch on the Harvey story.
Promptly, a new article by Masters about me came out in The Hollywood Reporter and this one had one piece of brand new dialogue that had not been part of either the initial investigation or any requests for comment or The Information piece. Specifically, the line “You will love my dick.”
I definitely never said, “you will love my dick” or anything crude or aggressive like that. That is absurd. Everything said in the Uber was at least intended to be in good humor. Remember, another person was sitting right there. He was interviewed by Amazon in their investigation and I have personally asked him whether I said anything like that and he said no.
If I had said anything like that, Amazon would certainly have fired me in 2015.
We did have a show in development called “I Love Dick.” There was some sniggling about the title at the time.
The article was done in the form of an interview. Most of the interview was about how we really need more diversity in Hollywood, but it did offer the “dick” quote. Kim Masters, in a discussion with Peter Kafka, later said that she had worked on Isa Dick Hackett for a long time to get the right story. In a curious bit of introspection she also said:
There’s so much rage out there, at the years and years of abuse, that I think some of it can spill over where it’s not entirely appropriate.
Well, we certainly agree on that!
Rage is the right word, I think. It’s not anger or frustration. It’s rage — “violent, uncontrollable anger.” Rage makes people do ill-considered things.
At this point eight years later, and even then, only one thing matters: did I make the insane and totally uncharacteristic choice to make a sexual proposition to Isa Dick Hackett in the Uber, with Michael Paull sitting right there, when we were all in conversation, such that she was sexually harassed? The answer to that is certainly no. I’m not even sure she asserts that it was a sexual proposition.
To believe my version of events, you have to believe that in the midst of the fervent heat of the Harvey Weinstein scandal — when the rage was at its peak — Isa Dick Hackett and Kim Masters decided to spice up Hackett’s recollection of our dialogue a bit.
To believe the other version of events, you have to believe that Amazon would just let the discussion she described slide and then … she would do the same, bringing us her next show (Electric Dreams, which we bought) and offering us an overall deal with her company (even though the television world had many well-funded competitors at the time).
Which just seems so unlikely.
And, again, there is a witness to all of this — this is not actually “he said, she said.”
That was a suboptimal week to have a MeToo article come out about you. Perhaps the most suboptimal week in history, actually! My time at Amazon, despite having worked there for thirteen years and having started Amazon Video and built Amazon Studios from zero, was up.
I must say, it is a bit ironic. Amazon Studios’ signature move was taking not well known but very talented female creators, putting the resources of an international tech giant/media giant behind them and turning them into the stars that they deserved to be. Our top paid producer was a woman whose company slogan was “topple the patriarchy.” 50% of the studios team was female. Most of our overall deals were with women. The Best Comedy Director Emmy went to us four years out of five, and three were women. We mandated that 50% of comedy directors be women when the industry was at 17%. Many of our prominent shows run by women: Transparent (Globe); Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Emmy, Globe); Fleabag (Emmy, Globe); I Love Dick; Catastrophe; One Mississippi; Good Girls Revolt; Z: The Beginning of Everything; Just Add Magic; Tumble Leaf - Emmy; Wishenpoof; American Girl. And these weren’t just shows with women in them; it should be noted that many of these shows had a feminist point to make. We were transforming Hollywood. If there was a more feminist studio at that time, I would really like to know what studio that was.
Well, Kim Masters certainly put an end to that! (And now she’s complaining that Amazon Studios has no vision.)
Bottom line: there are very guilty people on one end of the MeToo spectrum. And there is a group of innocent or over-punished (e.g., Al Franken) people on the other end. I am doubly in the latter group — (a) innocent (did not do the thing) and (b) over-punished (by definition).
I have been asked: then why did Amazon let you go? I presume because it was three days after the Harvey explosion, things were extremely fraught in Hollywood, and it was the safe thing to do.
When you are an employee, you are always the lizard’s tail.
A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF WIDESPREAD PANICS
Cotton Mather visited Salem in 1693 to assess the shocking goings-on there. He promptly ended the use of “spectral” evidence in trials and ended the Salem proceedings and executions. Nineteen innocent people had been executed, and more than 200 were accused and suffered social castigation and imprisonment.
One key to making a Salem work — and, later, the McCarthyism that Arthur Miller was responding to in The Crucible — is you need a villain and a crisis, you need a core that is definitely real.
The Salem trials had Tituba, who confessed to having met Satan. One commenter noted that Tituba’s confession created “the essential legal evidence required to begin the process of communal exorcism, to purge the community of its collective sin.”
The House Un-American Activities Committee had Alger Hiss, who was definitely a spy. And TimesUp and MeToo had Harvey Weinstein, an indisputable villain.
After you have a villain exemplar, the next move has always been to create the crisis. McCarthy said in February 1950, “Today we are engaged in a final all-out battle. Ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.”
The exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s behavior in 2017 and the negative revelations about the entertainment industry that followed created a sense of crisis.1
But alternatively, and I think more accurately, one could argue that the crisis started earlier. Hillary Clinton’s loss on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 was a blow to her ardent supporters. You can make a credible argument that this is really what birthed Hollywood’s #metoo. (Sasha Stone’s excellent recollection here.)
Indeed, for certain left-wing elites (in Hollywood, is there another kind?), Trump was the real crisis (and perhaps also the original “rock solid case”). For certain very feminist journalists, all bets were off. This was to be their time of triumph. Instead, it became their time for rage.
As Jim Rutenberg said in the NYT, journalists “have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century" in order to combat Trump. This was done immediately! The media embraced tactics that were “by normal standards, untenable” (ibid.).
We may have joked about “truthiness” before 2016, but Trump’s election is when a full information war began in the US. It is, let us say, optimistic to assume that the MeToo/Times Up movement would completely escape agenda-driven deceptions.
SO WHAT PORTION OF METOO ALLEGATIONS ARE LEGIT?
We can look at the specific MeToo cases. We might ask whether they seem factually well grounded and whether the complaints or offenses seem serious enough to warrant a very severe punishment (at least six years of being totally cancelled apparently). We will see that there is indeed a core of real cases — factually well established with a fitting punishment — and then there is a nimbus of ambiguous cases. The Harvey Weinstein cases have been accepted by juries in court twice. The stories about Les Moonves are old but they seem to be specific and have detailed testimony. However, the Johnny Depp case fell apart. The serious part of the Armie Hammer case fell apart. The Ryan Seacrest case fell apart on investigation. Paul Telegdy was literally not even ever accused of anything in particular. The Bob Dylan case fell apart. The Junot Diaz case unraveled. The David Sabatini case is deeply flawed. There are others. And does anyone not think that Aziz Ansari and Al Franken have been over-punished?
One common type of case is the “jilted ex.” There is perhaps particular reason to be skeptical of these cases because the incentives to prevaricate are at their peak. Any jury would reasonably take into account the strong motivations of the accuser in these cases.
Indeed, given what we now know to be the penalty in these cases, the standard should be whether a jury would convict on any claim. It is nearly certain that they would not in any of these ambiguous cases, which is why a central effort of the grift part of the metoo movement has been to stay out of courtrooms. It is much, much easier to do one sided articles in The Hollywood Reporter or documentaries on HBO than to present testimony and evidence subject to contradictory evidence and cross-examination in front of a jury.
What if we estimate that, despite the many weak or fictional cases, 80% of all MeToo cases were factual and 80% were sufficiently serious to warrant the punishment? That would mean that 64% of cases are both factual and serious and 36% of cases are either not factual or not serious enough. Thus by these figures, 36% of Hollywood MeToo claims were illegitimate.
Now, there is no official registry but I have seen it in writing that there have been hundreds of MeToo cases in the entertainment industry since 2017. If we go with a hypothetical number of 400 Hollywood MeToo allegations, then according to the earlier calculations, 144 of those 400 cases were either not factual or serious. That is, 144 men were punished, fired, or canceled unfairly.
If we had a district attorney who convicted 256 guilty murderers but then also convicted 144 innocent people of murder, would you think you had elected a good District Attorney? That’s better than 50/50, but not by a lot.
144 people times 5 years. That’s 720 years of isolation. Hundreds of children unborn. Hundreds of films not made. Hundreds of lives not lived.
The key legal dictum comes from William Blackstone: “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
If you violate this principle, perhaps with the edict in mind that “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” not by mistake but with intent, you have trespassed on someone’s rights—indeed on someone’s life—and now you are the guilty party.
IF TIMESUP WAS A LEGAL DEFENSE FUND, WHY DID IT HAVE JOB GOALS?
TimesUp was not a normal legal defense organization. When Times Up was formed, one of its stated goals was to capture a certain percent of entertainment business jobs. They wanted to achieve a 50/50 gender ratio in leadership jobs in the entertainment industry by the year 2020. This is an odd goal for a legal justice organization. But perhaps not. The concepts of legal justice and getting jobs became deeply intertwined in Hollywood.
The TimesUp movement subscribed to the “break a few eggs to make an omelet” ethic which runs counter to the American idea of justice. If you have doubts about TimesUp’s willingness to trade in justice for power, you have only to look at the Lindsey Boylan and Tara Reade cases. Lindsey Boylan had a claim against Andrew Cuomo and TimesUp helped Cuomo (for a time) quash it. Ditto Tara Reade with her claim against Joe Biden. The Cuomo case is what ultimately brought TimesUp down and forced Tina Tchen and Roberta Kaplan to resign; however, they were subsequently recuperated by the press.
All the bad cases (the fictional ones) were presented initially in the press as strong cases. How did the MeToo/TimesUp movement ensure that weak cases could get traction at scale? What legal, social and PR foundation had to be put in place to maximize the effectiveness of even marginal cases?
As we saw with the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case, the key to making weak cases work is to prevent the details from getting out. Once people at large get the details, weak cases fall apart. Roberta Kaplan settled the Moira “Shitty Media Men List” Donegan case because, presumably, she knew that bad cases only work when the information environment can be managed within editorial boards and HR committees. The MeToo system, implemented by lawyers, PR people and journalists, had to stifle openness and debate and it did so in 10 ways.
Make courts unavailable. The courts are our best path to truth. Times Up’s purpose seems to have been to intimidate potential litigants and prevent litigation.
Obscure details. Journalists adopted the practice of obscuring the details of claims, jumping as quickly as possible to opinions about the claims or to the emotional feelings of claimants. Abdul-Jabbar discusses this practice here.
All offenses are the same. A joke and a rape are the same. Someone who overheard an off-color joke should be referred to as a “survivor.” The only reason anyone would propose this policy would be to entangle as many substantially innocent people as possible.
Squash witnesses. Witnesses with exculpatory evidence or positive character testimony were ignored or if they somehow got their word out they were punished. Lena Dunham tried this and was punished. As she said, “I did something inexcusable: I publicly spoke up in his defense. There are few acts I could ever regret more in this life.” That sounds very North Korean.
No defense case. After the publication of an initial carefully packaged article impugning the accused, any further discussion of the facts of cases was deemed hurtful. (I’m sure many prosecutors also find it distasteful when defendants refute the DA’s case.)
“Believe all women.” (Except Tara Reade, and including the most ridiculous, like Julie Swetnick.) Corollary: always disbelieve all men.
Active propaganda. Articles were placed in media outlets by PR operatives to reinforce the notion that consideration of opposing views or the general character of the accused was improper. It was important to control the process so that the data was one-sided, as harsh as possible, and was limited to the prosecution’s case.
Abandon press standards. Normally journalists are supposed to be careful of people who clearly have an axe to grind. This standard was abandoned.
Press Collusion. Whenever someone is accused of anything, no matter how picayune, they are immediately “enemied” by the press. So no matter what you are accused of and no matter how contestable the accusation, or no matter how singular the accusation—or even if an official company investigation has cleared you—you will be tagged with “sexual harassment allegations” whenever you are mentioned in the press (always plural to suggest a hidden, massive iceberg of scandal) and you will be put in the same sentence with known guilty parties to establish guilt by association. Along the same lines, pictures will be posted of you with Harvey Weinstein. (And since Weinstein was one of the most successful people in Hollywood for decades, everyone has taken pictures with him.)
No appellate court. It is considered impolite in journalism circles to “peer review” a journalist’s MeToo indictment. It almost never happens. So essentially this is a Justice system with the penalty of a criminal court but with no appellate court. Targets of accusations, to the extent possible, are ignored.
Taken together, these 10 policies obscured truth and maximized the probability that false cases would happen. These policies may seem appropriate for the worst cases, but most cases aren’t the worst cases. I believe that these are deeply unethical choices, and this is where the grift part of MeToo diverged from the legitimate part.
If there were hundreds of bad guys deservedly punished in Hollywood, that’s a huge number and it speaks to the seriousness of this issue. And to be clear, I am glad that the disincentive for gross behavior is now strong and I think that Ronan Farrow and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey did exemplary work. But if there were also 100+ people punished without deserving it, or who were severely overpunished, that’s quite a lot, too. And those cases now call for their own justice.
Just like in police work, it is possible to achieve good outcomes without prosecuting the innocent. If the entire press corps had adopted the standards of The New York Times or The New Yorker, there would have been many strong and meaningful cases and zero bad cases. That path could have been chosen. But it was not chosen.
Why? Because it all depends on your concept of what exactly constitutes a “good outcome.” If a good outcome is large scale revenge on men as substitutes for Donald Trump and the transfer of high-end jobs in the entertainment industry to women—that is, if you are in the “break a few eggs” TimesUp ethical camp—then careful prosecution misses the point entirely. However, that is not the point of view of the courts or of most Americans (or of real justice, for that matter).
It is obvious why no one wants to look into the details of the bad MeToo cases, like mine. There is an unspoken understanding that it was not about the details and the facts or justice to begin with. Everyone knows that many allegations won’t withstand scrutiny. It was about the jobs, the rage, and Hillary’s “stolen” presidency.
In my case, Netflix and Amazon had quickly emerged as major Hollywood powers. Both had been created by and were run by men. So the bar for behavior was simply lowered until one of us – me or Ted Sarandos – could be disposed of.
WHERE WE GO FROM HERE
You might feel that none of this matters much because the falsely accused still must have been guilty of something at some point in their lives after all...
Remember in Unforgiven when the kid says to Clint Eastwood, “Well, I guess he had it coming.”
Clint replies, “We all have it coming, kid.”
Maybe we’ve all got it coming. But the way we do justice in the United States is that you get it for a particular thing that you actually did.
When a particular group decides that another group should be persecuted en masse, lowers the evidentiary bar almost to zero for this purpose, and punishes the group indiscriminately and aggressively, is that just? And, speaking more practically, is it healthy for a successful, functional society? We all know it’s not. No other country is doing this. In these cases, the false accusers, and the organizers of the process, tend not to come off well in the long run.
Martha Cory was, in her words, a “gosple woman” [sic] which I am willing to believe. And today her testimony is the only testimony people care about from the Salem Witch Trials. Martha was killed. Perhaps her enemies thought it was “the most fun thing they’d ever done in their lives.” But in due time her enemies were rightly seen as the malefactors that they actually were.
The grift and rage part — the fake part — of MeToo has become visible to the public. Amber Heard is still trending on Twitter, frequently, even now, long after her trial. My prediction is that the reputations of the more unscrupulous activists and accusers will decline. Hopefully we will see more legal victories by the falsely accused, such as Johnny Depp won a year ago. One day it will be “times up” for this dark McCarthy-esque period. But many legal claims have aged into oblivion and unless accusers say something new, restate their claims, or do something else unwise, the legal options are fading away. But we should remember that McCarthyism wasn’t ended primarily with lawsuits. (See very short history of the Blacklist.) Change will be driven by culture and opinion.
Ideas and predictions moving forward.
The weak and tenuous cases should be abandoned. They hurt the whole movement. The whole ethically compromised, “break a few eggs” mentality is, in the long run, a vulnerability, as Roberta Kaplan and Tina Tchen discovered.
The media should try to be more like The New Yorker and less like The Hollywood Reporter. It is possible to get all of the good cases and none of the bad cases by following standards that were, until recently, generally observed.
Going forward, all (unfounded) cases must go to court. Juries and cross-examination are our only source of truth.
The law of libel should be federalized by statute, and the statute of limitations should be lengthened. Few people have a reputation only in one state and it is hard to quickly assess damages from defamation. Anti-SLAPP, a provision in many states that substantially deprives the people of the protection of libel, should not be a part of any federal libel statute.
I anticipate that NYT v. Sullivan will be revisited by the Supreme Court. As Neil Gorsuch said of Sullivan, “Not only has the doctrine evolved into a subsidy for published falsehoods on a scale no one could have foreseen, it has come to leave far more people without redress than anyone could have predicted.” So true.
Leaders of the corrupt part of metoo — the promoters of the rules that facilitated the weak cases — deserve fame, scrutiny and criticism. Their choices were unethical and were not necessary.
The American people are not aligned with the essential process principles of this movement, its abandonment of due process, and its indiscriminate rage. As more cases fall apart, and as America has more time to dig into cases and get the truth, and to look closely at the leaders of this movement, such as Roberta Kaplan, and learn what they’re really like, this movement will become less popular.
The break-a-few-eggs mentality, like much in the last five years, was a fad. It is fading. It creates risk. The Blackstone point of view is the enduring moral judgment of American culture — do not convict the innocent.
It is impossible for the people who laid the groundwork for the grift part of metoo personally to repay the damage that they have done to the innocents in their expression of political rage. The 700 years that were not really lived. But I predict that the ledger will wind up much more even than it is now or than people anticipate. It could take three months or it could take ten years, but in 1954 Senator Joe McCarthy was at the peak of his powers and in 1957 he was disgraced and dead. Things even out.
The people behind McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials thought they were on the right side of history. But when you’re against due process and you are victimizing people on a large scale, you should have a sneaking suspicion that you might be on the wrong side of history.
One detail here is that there was a campaign to popularize the idea that “everyone knew.” This was a classic McCarthyist campaign to try to make “everyone” vulnerable to attack. The “everyone knew” campaign, though widely accepted, has a flaw at its heart, which is that many of the people who presumably were keeping Harvey’s secrets — Kathleen Kennedy, Ted Sarandos, Jeff Bezos, Ari Emmanuel — are tremendously powerful and wealthy people who owe nothing to Weinstein and I disagree that they would have tolerated anyone’s wrongdoings. They simply have no need to.
As an academic (at USC, one of your old haunts!) doing research on "second chances" in business and society, I found this piece fascinating and illuminating. Any interest in joining an academic conversation about this? Academic researchers like myself could learn a lot from your experiences (and maybe help us nudge the world in better directions). No matter what, thank you for writing this piece, and I hope you continue to share your thoughts on this!
Wow. Fascinating piece! I have a (minor/major?) quibble. Ghosting in lieu of "no" is VERY much alive and well in Hollywood, my friend.