The Fall of Harvey Weinstein

One reason I’m even willing to consider the possibility that he can find a path back is his strong track record on this. Most notably, drawing attention to and subsequently distributing Tig Notaro’s amazing grief/cancer set at Largo in 2012 (which put her in the kind-of-hilariously-awkward position of owing her career boost to a grotesque predator) and backing his Louie co-star Pamela Adlon on Better Things which, as mentioned upthread, is the best thing to happen to women on television in the past decade+.

The problem being, they’ve both had to distance themselves from him. (I really hope he secretly stayed writing for Better Things season 3 even though there’s no way he did. Can’t wait to see how it turns out.)

I would be very surprised if he ever re-attained his Secret Life of Pets/Madison Square Garden level of fame. I don’t think he should, nor do I think he ever belonged at that level to begin with. As a comedy nerd and a film school prof, his has been an absolutely fascinating career to watch and this latest chapter fits into it perfectly.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting he be banned.

What we’re saying is that he ought to be so ashamed to do it that he never even considers it (and clearly, he isn’t so ahamed),

and that the reaction of people ought to be to deplore him doing it.

No one can force someone to deplore it, or force him to be too ashamed to do it, but everyone is free to judge him for it, and everyone is free to judge the people who support him doing it.

Well, I hope after three days of trying to reckon with this stuff honestly and openly, you have more information with which to judge some of his fans.

Openness and honesty are great, but they’re not a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’m sure you can think of people who are open and honest about views you judge quite harshly.

Why on earth should he be ashamed for doing his job?!

The more someone is open and honest, the less harshly I judge them for holding whatever view is being wrestled with because I gain empathy and understanding. Especially here in Tom’s living room!

And following on that, Louis CK’s openness and honesty in his comedy and writing has given me exactly that kind of empathy and understanding on a wide variety of subjects. He literally dramatizes these kinds of conflicts and impasses and helps me process them through humor.

(I’m thinking of his Afghanistan USO episode called Duckling when he shows the duckling under the table to the young dancer who thinks he and his comedy are disgusting.)

Because he’s a notorious admitted sex offender who forces women to watch him masturbate, and then covers up his crimes by conspiring to destroy the careers of the women who complain about being assaulted that way? I mean, that’s just a guess, what do you think he should be ashamed of?

The first part of your post is damning enough, but I don’t believe this section is supported by the facts.

So you don’t actually believe the women who came forward; that explains some of your response.

I can understand that you think he should feel shame for his actions but why should that affect him doing his job?
I’m not defending his actions but I’d also like to point out that he’s not been convicted of any crime. I’m not even positive you can classify his actions as a sexual assault… sexual misconduct maybe?

If a bus driver was exposed as and publicly shamed for being a flasher should he be too ashamed to be a bus driver?

Several of the women say trying to accuse Louis resulted in them being effectively blacklisted. You can believe them or not, I don’t really care, but since this is about behavior in a power imbalance, the accusation seems entirely plausible to me. Of course he didn’t want this to come out, and of course the people dependent on him didn’t want it to come out, and of course they would apply pressure to prevent it. What sort of pressure did they have at hand?

Because he ruined the careers of his victims, and if he were properly remorseful, he’d not ever want to profit from the same work again? Because he’s rich anyway, and doesn’t need to remind people what a cretin he is?

I believe that his agent or manager tried to prevent this story from going public. I don’t believe they “conspired to destroy the careers of women who complained” as Scott put it. Maybe it’s his melodramatic overstatement that I’m objecting to. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

I also believe he masturbated in front of them and, ech, god, don’t do that. That’s horrendous.

Here’s the original NYT article.

The relevant segment about threatening careers.

Hoping that outrage would build against Louis C.K., and also to shame him, they began telling others about the incident the next day. But many people seemed to recoil, they said. “Guys were backing away from us,” Ms. Wolov said. Barely 24 hours after they left Louis C.K.’s hotel, “we could already feel the backlash.”

Soon after, they said they understood from their managers that Mr. Becky, Louis C.K’s manager, wanted them to stop telling people about their encounter with Louis C.K. Lee Kernis, one of the women’s managers at the time, confirmed on Thursday that he had a conversation in which he told Mr. Becky that Louis C.K.’s behavior toward the women had been offensive. Mr. Kernis also said that Mr. Becky was upset that the women were talking openly about the incident.

Mr. Becky denied making any threats toward the women. “I don’t recall the exact specifics of the conversation, but know I never threatened anyone,” he wrote by email on Thursday. Ms. Halpern and Robert Schroeder — Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov’s agent at the time — said that the pair told them that they felt they had been warned to stop talking.

I still find it incredulous that the victims didn’t do anything.

Why didn’t they go to the police?
If I felt that I’d been wronged in such a fashion then I would go to the police.
At the very least they could have complained to his managing agency or the venue where it occurred.
Instead they waited, what… 5+ years and then jumped on the #MeToo bandwagon with a newspaper article.

Thanks for finding that, Tin.

I think it does a disservice to overstate the issue, nor do I want to understate it. Facts matter if we want justice.

It’s also not fair to call #metoo a bandwagon, drax. We’re all on the right side of this issue. The victims didn’t know what course to take because there was no course available to them. That’s the issue we should be working on.

There are a million ways to answer this question, but the general response is it was not safe for them to do it. You could not go out and say these things happened to you without being labeled a slut, a whore, blacklisted and shamed. In some cases… still can’t.

We do not have a society that allows women, or men, and to come forward. It only exposes you, allows others to blame you, second guess your actions and after all that, there may still be more people relating to the aggressor than the victim so they wind up doing it…for nothing.

Yes, you’re right. It’s probably unfair to categorize the entire movement like that. What I mean is the MeToo media bandwagon. Where it seems the only goal is to acquire media attention.

I don’t think that anything illegal happened. What CK did was creepy and weird, but not actually illegal, especially since he explicitly asked their permission. There’s no way you could convict him of anything.

It’s not something that the police could have helped with.

They did what I would think was normal and appropriate… they went and told other folks, but other folks didn’t want to deal with it. That’s the crux of the entire problem that the MeToo movement tried to tackle. The fact that bad shit was going down, and no one wanted to face it, because it was supremely inconvenient for everyone.

I guess in reality, the best act would have been to say, “No, you can’t masturbate in front of us.” but the request is so off the wall, and given that CK made jokes about that kind of thing all the time, I could see them assuming it was a joke, until the point where it obviously wasn’t, at which point it’s so awkward and nuts that I can see them having no idea what to do.

@Nesrie you make some good points and I understand and can see that’s part of what the MeToo movement is about. All I can say is that the wall of silence (by both the victims and those protecting the perpetrators) that allowed these events to occur irks me as much as the trial by media circus that followed.