Harvey Weinstein was guilty. Everyone in the industry knew it. They just knew it in their core: big movie producer? Aspiring starlets eager for the lights and glory of the big screen? Of course Weinstein was guilty of exploiting them. All these women knew it, too, and they'd kept quiet because perhaps letting Weinstein have his way with you was the only way to make sure you had a career in Hollywood. These poor unwitting girls attended Weinstein in his hotel rooms, where he'd greet them in some never ending supply of white bathrobes and make untoward demands accompanied by promises of fame and success.
That was the #MeToo narrative. But it was a lie. The case on which the entire movement was based could not be proven on its merits.
Yes, this entire time, a lie was the basis for #MeToo, where strings of women, teary eyed, made their confessions against powerful men on social media and in magazine interviews, mascara-streaked faces testifying to the veracity of their statements, the truth of their victimization. They were called survivors, while the men were barely able to defend themselves in the court of public opinion, which is where these cases were tried. Very few of the cases brought by "survivors" saw the fluorescent overhead lights of a criminal courtroom. Weinstein's case was one of those, and it turns out, based on a ruling from the New York Court of Appeals, that was a false conviction.
The Weinstein case and its fallout across all echelons of society cast doubt on every casual relationship between men and women. No industry was immune to the pointy female fingers of hysterical accusers— newsrooms, politics, publishing, academia, entertainment, the arts. For a time there seemed to be no end to it. Male reporters who'd had casual, consensual sex while on international assignments were suddenly recast as rapists. They lost their jobs, their friends, their reputations, their ability to get work in any sphere. Artists, writers and poets, who had been part of heavy drinking, hedonistic scenes, were all of sudden remade as predators, the women they'd engaged in sex with remade as victims and survivors. Lists emerged, such as the Shitty Men in Media list, where women (whatever that is) were able to anonymously accuse men, destroy their reputations, and cost them their livelihoods and in some cases their lives when those men committed suicide over it.
It was in this climate that advice columnist E. Jean Carroll brought her 30-year-old allegations against Donald Trump and was believed to such an extent—despite not being able to say when, exactly, Trump allegedly fingered her in a Bergdorf's dressing room while she was allegedly trying on lingerie for him—that she won a massive defamation settlement against him when he tried to defend himself. This was the kind of nonsense that was going on, and Weinstein's case was at the root of all of it. Liberal legacy media thought it was time to take men down and they went about doing it systematically. It was part of the whole anti-patriarchy thing, and in the vacuum left behind, the false accusers attained new found fame and success in their chosen careers, often the same careers from which they'd ousted those evil men.
Prosecutors in New York can seek to retry Weinstein, who sits rotting in a New York prison, but the 4-3 decision from New York's highest court found that prosecutors should not have been allowed to call witnesses to the stand who claimed Weinstein assaulted them even though those women's claims were not part of the charges against him. Women whose allegations either did not rise to the level of being included in the criminal case were given voice to accuse Weinstein in court, before a judge and jury, and he was entirely unable to defend himself against those allegations because he was not charged with the crimes they claimed he committed.
Despite the overturning of the conviction, the New York Times continued to call these women victims and survivors. Yet the case against Weinstein, it turns out, had not been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. It's highly possible that Weinstein, at the height of his powers, was a womanizer and a lech, yet these are not crimes. Many men are eager to bed as many women as possible and many women consent to sexual encounters with such men, particularly when fame and fortune are on the line. The New York Times, of course, has a vested interest in maintaining the narrative against Weinstein. Back in 2017, they went all in on it. This despite the fact that then-Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. had declined in 2015 to prosecute Weinstein when a model came forward and said he "groped" her during a meeting.
The New York Times couldn't let that stand; they had a bigger mission, something like "believe all women" or something, and undertook their own investigation, along with the New Yorker, in 2017. These outlets were not at all beholden to meeting the burden of criminality that the DA's office was. These outlets could listen to hearsay, could report on allegations from anonymous sources, could snoop around in ways that police officers and prosecutors are simply prevented by law from doing. In 2017, the Times revealed the fruits of their labors, revealing, as they say, "accusations that Mr. Weinstein mistreated women and that his company covered it up."
This reporting from Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey didn't just elevate the Weinstein case to the level of criminal prosecution, it elevated many instances and opened the door for false accusations across industries. The so-called victims they revealed were elevated as well, many of the women who accused Weinstein were able to gain a boost in their careers. They appeared on talk shows, wrote books, were praised as being survivors. This was true across industries—false accusers were often able to slip into the void left by the collapsed careers of the very men they accused. These women got the book deals the men they falsely accused lost as their friends and colleagues abandoned them. These false accusers got the teaching positions, the jobs, the status that they stole from the men they accused of groping, of sexual misconduct, of looking at them weird, of asking them out on dates, of telling them to smile more...
Amber Tamblyn was pissed on Wednesday when the verdict against Weinstein was overturned. She was "flooded with anger," the New York Times reports. She called the decision by the New York Court of Appeals " a loss to an entire community of women who put their lives and careers on the line to speak out." But this, of course, just like Weinstein's conviction, apparently, was a lie. The women who spoke out—other than early adopter Rose McGowan, who ended up losing most of her career for not upholding the accompanying leftist narratives—did not risk their careers, they enhanced them. Speaking out, tagging yourself in #MeToo posts on social media, was a career enhancer. To believe otherwise is to believe that the women who made these accusations were as helpless and feeble as their white knights in media would have us believe.
Tamblyn isn't ready to let go yet though, she told the Times she hopes #MeToo is re-empowered by the anger at having their great white whale get away. "If there is any good that comes out of this news," Tamblyn said, "I hope that it reignites people and their passion to not just say they want equality, not just say they want safety, but to really work towards it."
The women who brought the false allegations against powerful men were just as powerful as the men they took down. Obliterating men, their careers, their lives, by lying, by just making things up, or by claiming rape to cover up for an affair (as happened to one poet), is a powerful act. Legacy and leftist media was all too happy to have concrete reasons to blast the patriarchy, to concoct slogans about women's veracity in all cases (except if it was Joe Biden's accuser Tara Reade), to blame Trump and MAGA for some kind of supposed misogynistic atmosphere against women. Weinstein was the case that led to so many other cases; the allegations against Weinstein that never reached the level of criminal prosecution led to the justification for so many other accusations.
But it turns out the case, and #MeToo, was based on a lie. Weinstein may be a demon, he may be a saint, but he's not criminally liable for rape. And the legacy media, the careerist women who used false claims to advance their position and gain a payday, owe the falsely accused, the defamed men, the American public, an apology. Something tells me we're never gonna get it.