Weinstein to Hollywood execs: I am desperate for your help
Disgraced movie mogul reportedly pleaded with top Hollywood executives to help him resurrect his career; Jonathan Hunt reports from Los Angeles.
In the movie "Forrest Gump," the vulnerable character Jenny is violently smacked by her unlikable and smug hippie boyfriend Wesley, the fictitious head of the Berkeley’s Students for a Democratic Society. Thankfully Forrest, resplendent in full military dress and wearing his fresh Medal of Honor, intervenes and pummels Wesley, stopping the abuse. Wesley later half-apologizes to Jenny saying “things got a little out of hand…it’s just this war, and that lying son of a bitch [President] Johnson!”
Talk about misdirection! This scene came to mind when I read Harvey Weinstein’s inane explanation on Thursday, October 5 of his past abuse of women. He had the temerity to blame shift away from his own behavior to…wait for it…the NRA. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised as Hollywood liberals love to castigate America’s largest and oldest civil rights organization. But Harvey’s statement took the scapegoating to a new level. He wrote “I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope [NRA CEO] Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party.”
What on earth does the NRA have to do with Weinstein's mistreatment of women?
Incredible. First, why, pray tell, do you have any right to be “angry,” Harvey? If myriad reports are credible, then at the least, you serially abused women psychologically and used your position of incredible Hollywood power to sexually harass them -- and perhaps even much worse. Second, what on earth does the NRA have to do with your mistreatment of women?
If anything, the NRA empowers women as it consistently defends their right to bear arms so that they are NOT victimized by male assailants who may use physical strength to abuse women. It’s hard to exaggerate the hypocrisy of Weinstein in attacking the NRA as somehow germane to his personal problems.
To that point of hypocrisy, Chris Cox, the director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, told me “the NRA’s spent millions teaching safe and responsible gun ownership while Harvey’s made a fortune off of movies that many find grotesquely glamorize gun violence. At the same time, he’s reportedly spent decades assaulting women and now he wants to lecture us about morality.”
To be fair, Weinstein is hardly alone in this hypocrisy. Rosie O’Donnell once said “I don’t care if you want to hunt. I don’t care if you think it’s your right…you are not allowed to have a gun.” Shortly after this statement, her bodyguard applied for a concealed gun permit. More recently, Jimmy Kimmel has regularly scolded Americans who believe in the Second Amendment, and yet his show has reportedly ramped up its security detail of off-duty police, presumably armed.
Memo to Hollywood: tens of millions of working class Americans cannot afford professional security. They enthusiastically embrace their Constitutional right to bear arms…for protection, for sport, for collecting – and we neither need nor appreciate the condescension and disrespect from elites.
To Harvey Weinstein: like Wesley in Forrest Gump, your misdirection won’t get you off the hook for your own misdeeds against real-life “Jennys.”
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