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The Downfall of Harvey Weinstein?

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    I guess I can see that. Idealistically anyway. I sure as shit wouldn't want to 'out' myself until I knew the jig was up. But yeah, perhaps my props weren't warranted. I guess I was thinking of it more in contrast to Cosby, Weinstein and Toback; when the crushing weight of accusations is unrelenting, why not just come clean and try to do a bit of good where you've done bad?

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      In other news, Trump has asked Putin if they meddled in the 2016 election, and he's said "Nyet". So there's that sorted.

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        bloody hell. Just clocked the opening line of the wiki page on Spacey (which I assume will be changing frequently in some kind of edit war):

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Spacey

        Kevin Spacey Fowler KBE (born July 26, 1959) is an American actor, director, producer, screenwriter, singer and *********.

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          Nine women allege harassment at Lars von Trier's company Zentropa

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            Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
            Stewart hasn’t been part of the stand-up scene for a long time and he was in New York and his farm in New Jersey while most of people involved are probably in LA. So it’s not surprising that he hadn’t heard.

            Whenever somebody says “everyone knows” something, usually that’s not true. Some people just aren’t clued in to gossip or even the actual news.
            How did he not hear? I'm a schlub in London and I'd heard. All you literally have to do is like stand up comedy. Fucking Gawker wrote about it, for pete's sake.

            Now if Stewart was saying he had no idea they were *true*, that's different.

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              I'm a schlub who used to have a Gawker feed on Facebook, and I hadn't heard. Perhaps nobody told Stewart because everybody presumed everybody, including Stewart, knew.

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                That's got to be even less surprising than the Kevin Spacey story, given what we've heard from Bjork.

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                  Originally posted by Flynnie View Post
                  How did he not hear? I'm a schlub in London and I'd heard. All you literally have to do is like stand up comedy. Fucking Gawker wrote about it, for pete's sake.

                  Now if Stewart was saying he had no idea they were *true*, that's different.
                  I like stand-up and I'd never heard about it. I'm not really a Gawker fan.

                  And yeah, having "heard" about it is different than having heard convincing first-hand accounts of it. There are a lot of urban legends out there. In the 80s, we all KNEW that Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials died violently after eating Pop Rocks with Coke. We KNEW.

                  And even once I heard about it, some of the rumors surrounding it turned out not to be true. For example, I saw some comment that said they *KNEW* that the female comic duo that he whacked in front of was Garfunkle & Oates. But, as we saw when the story broke, it wasn't them. It was two women whose names escape me.

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                    I am not a fan of stand-up and was aware of this for years.

                    I think it has to do more with media consumption, "industry gossip" (which includes very valid warnings and career advice) and one's geographic location than one's feelings about the artform.

                    This Jezebel piece collects a number of the earlier accounts.

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                      Garcia kept trying to get me to watch Louis CK, but I honestly could take more than a couple of minutes of it. I found myself overwhelmed by the self loathing and unhappiness of the whole thing. A lot of the jokes were good, but it was literally everything else around it. it was not a show made by a man in the whole of his health. There's something about the overly self flagellating tone of much of it that said more about the writer than he might have intended.

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                        I personally was - am* - a huge fan of Louis CK so maybe I'm conflating liking standup with liking Louis CK, but in the 2010s they aren't that different from each other. He's got to be the comedian of the decade as of right now, the way that Jerry Seinfeld was in the 90s or Dave Chappelle was in the 2000s.

                        There was definite smoke there. Jen Kirkman made all sorts of allusions to a comedian that was "practically a French film maker" acting inappropriately towards her, which could only be read as CK. The Jezebel piece ursus posted above has all the dope before last Friday that has been passed around the internet. I think standups have a pretty high regard of the art form and tend to discuss it constantly among each other, and one of the side effects of that is gossip goes around very quickly. I find it extremely implausible Stewart hadn't heard about this, although as I said, the context makes it possible he's saying he didn't know it was true.

                        *this is probably the first person in the fallout from Weinstein that I really, really enjoyed. It's easy to cut Kevin Spacey out of your life. Even Weinstein - I'm not sure I've seen more than a half dozen of his films, and even Pulp Fiction is something you can go a lifetime without watching again. But my wife and I were incoherent from laughing so hard at Louis CK's new special just a few weeks ago. We haven't even finished watching it. Should I? I don't know.

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                          well ask yourself is the knowledge that his idea of sexual harassment is sadly trying to masturbate at unwilling people, consistent with his "Character" or not? or does it snuff out the comic aspect?

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                            Louis CK loves to talk about wanking, which is gonna ruin it for me. It's not like finding out Jerry Seinfeld ran a Colombian cartel.

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                              Originally posted by Flynnie View Post
                              Jen Kirkman made all sorts of allusions to a comedian that was "practically a French film maker" acting inappropriately towards her, which could only be read as CK.
                              I have no particular way of reading "practically a French film maker", but why is it so obviously referring to Louis CK?

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                                A geographically off ref to Polanski? A play on the stereotype (is it?) that French auteurs are shag happy octopus hands creeps?

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                                  Cause he's called Louis?

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                                    D’oh!

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                                      As a massive Louis related tangent, is it true that Louis Armstrong is called “Lewis” in the States, and the French style pronunciation is only done in the UK for god knows what reason (maybe Reithian Beeb didn’t want folk unnecessarily confused between Satchmo and the famously austere Hebridean island)?

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                                        Maron is great on this. Well worth your time. He’s obviously very troubled by all of it, especially that LCK lied to him when he asked about the rumours, but he says he is still his friend, which is decent, but complicated.

                                        And the rest of the podcast is an interview with Kim Deal, and that’s cool.

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                                          Somewhere there are sixteen women who say they were harassed/assaulted by the man who's now President of the United States. Why aren't we hearing about them anymore? As dispiriting and repellent as the current litany of celebrity abuse is, will the core issue change? I was listening to Constance Backhouse the other day, prominent feminist and Canadian legal scholar. She's worked on a good deal of the progressive gender parity legislation this country has passed in the last forty years. Her, depressing, point was that the law in Canada and in other nations, is now far ahead of the culture. You can pass as many laws as you want but if most people don't believe in them it won't make a blind bit of difference. Most of us, men for sure, but women too — don't forget 42% of Trump voters were female — apparently think this issue is no biggie. And, until I hear the current occupant of the White House face his accusers I'd have to say they're right.

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                                            This piece explains some of the limitations on that, while at the same time reminding everyone of the charges.

                                            As for the possibility of pressing charges against Trump, that window had already closed by last year’s election for everyone except his ex-wife. In New York, there is no statute of limitations in rape cases. But Ivana signed a gag order in the divorce, which prevents her from talking about her marriage without Trump’s permission. She also appears to have no interest in pressing charges. Her recent memoir, “Raising Trump,” does not mention the incident (or any overtly negative story about her ex-husband, for that matter). Some of Trump’s accusers describe acts that could have fallen under New York’s definition of “forcible touching,” a Class A misdemeanor; the statute of limitations for that crime is two years. Stoynoff’s Mar-a-Lago story could meet Florida’s definition of battery; that offense has a four-year statute of limitations in the state. In any case, it’s difficult, to put it mildly, to imagine a prosecutor who would be able and willing to bring these charges against the President. In 2015, Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan District Attorney who was just reëlected—he ran unopposed—chose not to bring charges against Weinstein, despite having audio of Weinstein admitting to sexual misconduct, as well as testimony from his alleged victim, the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who had reported the crime the day it occurred. The decision was rooted “in the difference between a case against an ordinary person accused of a sex crime and a person like Harvey Weinstein,” Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote recently. The distance between an ordinary person and a President—one who happens to be Donald Trump, a man vindictive enough to cut off medical benefits to his nephew’s seriously ill young son in the middle of a dispute about family inheritance—is wider still.

                                            There is a single ongoing piece of litigation against the President, a civil defamation suit lodged by Summer Zervos, the former “Apprentice” contestant, who alleges that Trump “aggressively” kissed her, groped her, and thrust his genitals at her. Zervos is represented by Gloria Allred, the famous women’s-rights attorney, whom I profiled last month. (Allred’s California firm, Allred, Maroko & Goldberg, is working in partnership with the New York law firm Cuti Hecker Wang.) Allred, who has spent much of her forty-one-year career defending victims of sexual assault and harassment—she also represents thirty-three of Bill Cosby’s nearly sixty accusers—held a press conference with Zervos shortly before Trump’s Inauguration. “Enough is enough,” she said. “Truth matters. Women matter. Those who allege they were victims of sexual misconduct or sexual assault by Mr. Trump matter.” One of her court filings in Zervos’s lawsuit lists seventeen statements made by Trump during the campaign in an attempt to discredit his accusers’ stories: the women were telling “false allegations and outright lies,” he said; their stories were “100% fabricated and made-up”; Zervos “wishes she could still be on reality TV.”

                                            Zervos is asking for three thousand dollars in damages, a sign that the lawsuit is not financially motivated; the goal is a systematic reëngagement with the truth about Trump’s sexual misdeeds. Her lawyers have filed a wide-ranging subpoena that seeks all records from the Trump camp concerning any accusations of sexual misbehavior made during the campaign, as well as anything related to statements made by Trump himself on the “Access Hollywood” tape. (Trump maintains that he was engaging in “locker-room talk,” and that every woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct is lying.) Trump has attempted to get the case dismissed through a variety of arguments—that it was a matter of “political opinion” when he said his accusers were liars, that a sitting President can’t be sued in state court. A judge is expected to rule on whether the subpoena’s discovery will be granted, and whether the case can proceed to the New York State Supreme Court in the relatively near future, possibly before the end of the year. Zervos, for her part, has refrained from speaking to the media since the Inauguration.

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                                              Thanks for that. I had heard somewhere that Summer Zervos's suit was moving forward which is good, but realistically what are its chances? I can't help but feel that the celeb stuff is just pushing it off-stage (and I use that term deliberately.) In the end it all seems to serve Trump's purpose more than any of the women concerned. Though I realise I'm not best placed to make that judgement.

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                                                I expect that the Zervos suit will be settled now that it has survived their initial attempts to dismiss it.

                                                Unless the record is VERY different from what everything we’ve seen so far makes us think it is, 45 really can’t afford to comply with the discovery requests.

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                                                  I don't understand. Why would it be settled if the accuser isn't motivated by money?

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                                                    I was going to ask the same question.

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