Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s 2017 fall created a cultural earthquake that spread far beyond La La Land.
Other bad actors, from PBS’s Charlie Rose to NBC’s Matt Lauer, saw their careers crumble following a crush of damning accusations. They weren’t alone.
Hollywood may be the land of make believe, but by championing the nascent MeToo movement, stars sparked an overdue revolution. Powerful men in any industry, especially politics, would no longer get a pass for their awful behavior.
Or so we thought.
We eventually learned these MeToo warriors often cared as much about party affiliation as guilt or innocence. What started as a noble, necessary movement — in Hollywood of all places — morphed into yet another ideological cudgel.
The MeToo movement’s relative silence on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s fall, which began last year and culminated in his resignation, proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt. In retrospect, the signs were there all along.
Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax isn’t a household name, yet the dramatic testimony from two women in 2019 claiming the Democrat sexually assaulted them was hard to ignore. Except the Hollywood elite did just that, failing to rally behind these alleged victims. The previous year the stars assembled to savage Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — President Trump’s right-leaning selection — for a sexual assault charge sans corroborating data.
Actress Amy Schumer and model/actress Emily Ratajkowski were arrested in October 2018 during those star-studded Kavanaugh protests. We saw what Hollywood feminists could do given a singular, alleged monster.
Flash forward to the 2020 presidential race. Former Vice President Joe Biden survived a bruising primary campaign to emerge as the Democratic standard bearer to face President Trump. This despite Biden’s history of uncomfortable interactions with women, captured in fact-based memes and mocked on late night TV.
Those charges included eight women claiming he inappropriately touched them over the years. That group included Tara Reade.
The former Biden aide offered shocking clarity to those charges during a March 2020 podcast interview. She said Biden sexually assaulted her during a 1993 encounter.
Not only had Hollywood elites looked past Biden’s creepy track record up until that point (including Lady Gaga, who co-starred in a sexual assault PSA with Biden in 2017) but they stood down when Reade’s allegations went public.
The “believe all women” battle cry shared during the Kavanaugh imbroglio turned to ash in a Thanos-like snap.
Alyssa Milano, who resurrected her career by adding “activist” to her Twitter profile, explained why “believe all women” suddenly required an asterisk.
“Even though we should ‘believe women’ and that’s an important thing, and what that statement really means is that for so long the go-to has been not to believe them … We have to societally change that mind set to ‘believing woman,’ but that does not mean at the expense of not giving men they’re due process.”
As for the Biden-Reade matter, Milano said she did her “due diligence” on the subject.
“I just don’t feel comfortable throwing away a decent man I’ve known for 15 years in this time of complete chaos.”
Politics won the day. Again. Biden was too important to Milano to cast aside. And she wasn’t alone.
So when woman after woman accused Gov. Cuomo of inappropriate behavior late last year it didn’t take a crystal ball to predict Hollywood’s reaction. The industry which helped coin the phrase “Cuomosexual” stayed mostly silent. (They did give him an Emmy for his pandemic press conferences, though).
That silence endured as the number of accusers climbed, and climbed, topping out at 10.
No marches. No speeches. No one getting arrested outside the governor’s mansion demanding justice.
They couldn’t completely stay silent following Letitia James’ IG report on the governor’s sexually inappropriate ways, though. This time, the Time’s Up legal group, formed following Weinstein’s fall, suggested the governor resign via Twitter. Milano shared a pair of Tweets suggesting the same.
Meanwhile, Time’s Up, a group Hollywood helped form, appears directly linked to the governor’s defense team, sparking the resignation of the group’s leader, Roberta Kaplan.
That news cycle coaxed some Time’s Up clients and ex-staffers to savage the group. Their open letter, bereft of any high-profile celebrity signees, said the group had “abandoned the very people it was supposed to champion.”
Mega-producer Shonda Rhimes, Ashley Judd, and Eva Longoria currently serve as Time’s Up board members.
Hollywood hypocrisy is nothing new. The celebrity “kids in cages” chorus went silent once President Biden held the key to said cages.
And remember those star-studded Women’s Marches? Where did they go? Did the PatriarchyTM vanish after Biden took the oath of office?
To be fair, one Hollywood voice has been unwavering in her MeToo support. “Charmed” alum Rose McGowan, who claims Weinstein raped her in 1997, has hammered Cuomo and her fellow stars over the past few years, calling out their hypocrisy along the way.
In many ways, Hollywood changed the culture for the better by boosting the MeToo revolution. Now, their nuclear-level hypocrisy on the vital cause might just burn it to the ground.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.