Harvey weinstein

Friday

Ella Whelan

Kevin Spacey’s #MeToo revenge

In the 1950s, witch hunts were stoked by pamphlets identifying supposed communists in the media. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo fell victim to this vicious whispering campaign. He was blacklisted by Hollywood and only given full credit for his work after his death. Today, witch hunts happen on Twitter – with the speed and ferocity of lightning. Kevin Spacey was struck by just such a bolt when he was accused of various sexual assaults on social media and then formally accused in courts in the US and UK – where he was cleared. And now, in trying to recover his life and his reputation after being scorched by the #MeToo movement, the double Oscar-winner has recognized that there is nothing new about his experience.

Kevin Spacey

Thursday

Ben Domenech

In Andor, Tony Gilroy showed us the emotional power of Star Wars

Tony Gilroy’s Andor, having concluded its second season on Disney+ this week, stands as a monumental achievement given the pressures of Disney-era Star Wars leadership and its Kathleen Kennedy authoritarian “The Force is Female” complex.  The excellence seems almost accidental, a trick of timing and opportunity. With Gilroy exercising the authority of an auteur director from outside the world of science fiction, equipped with sensibilities derived from corporate thrillers and conflicts that pit differing clans of elites against one another, the series is the standout of an otherwise unmemorable or eagerly forgotten era of Star Wars creations.

andor

Tuesday

Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So much for #MeToo

Five years have passed since Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on sexual misconduct in Hollywood and beyond. Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo’s Perv Patient Zero, is in prison. Bill Cosby spent three years there as well. Woody Allen — Farrow’s estranged father, one-time accused child molester and husband of his ex-partner’s adult daughter — still walks free (not having actually been charged with anything), but a bunch of A-list actors won’t work with him, and you now have to preface every mention of Annie Hall with a handwringing disclaimer. Donald Trump, well, he wasn’t reelected, which has to count for something. The world, we were assured, would never be the same.

#MeToo

Wednesday

Cockburn

Jennifer Lawrence’s Tucker Carlson nightmares

Quirky actress Jennifer Lawrence has come clean about her fears in a new interview with Vogue. Spiders, you ask? Heights? No. J-Law claimed that what keeps her up at night is… Tucker Carlson. Cockburn's thoughts drifted back to the height of Lawrence’s fame and realized that claims like this are nothing new for the sanctimonious Hollywood sweetheart. After all, here we have a woman that for years was synonymous with cringe. Striding up and down the red-carpet telling interviewers how hungry she was and demolishing pizza at the Academy Awards. Every OTT gesture screamed "relate to me, women of America!" It was inevitable that her obsession with coming across as ~subversive~ would drip downstream into politics.

jennifer lawrence

Wednesday

Christopher Sandford

Chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer’s fall from grace

“Paradoxes arise within an individual in proportion to their growing status or fame,” the author Stewart Stafford reminds us. Whether it’s the sexual peccadilloes of Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, Lance Armstrong’s relaxed approach to his diet, or the apparent reluctance of certain well-known television performers to overdo it when it comes to wearing trousers in the green room, for many of our celebrities it seems that personal license is the rule and sustained self-restraint the exception.

bobby fischer

Sunday

Christopher Sandford

Fatty Arbuckle’s fall

Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle (1887-1933) never won an Oscar or saw his name emblazoned on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but he should be remembered as a movie pioneer. Despite his considerable physical size, he was a remarkably versatile and agile actor, and his best films are weirdly droll as much as slapstick funny. He predated both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a master of physical comedy played with a straight face. Arbuckle was also an accidental pioneer of cancel culture. Exactly a hundred years ago, he found himself sitting in a cell on ‘felony row’ at the downtown San Francisco jail, held without bail for the alleged rape and subsequent death of a 26-year-old actress named Virginia Rappe.

fatty arbuckle

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Witch fight! The naked hypocrisy of Alyssa Milano

Alyssa Milano has rebranded herself as a Twitter activist and Democratic party booster since her acting career peaked with the late 90s TV hit Charmed. Thanks in part no doubt to her husband’s powerful connections in the entertainment industry (he’s a managing partner at CAA, a top-tier rep agency in Los Angeles) she’s leveraged her voice onto cable news, podcasts and into political campaigns. She is the celebrity perhaps most responsible for the mainstreaming the #MeToo movement. Her zenith as an activist came in 2018, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Milano was the most recognizable face behind the justice during the controversial confirmation hearings in which he faced thinly-sourced and circumstantial sexual assault allegations.

charmed alyssa milano rose mcgowan

Tuesday

Celia Walden

Celia Walden: the birth of ‘corona kissing’ in LA

Los Angeles If you want to know the general consensus on any given topic in LA, it’s not the cabbies you listen to, but the nail salon buzz. Everything from Michael Bloomberg’s failure in the presidential race and Russian collusion claims to coronavirus conspiracy theories gets thrashed out while women and men have their cuticles trimmed — because, unlike back home in the UK, bankers, bricklayers and Larry David will all come in for regular mani-pedis. As in a chamber of Congress — one offering $1-a-minute shoulder massages — there’s always a dominant topic, and right now it’s Meghan Markle. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been apologized to ‘for Meghan’ in LA nail salons over the past year.

LA celia walden piers morgan

Monday

Taki

Why Harvey Weinstein cried on the phone to me

Harvey Weinstein was a very sought after dinner guest back in the days before he was a convicted rapist. Mind you, he and I started out as mortal enemies, over a woman, needless to say. I won the first skirmish although I didn’t know it at the time. (The lady went home with me and Harvey badmouthed me to her.) Once I found that out I wrote in my New York Post column of the time that Weinstein was an enemy of good manners and good tailoring. He found it funny and approached me at a party I was giving with Michael Mailer in a downtown New York tavern. As he was known as a brawler, I stood up and got ready to rumble. But it was not to be. He graciously put out his hand and told me in front of witnesses that I had never done him any harm and that he wanted to be friends.

harvey weinstein

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

2019 was the year of the ill-advised celebrity interview

If we learned anything from the #MeToo movement, it is that powerful men in media and Hollywood believed themselves to be living in their own personal movies rather than the harsh truth of reality. They were the stars, directors, and producers, and they would always get the girl — even if the girl wanted nothing to do with them, or was actually just a potted fern in a restaurant.This explains why these A-List abusers keep sitting down for tell-all interviews against (one would hope) the better advice of their legal counsel. Rather than the sick perverts that they are, these men see themselves taking on the role of Frank Mackey in Magnolia, whose tough, sexist exterior will eventually melt away to reveal his wounded inner-heart to the audience, thus garnering our sympathy.R.

interview harvey weinstein

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

At Harvard, you’re guilty until proven innocent

‘In 55 years of association with Harvard, I can’t remember a worse violation of academic freedom than this one. And Harvard has had a few,’ Alan Dershowitz tells me in this week’s Censored in the City podcast. https://audioboom.com/posts/7260600-is-there-still-academic-freedom-at-harvard Activists on the left have been working hard to change definitions and distort values for some time. We shouldn't be surprised that they’ve started succeeding. At first it was simple. One word at a time, like how you define the meaning of safety or assault. Then it became about bigger ideas. The left, who once championed free speech and academic freedom, began distorting how we should think about and advocate for those values.

harvey weinstein guilty harvard