George Takei accused of sexually assaulting former model in 1981 https://t.co/ZiL5AmMPAP pic.twitter.com/PBth567KIu
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) November 11, 2017
Is that the technique that you used? pic.twitter.com/gCzKMuUasY
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) November 11, 2017
To women and men in the industry, it would be wise of you to not promote Alec Baldwin. Fair warning. #ROSEARMY pic.twitter.com/x1I9Rti3LX
— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) November 5, 2017
The curtain has been pulled back, and, oh, is it messy.More.
Hollywood has always reveled in scandal. The rumor. The whisper. The unfortunate photograph. The apology and return to grace. But the recent sex abuse stories have turned into a parade of tawdry violations and twisted passions, the stuff of movies acted out in real lives against the unglamorous air of disgrace, endless transgressions that even Ray Donovan, Showtime's half-shaven mercurial fixer, couldn't clean up with all his hush money and muscle.
The rape and sexual abuse allegations surrounding Harvey Weinstein, Brett Ratner, James Toback and others have shattered the awards-season aplomb in a town that imagines itself bold and freewheeling but prefers the tempered and scripted. The entertainment industry has slipped into a multi-polar catharsis of emboldened women, nervous men, threatening lawyers, broken deals, spoiled careers and the uncertainty that comes when cracks run like lightning through facades.
“I think the industry is forever changed,” said Marcel Pariseau, a publicist whose clients include Scarlett Johansson and Olivia Munn, one of six women who accused Ratner of sexual misconduct in The Times last week. “Every morning we wake up and we don’t know what’s going to be next. You’re almost afraid to get on your gadget to see what the new story is.
"No one is going to be going to a producer or director's hotel suite anymore," he added. "All meetings will be done with somebody else in the room for protection for both sides. It's a defining moment. It's vigilance."
Instagram accounts are being scrubbed, Facebook pages edited, publicists consulted and memories jogged about what might have happened where and with whom on that blurry night years ago. The cocktail circuit is jittery; the Oscar buzz feels a bit listless. Talent agencies are dropping clients and scouring their own houses. Studios are pruning relationships, firing executives hours after an allegation is made public.
In every pitch or development meeting, “people want to talk about it,” said a female television writer who preferred to remain anonymous. “It’s like everyone needs a little bit of therapy. It’s preoccupying people’s minds because they either have a direct connection to it or it’s like driving by a car crash; you’re just riveted. In the way Trump stuff used to lead a lot of things, now this stuff leads every single sit-down.”
This is the new Hollywood. Restless, unsure, demanding justice, looking for cover and wondering how to move beyond a long history of discrimination and sexual harassment and toward the kind of enlightened world it so often supposes in its art.
“We’re all having a conversation now about whether or not we are protecting people in our industry from people committing violent crimes against them,” said comedian and producer Judd Apatow. “I personally would not be comfortable making it a big part of my business trying to keep rapists and people who commit sexual assaults on the street. We all decide how we want to make money. We all decide what’s ethical. I’m well aware that all criminals deserve representation, but at the same time sometimes we’re putting other people in danger.”
It's hard to fix things when even hallowed names are in the headlines: Dustin Hoffman has apologized after being accused of sexually harassing a 17-year-old intern in 1985. Kevin Spacey said he was seeking "evaluation and treatment" after allegations of sexual assault and harassment.
The consequences against the accused have been swift: Netflix canceled Spacey's "House of Cards" and Warner Brothers cut ties with Ratner, who has denied claims of sexual harassment and misconduct from a number of women.
"When the Dustin Hoffman thing broke I was like, my gosh, now there's going to be a library of great movies that I can't watch anymore because of the ick factor. The ick factor is real," said the TV writer.
Audiences and critics have already begun reevaluating Weinstein's films, many of which were nominated for and won Academy Awards, including "Shakespeare in Love," whose star Gwyneth Paltrow says that the producer assaulted her in a hotel suite when she was 22...
A well-known female veteran of the media business emailed me as new revelations were posted about Mark Halperin:Keep reading.
"If you are anxiously looking around your media organization wondering who the harassers are or were, start with the men in power who are bullies: who screamed at subordinates, berated them, seemed to take pleasure in humiliating them — often publicly. We all know them. We have all worked with them. There is clearly a correlation between that behavior and this. ... I would love to send a message to the screamers that their behavior will no longer be tolerated."There's clearly a lot of screaming in tech, as well as in media and movies.
The excuse many men gave for not interfering with Harvey Weinstein was that "everybody knew" he was a bully and a jerk — but didn't realize he was also a serial assailant. Arianna Huffington, a board member at Uber, distilled the emerging ethos: "No brilliant jerks allowed."
Halperin's had been quite an empire. If you change the game once, it's pretty cool. Changing the game more than once? Very small club. And Halperin did it repeatedly: "The Note" at ABC ... "The Page" at TIME ... The "Game Change" franchise ... Showtime's "The Circus" series.
His comeuppance all came within 24 hours of CNN's story quoting five women as saying that he "sexually harassed women while he was in a powerful position at ABC News" (political director from 1997 to 2007)...
#MeToo https://t.co/J4R5sj9wfG
— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017
To be clear, I was NOT one of the victims in this story about Mark Halperin. I was ANOTHER junior ABC employee he attacked. #MeToo https://t.co/itV6HvEpA2
— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017
Go back and watch the episode I was on of Morning Joe. This will explain why so many of you asked why he attacked me on live TV
— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017
I did not report Halperin to ABC because I thought I was the only one, and I blamed myself, and I was embarrassed and I was scared of him.
— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017
The multimedia career of political journalist and author Mark Halperin is on shaky ground after a report that he sexually harassed five women during his tenure at ABC News.More.
Just hours after the publication of the CNN report late Wednesday, Halperin was pulled from his contributor’s role at MSNBC and NBC News. Penguin Press canceled the publication of his next “Game Change” book about the 2016 presidential campaign, co-authored with John Heilemann. Plans for an HBO miniseries tied to the title were scrapped by the premium cable network, and the next season of the Showtime documentary series “The Circus,” in which Halperin co-stars, appears in doubt.
Five women who worked with Halperin when he was political director of ABC News in the early 2000s told CNN that he propositioned them or touched them inappropriately while on the job. Three women said Halperin pressed up against them while having an erection. None of the women complained to ABC’s human resources department about his behavior. The accusers spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity.
The accusations against Halperin join the growing maelstrom of sexual harassment and assault charges, which have rocked the careers and reputations of former Weinstein Co. co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein, former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, screenwriter James Toback, and others. As more women come forward to allege years of bad behavior, the roiling national discussion of workplace harassment shows no signs of abating.
In a statement to CNN, Halperin acknowledged that he mistreated female employees at ABC News and issued an apology.
“During this period, I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me,” said Halperin, 52. “I now understand from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain. For that, I am deeply sorry and I apologize. Under the circumstances, I’m going to take a step back from my day-to-day work while I properly deal with this situation.”
By Thursday morning, Halperin, a paid contributor who regularly appears on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and other NBC News programs, was on leave indefinitely.
“We find the story and the allegations very troubling. Mark Halperin is leaving his role as a contributor until the questions around his past conduct are fully understood,” the cable network said in a statement.
The alleged incidents involving Halperin occurred when he was political director at ABC News from 1997 to 2007. An ABC News representative said, “Mark left ABC a decade ago and no complaints were filed during his tenure.”
But some women who worked with Halperin at ABC have commented on social media that there had been talk within the company at the time about his treatment of women.
Clarissa Ward, a senior international correspondent for CNN, tweeted out the Halperin story and said, “This was an open story when I was @ABC for years.”
Former ABC News staffer Emily Miller put a #MeToo hashtag on her tweet of the CNN story and said she too was harassed by Halperin. She then added: “To be clear, I was NOT one of the victims in this story about Mark Halperin. I was ANOTHER junior ABC employee he attacked.”
As of Thursday, there had been no sexual harassment complaints filed against Halperin at NBC, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly. As an on-air contributor, Halperin does not have an office or work space in the network’s headquarters or newsroom.
Halperin has a multiyear contract with NBC, but such deals can typically be terminated in the event an on-air talent embarrasses the company.
Showtime Networks issued a statement that there had been no allegations of “untoward behavior” by Halperin during the production of “The Circus.” However, the premium cable network said it will “evaluate its options” on going forward with a second season of the program...
NFL welcomes those accused of sexual and physical assault, but not Colin Kaepernick. My @USATODAYsports column: https://t.co/EYY46wBeQI
— Christine Brennan (@cbrennansports) May 3, 2017
I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73....it never goes away.
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) January 6, 2016SAN FRANCISCO — The classroom of 10th graders had already learned about sexually transmitted diseases and various types of birth control. On this day, the 15- and 16-year-olds gathered around tables to discuss another topic: how and why to make sure each step in a sexual encounter is met with consent.Yes, grateful. Because leftists are always grateful for more chances to destroy people's lives.
Consent from the person you are kissing — or more — is not merely silence or a lack of protest, Shafia Zaloom, a health educator at the Urban School of San Francisco, told the students. They listened raptly, but several did not disguise how puzzled they felt.
“What does that mean — you have to say ‘yes’ every 10 minutes?” asked Aidan Ryan, 16, who sat near the front of the room.
“Pretty much,” Ms. Zaloom answered. “It’s not a timing thing, but whoever initiates things to another level has to ask.”
The “no means no” mantra of a generation ago is being eclipsed by “yes means yes” as more young people all over the country are told that they must have explicit permission from the object of their desire before they engage in any touching, kissing or other sexual activity. With Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature on a bill this month, California became the first state to require that all high school health education classes give lessons on affirmative consent, which includes explaining that someone who is drunk or asleep cannot grant consent.
Last year, California led the way in requiring colleges to use affirmative consent as the standard in campus disciplinary decisions, defining how and when people agree to have sex. More than a dozen legislatures in other states, including Maryland, Michigan and Utah, are considering similar legislation for colleges. One goal is to improve the way colleges and universities deal with accusations of rape and sexual assault and another is to reduce the number of young people who feel pressured into unwanted sexual conduct.
Critics say the lawmakers and advocates of affirmative consent are trying to draw a sharp line in what is essentially a gray zone, particularly for children and young adults who are grappling with their first feelings of romantic attraction. In he-said, she-said sexual assault cases, critics of affirmative consent say the policy puts an unfair burden of proof on the accused.
“There’s really no clear standard yet — what we have is a lot of ambiguity on how these standards really work in the court of law,” said John F. Banzhaf III, a professor at George Washington University Law School. “The standard is not logical — nobody really works that way. The problem with teaching this to high school students is that you are only going to sow more confusion. They are getting mixed messages depending where they go afterward.”
But Ms. Zaloom, who has taught high school students about sex for two decades, said she was grateful for the new standard, even as she acknowledged the students’ unease...
Is Congress waging a war on college men? It’s starting to look like it.That's a war on men alright, brought to you not just by asshole congressional Democrats, but by the Obama White House as well. (Also assholes, naturally.)
Last week, Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, suggested that even innocent students should be booted from campus if they were accused of sexual assault. According to Polis: "If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people."
So one of the longstanding traditions of American law — that it is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent — has now been turned on its head. Under the Polis standard, it’s basically the other way around.
According to Polis, it’s not such a big deal: "We’re not talking depriving them of life and liberty, we’re talking about their transfer to another university, for crying out loud," Polis said, laughing off the idea that his suggestion would violate due process rights. He is not alone in taking the due process rights of the accused lightly, a widely-backed Democratic senate bill is just more circumspect.
But it’s no laughing matter. A student with expulsion for sexual assault on his record will have great difficulty gaining admission to another college, with life-altering consequences. (If you don’t believe that, then you don’t think that college matters much, which is something I doubt higher education boosters want to maintain.) And even if he succeeds, the expulsion will affect his chances for employment for the rest of his life, too.
As UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh notes, Polis’s approach suggests that he doesn’t think the rights of the accused are very important at all: “Now I should say that there are certain positions where indeed a whiff of suspicion might be enough to get someone removed. I just hadn’t thought that being a college student would or should be one of them.”
Plus, as Volokh also notes, Polis’s approach punishes the innocent without doing much about the guilty...
CONCORD, N.H. — A graduate of an exclusive New England prep school was cleared of rape but convicted Friday of lesser sex offenses against a 15-year-old freshman girl in a case that exposed a tradition in which seniors competed to see how many younger students they could have sex with.More at that top link.
A jury of nine men and three women took eight hours to reach its verdict in the case against Owen Labrie, who was accused of forcing himself on the girl in a dark and noisy mechanical room at St. Paul's School in Concord two days before he graduated in 2014.
Labrie, who was bound for Harvard and planned to take divinity classes before his arrest put everything on hold, could get as much as 11 years in prison at sentencing Oct. 29. The 19-year-old from Tunbridge, Vermont, will also have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
He wept upon hearing the verdict, and then, as his lawyers conferred with the judge, sat alone at the defense table, shaking his head slightly and looking up at the ceiling. His mother sobbed. His accuser appeared stoic and huddled with members of her family in the courtroom.
"Owen's future is forever changed," defense attorney J.W. Carney said, adding that the sex convictions will be like "a brand, a tattoo" that he will bear for life.
The scandal cast a harsh light on the 159-year-old boarding school that has long been a training ground for America's elite. Its alumni include Secretary of State John Kerry, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau, at least 13 U.S. ambassadors, three Pulitzer Prize winners, and sons of the Astor and Kennedy families. Students pay $53,810 a year in tuition, room and board.
Prosecutors said the rape was part of Senior Salute, which Labrie described to detectives as a competition in which graduating seniors tried to have sex with underclassmen and kept score on a wall behind a set of washing machines.
The young man was acquitted of the most serious charges against him — three counts of felony rape, each punishable by 10 to 20 years in prison. But he was found guilty of three counts of misdemeanor sexual assault, using a computer to lure a minor for sex, and child endangerment.
Essentially, the jury by its verdicts signaled it didn't believe Labrie's assertion that there was no intercourse, but it also didn't believe the girl's contention that it was against her will. In the end, it found Labrie guilty of having sex with an underage girl.
The girl is "leaving with her head held high," said Laura Dunn, a spokeswoman for the teenager and her family. "It was a step in the right direction.
But the girl's family lashed out at the prep school, saying in a statement: "We still feel betrayed that St. Paul's School allowed and fostered a toxic culture that left our daughter and other students at risk to sexual violence. We trusted the school to protect her and it failed us."
St. Paul's rector Michael G. Hirschfeld commended "the remarkable moral courage and strength demonstrated by the young woman who has suffered through this nightmare," and said the prep school is committed to teaching its students to act honorably.
Labrie was allowed to remain free on $15,000 bail while he awaits sentencing...
#LAPD Update: 10th Venice HS Subject Arrested for Sex Crimes after turning himself in @LAPDPacific @LASchoolPolice http://t.co/YhSRKub8EQ
— LAPD HQ (@LAPDHQ) March 14, 2015VENICE, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Fourteen students are accused in the sexual assaults of two underage girls at Venice High School.Still more.
The investigation began on Tuesday when police were notified by school administrators regarding a possible sexual assault.
Police located two victims, both students at Venice High School under the age of 17. The victims were subjected to a series of sexual assaults both on and off campus.
"They were able to identify 14 subjects that we believe are responsible for these sexual assaults and unlawful sex acts," said LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith during a news conference.
The alleged incidents occurred between December 2013 to March 2015. Smith said some of the sexual acts were forced, and others were consensual with individuals who were too young to give consent.
Eight students were arrested at the school on Friday morning, and one student was arrested off campus. A 10th person surrendered to authorities and was also arrested.
