
When your own lawyer (Lisa Bloom) dumps you, you know you’ve got troubles, and Harvey Weinstein’s got troubles.
Overnight the moguls in Hollywood and Washington, afraid to be contaminated by box office poison, began leaving him in droves and nearly everyone is piling on.
Hours ago he was fired from his own company.
The Oscar-winning (“Shakespeare in Love”) tycoon became persona non grata from the moment The New York Times found its patsy-of-the-week and splashed him across its front pages with allegations that for more than three decades he sexually harassed women.
Can this be true? But as we used to say – I only know what I read in the papers. That this paper happens to be the Times, well, I get ideas, and not quite favorable. I measure a newspaper’s trustworthiness on how it treats Israel, so mark this as a failing grade. Israel never gets a break from the Times. Neither does Trump.
But now I’m supposed to believe that the Times has the goods on Weinstein, for years among the most productive moviemakers in Hollywood.
I am prepared to believe the worst, that Weinstein behaved like a jerk.
Too many of us are enjoying the spectacle as in days past people bought tickets for a hanging.Too many of us are like that when it comes to women and this needs to be fixed. But in Hollywood it never did get fixed. Why then Weinstein when casting couch auditions have been going on for a century…and surely to this day Weinstein is not the first or the last tycoon to demand an exchange of favors from a blushing ingénue.
Then why Hollywood? Pick any man out of a crowd and you are sure to find SOMETHING.
But the Times chose Hollywood and it chose Weinstein as earlier it chose Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly for tabloid scrutiny.
Both were ruined to one degree or another, and Ailes, who died of a broken heart, may well have been guilty as charged in the press.
But as the boss at Fox News he did more for women than any other network honcho...as you will find in the newsroom thriller “News Anchor Sweetheart,” which stars Megyn Kelly (or a Megyn Kelly type) who ruins herself as she helped ruin Ailes, the man who created her.
A single front-page story and a man is defined forever. Is this fair? Isn’t there a scale where we measure a man’s merits against his sins?
One snapshot seldom gives the whole picture or the true picture of a life in full. Men and women, we are all a mix of contradictions and Weinstein’s alleged big flaw (was he given a chance to confront his accusers?) deserves our disgust, but what troubles me is the dancing…the heckling now that the entire Culture has picked up the scent.
Too many of us are enjoying the spectacle as in days past people bought tickets for a hanging.
I keep thinking of a line from King Solomon in Ecclesiastes – “God always seeks [and favors] the pursued.” Not the mob or the accuser.
Apparently it was Ashley Judd who cast the first or the biggest stone against Weinstein.
This is yet another unwelcome public appearance from this actress who’s been forgotten but is angling for a comeback through anti-Trump hysterics.
So now it’s Weinstein and perhaps it’s true what she and the others say abut him, and if indeed true, okay, he needs to be punished. But ruined?
Who’s next for The New York Times? For some reason the paper has remade itself into a scandal sheet that traffics in sleaze,
Beware the gloating. You too can become anathema if the Times decides you’re IT.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and the ground-breaking inside-journalism thriller “The Bathsheba Deadline.” His latest is “News Anchor Sweetheart.” He is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com