A few short years ago, Harvey Weinstein was widely considered the monster against which all other alleged sexual abusers were measured. As he begins his New York state retrial for a series of rape and sexual assault charges over a period of years, that consensus has broken.
To see just how wide of a cultural swing we’re in the midst of, observe the questions right-wing commentator Candace Owens and manosphere hero Joe Rogan — notable “just asking questions” provocateurs — have begun asking on Weinstein’s behalf.
“After looking over this case, I’ve concluded that Harvey Weinstein was wrongfully convicted and basically just hung on the Me Too thing,” Owens said on a podcast on Sunday. Owens is in the midst of promoting “Harvey Speaks,” a series of jailhouse interviews with Weinstein which she promises will exonerate him.
“I can’t believe I’m on Harvey Weinstein’s side,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast in March. “I thought he was guilty of, like, heinous crimes and then you listen, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what? What is going on?’” Rogan says Owens’s series convinced him to change his mind on Weinstein.
This high-profile support for Weinstein is part of a larger anti-Me Too, anti-feminist backlash that took off in earnest in 2023, arguably beginning with the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp domestic violence trial. The days in which America was transfixed by accusation after accusation of sexual violence committed by famous men are long over. Gone is the era in which it seemed possible that America was going to truly hold sexual predators accountable, regardless of their fame and power. In this moment, America is more often transfixed by the idea that those famous men aren’t so bad after all — that maybe the women who accused them are simply lying.
For Owens and Rogan to embrace even Harvey Weinstein signals a true sea change in the place the Me Too movement holds in American culture, and with it, a change in how we understand sexual violence. In the first days after Weinstein was accused, around 2017 and 2018, he was treated as a sort of boogeyman, a man whose crimes were so many and so monstrous that all the other sexual crimes coming to light around the same time paled in comparison.
“He’s no Weinstein,” commenters said of all the other accused men in those months: Louis C.K., Al Franken, Garrison Keillor. Over the next few years, as Weinstein faced jail time and the other men by and large did not, Weinstein became, as the feminist commenter Jessica Valenti wrote in 2022, a point of comparison next to which everyone else seemed not particularly bad. “Weinstein went to jail,” Valenti wrote, “so that when a woman complains about Louis CK winning a Grammy, men can scoff at her greedy overreach.”
Now, Weinstein himself is apparently no Weinstein.
Weinstein is currently facing retrial in New York because his 2020 guilty verdict was thrown out on a procedural issue. He is still serving out a 16-year sentence he received after a 2022 guilty verdict in Los Angeles, but a not guilty verdict in the New York retrial would mean he would not have to serve any time on top of that LA sentence. As he waits for the current trial to make its way through the courts, he appears optimistic about Owens’s efforts on his behalf. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he told the New York Post. “The woman is going to be a superstar, and I have been around stars.”
One of the greatest successes of the Me Too movement at the height of its influence was not necessarily the criminal prosecution of accused sexual abusers, but its powerful challenge of myths around sexual abuse that had been pervasive for decades. To see Owens’s millions of podcast subscribers and social media followers respond by and large favorably to these familiar flimsy defenses shows just how much we seem to have regressed.
First, Owens incorrectly asserts that of the more than 80 women who accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct, only three ended up bringing charges against him. This, she says, proves that the rest of Weinstein’s accusers were liars, and that the evidence against him is thin. In fact, three women brought charges against Weinstein in New York and five more in Los Angeles. By most standards, being legally charged with sexual assault against eight different women would be considered a lot, although in Weinstein’s case, it does work out to around 10 percent of his public accusers.
Sexual assault is notoriously difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard of defense in a criminal court. Many of the women who accused Weinstein publicly did so years or even decades after the fact, a common phenomenon among survivors of sexual assault, both because of the shame associated with the attack and the difficulty of securing a conviction. In some cases, the legal statute of limitations had closed by the time these survivors finally went public.
The standard of evidence in a criminal court is high for good reason: if you’re going to take someone’s freedom away from them, you should be absolutely certain that they committed a crime. The eight cases brought against Weinstein represent the eight cases that law enforcement was confident they could prove to that standard.
The fact that the other 72 or so accusations against Weinstein never resulted in criminal charges doesn’t mean that they’re all false. It doesn’t mean that they’re all true, either. It means they don’t meet the high standards of a courtroom, and that’s it.
Owens’s second major argument is that Weinstein’s accusers continued to spend time with him and, in some cases, send him flirtatious messages after they say he attacked them. She contends that they were acting as “sugar babies,” engaging in a quid pro quo relationship with Weinstein in which they traded sexual favors for his professional support.
It is true that many of the women who have accused Weinstein of sexual assault continued to maintain friendly relationships after their attacks. This, too, is extremely common among victims of sexual violence, the vast majority of whom know their attackers well. In the case of Weinstein and his accusers, Weinstein held significant professional power over his alleged victims — and his reputation as a vindictive actor left little doubt that he would not hesitate to use it. He torpedoed the careers of women who rejected his advances. That includes Mira Sorvino, who said she was forced to stop acting in major studio films after she turned him down (director Peter Jackson confirmed he decided not to hire her after Weinstein advised him against it).
We also know that Weinstein’s machinations didn’t stop with professional retaliation. As publication approached for the two bombshell news articles breaking the story of Weinstein’s decades-long pattern of sexual assault, Weinstein hired private security agencies, including former Mossad spies, to collect compromising information on the women who were preparing to accuse them.
None of the information or context I am laying out here is new. All of these revelations were discussed in the press in great detail in the weeks and months after the Weinstein story first broke in October 2017, and then repeated again over the course of his 2020 New York trial and his 2022 Los Angeles trial.
That was one of the few benefits of using Harvey Weinstein as a symbol of the worst kind of monster a sexual predator could possibly be. It was reductive and a little sensationalist, but at the very least, the public’s fascination with Weinstein meant a chance to talk through a few all-too pervasive rape myths. It meant a chance to explain why so many women hesitate to come forward and tell their stories, why so many women maintain relationships with their attackers, and why it’s so hard to get a conviction on a rape case. For a time, it looked as though if the Me Too movement had accomplished anything outside of a few high-profile arrests, it was at least that it educated the public.
When Owens performs her “just asking questions” routine about Weinstein, she is not asking new questions. She is asking very old ones and acting as though they weren’t thoroughly answered the first time around. That she has been able to do so successfully with Weinstein and find an audience willing and eager to welcome her takes means things could get a lot worse for all the other victims of sexual assault out there: the ones whose attackers don’t have 80 public accusations against them; whose attackers are, after all, no Weinstein. The informational ecosystem she is building is just one sign that the gains of Me Too are far more ephemeral than we had once hoped.
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