[She Said, the new film about the exposure of Harvey Weinstein,
keeps its focus on the disgraced movie producer and poster villain for
#MeToo — but misses a chance to expose the “girl bosses” who
protected him for years.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SHE SAID MISSES AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPOSE HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S ELITE
ENABLERS  
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Liza Featherstone
December 21, 2022
Jacobin
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_ She Said, the new film about the exposure of Harvey Weinstein,
keeps its focus on the disgraced movie producer and poster villain for
#MeToo — but misses a chance to expose the “girl bosses” who
protected him for years. _

Still from She Said. , (Universal Pictures)

 

Maria Schrader’s _She Said_, a feature film based on a book
by _New York Times_ reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan
Twohey (Carey Mulligan), about their 2017 investigation that helped
bring down Harvey Weinstein, is a decent, at times even inspiring,
movie about women journalists helping workers to expose a horrible,
exploitive, and very powerful boss. Weinstein, the disgraced
megaproducer accused of either harassment or assault by some seventy
women, reached millions of dollars’ worth of settlements with more
than thirty of them after exposés by the _Times,_ as well as
the _New Yorker_. He has come to symbolize the worst of male boss
behavior and is now serving prison time for rape.

While public curiosity naturally centered on the famous actresses
accusing Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment — including
Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Rose McGowan — the movie
commendably gives more attention to the unfamous and powerless
assistants who suffered under Weinstein. It also conveys the
structural powerlessness many women experienced: although he was, as a
sexual predator, exceptionally brazen and ruthless, Weinstein was also
like many American bosses in that he ran his workplace as an absolute
dictatorship, with workers terrified to defy him.

That said, _She Said_ has some blind spots typical of liberal
entertainment media: a lionization of mainstream journalism and, more
seriously, a failure to reckon fully with how deeply girl-boss
feminism is implicated in the Weinstein story.

The movie continues the relentless propagandistic journalism
hagiography that has been culturally voguish of late — a trend we
have written about
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— and in that spirit, _She Said_ makes the _Times_ itself too
central to a story that should instead focus on the experience of
working for Weinstein. Kanton and Twohey did great work on this story,
but there’s nothing especially fascinating about these journalists
and no reason to make them the main characters.

 

Since the movie came out, Weinstein has come to symbolize, for liberal
feminists, everything wrong with patriarchy — or, as they less
precisely tend to call it, “misogyny.” But their brand of feminism
must bear its share of the blame for enabling malefactors like
Weinstein.

Let’s first recall that Weinstein’s studio, Miramax, was
associated with mainstream-yet-edgy films whose sensibilities were
more notably feminist than standard commercial Hollywood. He made
movies directed by women and about women, as he pointed out in 2019 in
an interview with the _New York Post_ shortly before going on trial
for rape in Manhattan. For this reason, many powerful women directors
and producers overlooked or enabled his abuses and even covered for
him, as Ronan Farrow’s reporting for the _New Yorker_ showed.
Donna Gigliotti, director of Miramax’s 1998 hit _Shakespeare in
Love_, for example, discouraged Farrow from writing the story but
Farrow later learned that she had known about Weinstein’s abuses for
decades.

Weinstein was a major ally and Hollywood ambassador for Hillary
Clinton, a figure who, along with her loyalists in the media, has long
cast support for or opposition to her personal political ambitions as
an important gauge of an individual’s feminist credentials.
Weinstein was a major donor to each of Clinton’s campaigns —
Senate and presidential. He gave far more money to Clinton — both as
a donor and as a bundler (raising money from other donors) — than to
any other Democrat. They were also socially friendly: it’s easy to
find numerous warm and festive photos of them partying together,
like this one
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one
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When Weinstein’s extensive crimes came out, Clinton brushed it off,
but many assumed she must have known.

There’s almost no question that Clinton had at least heard the
rumors. Farrow reported that Lena Dunham, the creator of _Girls_,
knew about Weinstein’s actions and had warned Clinton’s campaign
staff that he could be a political liability for her. “Harvey is a
rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” Dunham said,
accurately, in an exchange that doesn’t reflect well on Clinton or
her campaign.

Nor does it reflect well on Dunham, but at least she’s been honest
about it. Dunham has written that in 2016, the year before
the _Times_ story broke, she performed at a Weinstein benefit for
Clinton, and shook his hand, despite having “heard the rumors.”
Dunham called the evening “a betrayal of my own values,” writing
in 2017, “I’m sorry that I shook the hand of someone I knew was
not a friend to women in my industry.”

_She Said_ offers some intriguing glimpses of the role of such
girl-boss feminists in covering for Harvey. In one scene, a woman gets
a call from one of her former bosses, and a female voice urges her not
to talk with any journalists about Weinstein; the call angers the
recipient, who then picks up the phone to return
the _Times_ reporter’s call.

Another scene rightly nails Linda Fairstein, the former Manhattan
district attorney once celebrated for her dedication to prosecuting
sex crimes, showing her taking a call from Twohey, who asks her
bluntly about her role in quashing a criminal complaint about
Weinstein. Fairstein became infamous as an icon of carceral feminism
for her role in the case of the Central Park Five, a group of black
teenagers who ended up falsely convicted of raping a white woman in
the park in 1989. Fairstein was shown to have engineered false
confessions from the boys. An appeals court judge described her
conduct in unusually strong terms: “I was concerned about a criminal
justice system that would tolerate the conduct of the prosecutor . . .
Fairstein wanted to make a name for herself. She didn’t care. She
wasn’t a human.”

Fairstein’s enthusiasm for prosecuting accused rapists apparently
did not extend to her powerful friends. The _Times_ reporting showed
that Fairstein intervened to help kill a complaint against Weinstein
in 2015, when she was no longer district attorney but still
well-connected in the office. Fairstein, despite being willing to ruin
the lives of poor black teenagers accused of sexual violence, not only
used her connections to help Weinstein get out of trouble, but also
provided consultation to his legal team. She had written about her
dreams that Weinstein would buy the rights to her books. The place of
Fairstein in the Weinstein saga, however, is only fleetingly rendered
in _She Said_.

_She Said_ is a good movie — a well-paced thriller that gives us a
solid appreciation of the important work of investigative journalism
and of the horrific hell that bosses force women to endure. But given
the Weinstein story’s central place in the canon of liberal
feminism, it’s long past time to interrogate the role that its
iconic girl bosses played in this disgraceful saga. Sadly, _She
Said_ gives them short shrift.

CONTRIBUTORS

Liza Featherstone is a columnist for _Jacobin_, a freelance
journalist, and the author of _Selling Women Short: The Landmark
Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart_.

* Journalism
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* Film Industry
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* corporate feminism
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* me too
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* new york times
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