To hear his lawyer tell it, Harvey Weinstein is in trouble for merely defending one of Hollywood’s longest and best-known traditions. “Mr. Weinstein did…
To hear his lawyer tell it, Harvey Weinstein is in trouble for merely defending one of Hollywood’s longest and best-known traditions.
“Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood,” attorney Benjamin Brafman said Friday after the Manhattan DA charged his client with raping one woman and forcing another to perform oral sex.
Added Brafman: “To the extent that there is bad behavior in that industry, that is not what this is about. Bad behavior is not on trial in this case.”
Actually, it is. Because prosecutors allege that Weinstein’s behavior wasn’t just bad, but also violent, coercive and criminal.
As prosecutor Joan Illuzzi said in court: Weinstein “used his money, power and position to lure women into positions where he was able to violate them sexually.”
It was not, in other words, a case — actually, scores of cases — of women eagerly throwing themselves into Weinstein’s bed for a shot at stardom, or even of him enticing them with offers of fame.
No: As the criminal complaint charges and dozens of women (many of them A-list stars) have testified, it’s a case of Weinstein forcing himself on his victims and then using his money and power to buy their silence.
That’s not someone greedily helping himself to goodies in the cookie jar of gorgeous starlets; it’s predation.
Weinstein and his lawyer seem set to argue that anything that happened was consensual, nothing more than the age-old pattern of powerful Hollywood moguls enjoying one of the job’s biggest perks.
Funny: It’s the same “that’s how business has always been done” argument that Sheldon Silver used in his trials. Corruption, he said, is built into the system; juries twice decided otherwise.
Now, another 12 men and women will decide whether Weinstein also crossed the line into criminal behavior. He might want to consider a better line of defense than “everybody does it.”
