Stars, they\u2019re just like us\u2014until they\u2019re not.<\/b>
\n\u201cWhen you\u2019re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.\u201d
That was Donald Trump, in 2005, explaining the world and its workings to his fellow TV star, Access Hollywood \u2019s Billy Bush. Both men were celebrities, but one was a bigger celebrity than the other; both were powerful, but one was more powerful than the other; both were connected to the American presidency, but one\u2014through having toyed with seeking the office himself\u2014was more connected than the other. And yet the older man couldn\u2019t help but brag to the younger about the happy affordances of fame. When you\u2019re famous, you can do whatever you want. When you\u2019re famous, you can have your way in so many ways. I moved on her. I moved on her very heavily. I moved on her like a bitch. I just start kissing them\u2014it\u2019s like a magnet. I don\u2019t even wait. Grab \u2018em by the pussy. They let you do it. You can do anything.
In 2016, after a recording of the men\u2019s exchange was made public, Billy Bush, the minor star, was fired from NBC. Donald Trump, the major one, was elected president of the United States.
Almost a year to the day after the publication of what would become known, with polite euphemism, as the \u201c Access Hollywood tape,\u201d The New York Times published a related kind of revelation: Harvey Weinstein had been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct\u2014an alleged pattern of psychological manipulation and strategic harassment that spanned decades\u2014and, in many cases, paid them off for their silence. The paper\u2019s report was followed up with an investigation in The New Yorker that included allegations from three different women that Weinstein had raped them. The stories\u2014and the many, many more from women who have come forward in recent days\u2014have been met with a mixture of shock and its opposite among Weinstein\u2019s fellow celebrities. \u201cI didn\u2019t know about these things, but they don\u2019t surprise me at all,\u201d Emma Thompson told the BBC on Thursday. She was speaking, it seems, for many in her field.
As the Harvey Weinstein news has spread, for the past week, across American culture and consciousness, it has been a story, in large part, about the particular actions of a particular man, enabled by a particular group of people. As the news settles in, though, it will be a story about the actions of the rest of us\u2014about the way we approach justice, collectively, at this moment in American history, when the person in question is powerful and wealthy and famous. Will Weinstein face criminal charges for his alleged abuses? Will he, as has been done before, remain in Europe and evade accountability in America? Will he be ruined? Or will he, as Weinstein himself has apparently suggested, be back winning Oscars within the year?
When you\u2019re a star, you can do anything, Donald Trump said, and his insight was terrible and correct. Is it still?
* * *
In 1977, Roman Polanski was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with several offenses, each emerging from a sexual encounter he had with Samantha Gailey, then 13 years old: The 43-year-old Polanski had, she said, given her champagne and a quaalude, and then had raped and sodomized her. Polanski struck a deal in response to the charges, pleading guilty to a blanket count of unlawful sex with a minor. But when he learned that the judge in the case had a change of heart and was planning to reject the bargain, he fled to Paris, and has lived in Europe ever since\u2014continuing to make movies, to win awards, and to be a member of Hollywood\u2019s elite. In 1981, Polanski was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director, for Tess. In 2003, he won the award, for The Pianist. In his autobiography, Roman, published in 1984, the director teasingly refers to girls being \u201csexy, pert, and thoroughly human\u201d and to appreciating Gstaad, Switzerland, on the grounds that it is home to \u201chundreds of fresh-faced, nubile young girls of all nationalities.\u201d
Through the years, one of Polanski\u2019s most vocal defenders, to the extent that Polanski has needed defenders at all, has been Harvey Weinstein. In 2009, the producer helped to circulate a petition among the elite in Hollywood demanding that Polanski be freed after he was arrested in Switzerland\u2014having appeared in Zurich to accept a lifetime achievement award at the city\u2019s film festival. As one element of the aggressive publicity campaign Weinstein mounted on Polanski\u2019s behalf\u2014Weinstein has been very skilled at waging publicity campaigns \u2014the producer wrote an opinion piece for the U. K.\u2019s Independent newspaper. The column mentioned not just Weinstein himself, but also Thierry Fr\u00e9maux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino, Warren Beatty, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Evans, and the then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy\u2014famous name after famous name, all dropped in service to the thesis that Polanski, whatever had \u201chappened in 1977,\u201d is \u201ca man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world.\u201d
The column anticipated, in its genuflections to fame, the remarkable apology Weinstein would issue to the Times on his own behalf, eight years later. In it, Weinstein emphasized that Polanski was \u201ca great artist\u201d and \u201ca humanist.\u201d He reminded readers that Polanski had gone \u201cthrough the Holocaust and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family,\u201d and that he had emerged from tragedy to win the French Legion of Honour. Weinstein quoted Martin Scorsese as saying, \u201cPolanski\u2019s films have influenced me as an artist all these years and his terrible political situation has been something we have all had to suffer through.\u201d In 1977, Weinstein suggested, one thing \u201chappened\u201d to one (unnamed) person; for decades, though, a great artist named Roman Polanski has been happening to the whole world. The one situation simply outweighed the other.
What Weinstein was doing, essentially, was constructing a more nuanced version of Donald Trump\u2019s pronouncement to Billy Bush: He was making a case for Hollywood exceptionalism. He was summoning the idea that celebrity, in America, functions as a secular religion, with good and evil, with gods and monsters, with humans that, through the alchemy of fame, turn into stars. Celebrities are with us, but more to the point they are above us. They transcend our earthbound assumptions. They are soaring; we are small. How can the things that sparkle in the firmament be held to account for humans\u2019 fleshy flaws?
It is a logic that is infused not just in the transactions of Hollywood, but also in the world of American sports. And the world of American tech. And the world of American politics. And the world of American science. And the world of American academia. The famous are famous, the idea goes\u2014the powerful are powerful\u2014the stars shine above us\u2014because they are, somehow, touched: with talent, with genius, with the capacity to make the things that, in turn, make the world richer and better. \u201cHollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,\u201d Harvey Weinstein told the Los Angeles Times in 2009, defending a man who had pled guilty to raping a 13-year-old. Debra Winger agreed: \u201cThe whole art world suffers\u201d when someone like Polanski is arrested, she said. When Jeffrey Toobin wrote of Polanski\u2019s legal troubles for The New Yorker, in December of 2009, his piece was headlined \u201cThe Celebrity Defense.\u201d When the \u201cfree Polanski\u201d petition circulated that same year, more than 100 of Hollywood\u2019s most prominent people\u2014including David Lynch, Michael Mann, Mike Nichols, and Woody Allen\u2014 signed it .
American evangelicalism has its prosperity theology; but American celebrity, too, has knelt before an altar of exceptionalism. Star by star, sin by sin, we have allowed the famous and the rich to abide by a different set of rules, a different mode of morality. The gospel of celebrity was invoked when Mel Gibson, after hitting his girlfriend and calling her a \u201cpig in heat,\u201d returned to filmmaking\u2014and, with it, an Oscar nomination. The gospel was invoked when it was announced that the guy who insisted that \u201cJews are responsible for all the wars in the world\u201d would be playing a wacky role in Daddy\u2019s Home 2. It was invoked when Bill O\u2019Reilly left the Fox News Channel with a parachute amounting to the tens of millions, and when Roger Ailes left with one amounting to $60 million, and when actors clamor to be featured in the next Woody Allen film, and when the world delights at Bill Clinton playing with balloons, and when Bill Cosby walks free. It is there when Donald Trump brags about being able to do anything, and then proves it by winning the White House.
We Americans are good at many things; one of them is our ability to be surgically selective in our vision and our outrage. Double standards drip among the stars in our synthetic firmament. The American flag is sacred, unless it isn\u2019t. Drug addiction is a menace deserving of consternation, unless it\u2019s a crisis deserving of compassion. Celebrities are just like us, unless they\u2019re not. They have been elevated by the brute physics of fame. They have done whatever they have wanted. We have helped them.
The aftermath of the Weinstein revelations, however, could well be cause for hope. As my colleague Alex Wagner argued, the mogul\u2019s downfall might mark the beginning of the end of the old boys\u2019 club among the institutions that, for so long, helped him to keep his secrets. Women talk\u2014amongst each other, and out loud. Social media have given a voice to those who were previously silent. And celebrity itself is becoming more intimate, more human, more accountable.
In the world as it spins in 2017, Bill Cosby may not be in jail, but he lives in disgrace. Bill O\u2019Reilly has moved to an online version of his Fox show that is a shadow of its former self. Fox has parted ways with Eric Bolling after accusations against the host came to light. Travis Kalanick has been ousted as Uber\u2019s CEO for creating a corporate environment that was hostile to women. Roy Price, the president of Amazon Studios, has been suspended following allegations of sexual harassment. Earlier this month, it was reported that Renate Langer had informed the Swiss police that Roman Polanski had raped her in February of 1972, when she was 15\u2014making her the fourth woman to publicly accuse the director of assaulting her as a teenager, and reopening the public conversation about Polanski\u2019s extremely questionable place in Hollywood\u2019s glistening hierarchy. Story by story, revelation by revelation, the stars are falling around us.
And this week, celebrities, in Hollywood and beyond, have been flooding the world with their public condemnations of Harvey Weinstein. That is itself suggestive of changing norms, of new assumptions, of a shift in what Americans will tolerate from their celebrities\u2014and what they will no longer. It is at this point extraordinarily difficult to imagine a scenario in which Weinstein has not permanently plummeted from celebrity\u2019s stratosphere. It is difficult to imagine that the world, now that his \u201copen secret\u201d is secret no more, hasn\u2019t been in some small way transformed. There are surely more stories to be told, and there is surely more work to be done. But fame, it seems, does not inoculate as it once did. Celebrity is no longer its own justification. When you\u2019re a star, they let you do it. Until they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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