Oct. 11, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:46
3854 The Harvey Weinstein Scandal: Aftermath
Recently the New York Times published an expose on Harvey Weinstein alleging sexual harassment and assault allegations from multiple women over a significant period of time. In the days following the article's publication, additional allegations, including rape, emerged causing Weinstein to be fired from the Weinstein Company and disavowed by many in Hollywood and politics. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
This is going to be a tough conversation for some of you to hear.
This is going to be painful for some of you.
I'm sorry for that. I guide myself by the truth, and the truth, as it is wont to do, makes you great friends or great enemies, because they think it's about you, not their own relationship to the truth.
So way back in the day, decades ago, there was a famous Hollywood director.
He directed Rosemary's Baby, he directed Chinatown, and was in it.
And his name was Roman Polanski.
And Roman Polanski was...
Well, first of all, his wife, when she was pregnant, was killed by the Manson cult.
And he himself was tried and convicted, found guilty, of drugging and raping, both vaginally and anally, a 13-year-old little girl.
13-year-old.
Vaginally and anally raped.
By Roman Polanski. Now he then fled before sentencing.
He fled to Europe. The reason why that is relevant, or maybe relevant, is that as we speak today, there is a giant grizzled ogre-sized hole in the American artistic landscape because Harvey Weinstein has left America.
He has gone to Europe to seek treatment because apparently there's just no one who can treat him in the United States.
He may be following in Roman Polanski's footsteps.
There may be an entirely innocent explanation.
I leave you to judge that one.
So other actresses have come out to say that Weinstein harassed them.
This is truly astounding and amazing and I I really have a tough time figuring out what I have in common with some humans other than the fact that I think we're both bipeds still.
Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and a bunch of others say that Weinstein harassed them.
And Gwyneth Paltrow said, this way of treating women ends now!
And, yeah, so she and other actresses have accused Weinstein of, you know, this traditional scenario of the casting count, you know, I'll give you the role in exchange for X, Y, and Z sexual favors.
And, I mean, it's just incredible to me.
It's absolutely incredible to me that all of this happened decades ago, started decades ago.
These are rich, powerful, beautiful, talented, famous, much-beloved actresses who are worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
And now that Harvey Weinstein has been written about, these allegations are swirling around, and as I predicted in my last video about this, much more serious than what was in the original New York Times article.
And within a couple of days, he's fired.
His wife says she's going to leave him because...
Well, I guess now he's humiliated and not just rich and powerful.
And he's left the country.
And now they're saying, well, it ends here, it ends now!
But you didn't do anything about it for decades, ladies and gentlemen.
There was a joke, I think it was in the 2013 Oscars, a comedian, when he was announcing the category for five actresses for a nomination.
I think it was Best Supporting Actress.
He said, and now here are the five ladies who will no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.
And everyone was like, ha, ha, ha.
People didn't say, what?
I don't get the joke. What's that about Harvey Weinstein?
I don't understand that.
But now, of course, like there's no internet, like they still control the media, like the old-style Hollywood moguls of the 1930s, they're saying they had no idea.
And everybody was laughing at that joke.
2013. So Gwyneth Paltrow says when she was 22 years old, so she got a role.
She was starring in an adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, Emma.
And before shooting began, Weinstein says, you know, come to my suite at the hotel for a work meeting.
And it began, I guess, as per normal.
And then Weinstein put his hands on Gwyneth Paltrow and said, hey, let's head to the bedroom for massages.
I guess I'm feeling tense or whatever it is, right?
And Gwyneth Paltrow said, I was a kid.
I was signed up. I was petrified, she said, right?
And... So she has finally come out and said or alleged that she was harassed sexually by Weinstein, who started her career going and later, for Shakespeare in Love, helped her to win an Academy Award.
So, I guess not so shocked that she would not continue working with him for, what, another half decade?
Now, Paltrow refused his, I don't know, grizzly bear-like grope fest, and she told Brad Pitt, who was her boyfriend at the time, what had happened.
Now, Mr. Pitt, Brad Pitt, then walked up to Weinstein and warned him not to have anything to do, not to touch his girlfriend again, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
And then Weinstein got angry at Gwyneth Paltrow.
Why did you tell someone? And she thought he was going to fire her, and I guess nothing happened.
She went on to start her movie career, and now she's an entrepreneur, and she doesn't really have to worry about getting movie roles and so on.
Now, Gwyneth Paltrow has a net worth of, give or take, about $60 million.
Brad Pitt, well, he's in the almost quarter of a billion dollar club, $240 million.
Now, I can understand and sympathize with.
You're some, you know, off the bus from Topeka, Kansas, young, nubile beauty, and you're being poured out by this guy, and you're concerned about the future and what he might do, and so on.
We'll get to the media's role in this in a little bit.
I can understand being pretty intimidated and not wanting to get sued and all that kind of stuff.
But, dear Lord, if you're worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars...
Now, this, of course, wasn't the case way back in the day, but there's been a lot of time since, and they've made a lot of money since.
If you don't have the courage to stand up to somebody you believe is a serial harasser and abuser, when you have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, when you are beloved, when you can get access, snap your fingers and have just about any magazine in the world, take your story, take your picture.
And if you can't actually do that, I guess my only question is why not?
Why not? Rosanna Arquette, she was in Pulp Fiction.
And she says, well, Weinstein did kind of the same thing.
So does Judith Goderes.
She's a French actress.
And Angelina Jolie. So, she made a movie called Playing by Heart in the late 90s, and she said that Weinstein made unwanted advances on her in the, again, solitary hotel room, which she then said no to.
And she basically said that she had a bad experience with him when she was young, and so she chose never to work with him again.
And she said she warned others when they did.
She warned other people about Harvey Weinstein.
She said in an email, quote, this behavior towards women in any field in any country is unacceptable.
Except, Angie, it kind of was in a way acceptable.
Because you didn't go public.
Angelina Jolie's net worth is $180 million.
I think you could hire a lawyer or two, can't you?
You play a lot of superheroes.
I mean, I guess I expected a little bit more from Lara Croft.
Maybe it's the Daisy Duke thigh-high bullet piercers.
I don't know. But it's unacceptable.
It stops now.
But it was stopped by other people.
And now you're claiming to be part of this victory?
Are you kidding me?
You're like the weird little sidekick who, like, the hero takes down the villain and then he jumps up and down on the dead villain saying, I did it!
I did it! I did it!
Now, as I said, things were going to get darker.
I mean, the idea that this kind of guy stops at a massage is, to me, somewhat unbelievable.
So, Tuesday, the New Yorker published a report including multiple allegations of...
Sexual assault. Including forced oral sex, forced vaginal sex.
And also, of course, the accounts of sexual harassment going all the way back to the 1990s.
And, you know, women saying, oh, he was big, he was scary, he was powerful, and I didn't know what to do, and I didn't want to alienate him, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, Weinstein has a spokeswoman...
Sally Hoffmeister.
And she said, and I quote, And this is just astounding stuff to me.
This is lifting the lid of a layer of hell that is truly astonishing.
And this is...
I know that I'm repeating this from the show I did on this last time.
It's important to understand just how powerful this is.
Now, this male feminist camouflage for predation is something that's important and I think well-worthy to discuss.
So, in 2015, Weinstein's company distributed a documentary about campus sexual assault called The Hunting Ground.
Now, this campus sexual assault thing is...
I mean, I've talked about it before, but women are safer.
On campuses than off campus.
And the whole...
I mean, it was recently fixed by Betsy Dubois to some degree, but this whole, you can't confront your accuser, you can't have a lawyer, this kind of stuff.
I mean, it's really, really terrible.
So you see, he's very concerned about campus sexual assault, inappropriate sexual behavior on campuses.
And this is kind of like a camouflage, right?
You understand? And it's important to really review this in your own mind about the people you know.
There are lots of other allegations coming out about male feminists.
You can look them up about how they're actually treating women.
As I mentioned before, Weinstein, longtime Democratic donor, hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton just last year in his home in Manhattan.
He employed the eldest daughter of former President Barack Obama, Malia Obama, as an intern just this year.
And he endowed a faculty chair in Gloria Steinem's name.
I mean, it's just absolutely astounding.
And during the Sundance Film Festival just in January, when Park City in Utah held its own particular version of, you know, these nationwide women's marches, Mr.
Weinstein joined the parade, you know, marching with women for women's rights and equality and egalitarianism.
Comedians, of course, have come under a lot of fire for not talking about this.
Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, I don't know.
He said to the Daily Mail Sunday that this very scathing and edgy and brave comedy show decided not to tell any jokes about Harvey Weinstein out of solidarity with New Yorkers?
It was like an on-the-street interview outside Saturday Night Live's studios.
Lauren Michaels told the reporter from the Mail that the show's producers...
Said, well, we're not going to have any commentary on Weinstein because, quote, it's a New York thing.
New York thing? Oh yeah, Weinstein was born in Queens.
Let me see if I can think of somebody else who was born in Queens.
It could be Donald Trump.
Well, at least Saturday Night Live has also respected Donald Trump and not done any comedy on him because it's a New York thing.
It's so transparent.
It's so ridiculous.
So even the show, which was hosted by Gal Gadot, tons of jokes.
Roasting the president.
Who's born in Queens, New York?
I mean, what can you say?
What can you say? What does It's a New York Thing really mean?
What does it really mean?
What else could the producer and Weinstein have in common?
I don't know. I almost sneezed for a moment.
So, another aspect of this is that the women weren't just afraid of Harvey Weinstein.
I mean, he's just a guy. What's he going to do, make a movie about you?
It's not very easy to sell.
So, one thing that seems to have happened with women who refused his advances, or maybe he was concerned about them going public, was that he...
Would supply information to the media, or the media would get a hold of information, and whoever his accuser was, their name would be dragged through the mud.
Right, so there was an Italian actress, Ambra Batalana Guterres.
Well, she filed a sexual assault complaint against Weinstein in 2015.
And lo and behold, details about her past began to appear in the tabloids, according to the New Yorker.
Wow! Isn't that interesting?
You file assault charges against the guy, and next thing you know, dirt about your past begins showing up in the tabloids.
What does that mean about the relationship of the media to Weinstein, of the media to these claims?
Now, the tape, the audio tape has emerged.
And it's pretty damning, in my view.
Right, so, this Italian woman was cornered.
She says he grabbed her breasts and stuck his hand up her skirt.
And she went to the cops, and the cops wired her up, and she went back.
And he basically admitted to it.
Ah, this is what I'm used to, you know, kind of thing.
And why he's not prosecuted...
See how wide and deep this corruption goes.
Does it go into the DA's office?
Does it go to the media? Well, I know from my own personal experience, you stand up for victims of child abuse when they're adults, and the media comes at you full bore.
It's just, tragically, the way it works.
So, I kind of want to introduce you to an idea.
This is like a teaching moment about how to achieve happiness.
You know, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
It's not a bad equation to start from.
In your mind, there are these two movies playing.
Now, these two movies are who you are and what you're actually doing and who you want to be or who you pretend to be.
Now, these...
It's not bad having these two movies because, let's say you're fat, you want to become thin, you have a future movie called Getting Thinner.
Let's suppose you're corrupt and you want to become better.
Let's suppose you're a spoon-clank smoker and you want to quit smoking.
Then you... Have a future vision of yourself that you strive to achieve.
You want to work out. You want to get fit.
You have a future vision of yourself that you're trying to achieve.
Only a documentary in your movie collection in your mind is not that great.
It doesn't give you anything to aspire to.
So it's great having a fantasy movie and then there's a documentary.
However, if these two diverge and you begin not using the fantasy to improve the documentary, not having the ideal to improve the empiricism of what you're actually doing, but if you just focus on the fantasy and then the fantasy is where you live and the documentary decays and falls away, it doesn't vanish. I've had this in my life.
And I've also talked to people who've done significant wrong, and they appear to be positive and chatty and happy and this and that and the other.
And when you're staring at the fantasy movie of your false self, of your ideal self, of your often imagined self, If you're staring at that movie and someone comes along and says, oh, oh, oh, hey, hey, over here, over here, look at this documentary.
Forget that fantasy. Look at the making of the fantasy.
Look behind the scenes. Then what happens is the emotions switch in people.
Amazingly quickly. I've seen this.
People who are happy, chatty, and so on, I'll confront them with the wrong that they've done.
And their face crumples like a face stabbed Nazgul.
Sorry, just re-watched the movies.
That's my... Analogy go-to place at the moment.
And taking people's view from the fantasy, from the fiction, to the documentary, to the facts, is astonishingly rapid.
Because both these movies are always playing in our minds.
And the purpose of philosophy, sure, use the fantasy to improve the documentary.
Use the fiction.
Use the ideal to improve the existence.
The before and after, right?
Everybody wants to be in the after shot.
So think of these two movies, the fantasy and the documentary, and the uneasy relationship we have with them.
Now Nihilists, of course, Determinists and so on, well, they just have the documentary and it's pretty empty.
Now, we all know, deep down in our heart of hearts, deep down in our second brain, you know, we have a second brain.
We say, I've got a gut sense, and my gut tells me.
They're not getting. There's a second brain down there, which is very powerful, and I believe is used to detect evil, which is why a lot of people want you to live in abstractions and live outside your body, not be connected to the reptile sense of predation and prey.
So we all know, deep down, our relationship is Between the fantasy and the documentary, between the ideal and who we actually are.
And if these two get too far apart, or if there's no tether between them, in other words, if the fantasy isn't being used to elevate the documentary to something better, if these two become disconnected, then we live in one or the other.
If we can't handle our ideals, or if we resent, if we fail to live up to them, The fantasy.
Then we become nihilistic, we become greedy, we become empty, we become deterministic, we become horrible people, frankly.
Because deep down we know, we know the relationship between these two movies.
And when you come across an evil in this world, when you come across an immorality in this world, Of course, in some ways, often you wish you hadn't.
You wish you had continued with the ignorance's bliss not knowing.
But once you have knowledge of immorality, you have a responsibility.
Sadly, once you...
It's sort of like there's a plague going on, and then you suddenly discover which plant heals the disease, which plant cures the disease.
Well, you can do nothing, I suppose, but then you're kind of causal in the deaths because you could have prevented them very easily.
You don't have to go and heal everyone, you just have to spread the knowledge.
So, these actors and actresses, and people are focusing on the women, but the women talked and the men knew, so it's the actors and the actresses.
These are rich and powerful people.
They are well-loved.
In fact, their entire bankability rests on them being loved, so to speak.
And these rich and powerful people who are loved and can get magazine articles like that spent decades not taking on this one guy.
Why not? They're worth tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars.
Are they afraid of Lawsets.
Are you kidding me?
Can you imagine in her prime, Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow or other people who are beautiful and loved going up against Harvey Weinstein?
Being sued by Harvey Weinstein?
Can you imagine what would have happened?
What were they afraid of?
I mean, they've got their own businesses.
Angelina Jolie, I think, has her own studio.
What were they scared of?
It's unfathomable to me.
I mean, I'm here on YouTube, and I took one of the first interviews from James Damore, who had been fired from Google for pointing out scientific facts about the differences between men and women.
You have to take a stand, even if it might affect you negatively.
Of course you do. We can see the effects of what happens when you don't.
I'll get to that in a second. But, ladies and gentlemen, famous people, actors, actresses, I want you to just think about this.
Because you actually live these fantasy movies, right?
They dress you up, they put you in costume, they give you a big sword, they give you thigh boots with weapons on them and so on, and you live in this.
But what is the actual empirical evidence of what you have done with your lives in terms of ethics?
You've played virtue. And how far is the relationship?
Could you not find inspiration from the courageous characters you played to do something somewhat courageous in your own life?
Because I want to just talk about this with regards to women, because this female empowerment thing, they're all like female empowerment and so on.
Here's what you're actually communicating to women.
Ladies. Actresses. And you know this.
I'm just turning your attention away from the fantasy, away from the glitz, the glamour, what you think is feeding you, it's actually eating you.
I'm just taking your attention away from the fantasy, from the fiction, and putting it to the documentary.
Here's what the documentary clearly broadcasts to people.
By not acting for decades, despite being rich, powerful, famous, beautiful, talented...
What you're communicating is that women can't be heroes even when they're famous, staggeringly wealthy, powerful, influential, much beloved, and have access to all the media they could imagine.
Women can't be heroes even when they're famous and rich and powerful.
What do you think that communicates to the average woman who's not worth $180 million?
But I can't do it even when I'm worth a lot, even when I'm worth staggeringly more money than you could ever accumulate in a hundred or two hundred lifetimes.
That's what you're communicating.
It is incredibly disempowering to say, well, I'm beautiful, rich, famous, talented, but I can't do the right thing.
I won't do the right thing. What does that say about women and what does it say about men?
What has happened to men's capacity or desire or ability to protect women?
To protect the women they claim to love?
Because here's the thing.
Let's say these allegations are true.
Just as a thought experiment, and it doesn't have anything fundamentally to do with Weinstein.
We've all seen or been exposed to various levels and kinds of corruption in this world.
Let's just say these allegations are true.
Or let's say, in your mind, as an actor or an actress or a producer or a director or someone who knows about these things, let's just say that you believe they might be true.
Seth MacFarlane is making jokes at the 2013 Oscars about women no longer having to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein and everyone laughs.
Oh, come on. People knew.
Even if you were completely blind to that, you'd say, well, I don't understand.
Why is that joke funny?
It's like, oh, well, you see, Weinstein has this reputation.
Everyone laughed, right? So here's the thing.
Let's just say that in your mind you believe...
These allegations, even the more serious ones, of rape are true.
You have then your fantasy movie, and you have your documentary.
Now in your fantasy movie, you're rich, talented, famous, beautiful, everybody loves you, you're the toast of the town, you're in demand at parties, you're on the cover of magazines, that's your fantasy world.
In your documentary, deep down in your heart of hearts, in the place where illusion cannot scrub truth.
In your documentary, you're standing at a door listening to women getting raped and doing nothing.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
That is the documentary.
You sail on to riches, to wealth, to power, to fame.
You take the devil's bargain.
And you achieve all of this material success, all of this artistic success, all of this adulation and worship and praise and envy.
That's your fantasy movie.
That's where you live.
The reality is a sort of documentary of enabling and covering up for A potential alleged serial abuser and rapist.
That's the documentary.
The fantasy is completely disconnected.
And this is why, in my view, these stars are so messed up.
This is why they can't sustain relationships.
This is why they have weird addictions.
This is why they get endless tattoos.
This is why they're so strange.
They're strange because there is now no longer any connection between the fantasy and the documentary.
Between what they portray themselves as and who they actually are.
Jolie and Paltrow, a series of disastrous relationships, divorces, can't sustain a relationship.
You can only have a relationship with another human being through reality.
It is the documentary that connects you to other human beings.
You can't connect to people through fantasy.
You understand? So if you live in this fantasy world as a way of recoiling...
From the documentary of what you've actually done, of what you've actually enabled, of what you've actually stood by and let happen.
If you live up there, you can't connect with anyone.
You probably have no idea, if you're an even remotely grounded person, how unbelievably lonely and isolated and full of self-loathing it is to recoil From your collusion with corruption.
And to live in this fantasy world that doesn't exist.
You can't connect to anyone.
You have contempt for those who worship you.
You have disgust towards those who praise you.
And the money, the pieces of silver, stand in your bank account like the towering sore on eye of a guilty conscience.
You can't be at peace.
You must become a workaholic.
You must become sinister.
And you must, of course, forever portray easy and instant sexual gratification in your movies.
You must collude and participate in the destruction of the family, of the West, of your culture.
You've already destroyed yourself.
What is Western civilization to you?
And you must become so desperate to drink the foggy, brain-shredding elixir of this fantasy movie and to live there forever that anybody who comes to you with the documentary, anybody who comes to you with the reality of who you are and what you've enabled and who and how many The trail of victims are who lie in your wake.
You say, well, I was young.
I was just a kid. I was intimidated.
I was scared. Why are you still scared at 40?
Why are you still scared when you have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank?
Why are you still scared when you have all of the funky weaponry of fame and media access?
Why are you still scared?
If you remember, of course, what it was like to be that young ingenue, The young kid off the bus, perhaps.
Then surely you should have sympathy for the other potential victims that might be trailing after your silence.
But you're colluding with corruption.
You're colluding with alleged criminality, with alleged rapes.
Do you have any idea what that kind of Documentary does to someone's happiness and sense of self, sense of identity, sense of virtue, sense of possibility, capacity to be loved.
There's a reason why Brad Pitt says that he spent a lot of time in a marijuana haze and he drank too much.
You are invited into a world of exploitation and unreality.
You make money for other people and you make money for yourself.
But the money doesn't bring you happiness because it is founded upon collusion and silence.
Please, everyone, meditate on this.
Ruminate on this. Think of this. What is the relationship between your fantasy and your documentary?
What are the two movies? Are you looking between the two and trying to bring them closer together?
Are you elevating the documentary to the levels of the ideal?
Is your fantasy something that you aim towards and bring yourself towards?
Or is your fantasy a recoiling and an unreality that takes you like an addiction so that you can avoid ever looking at the documentary of who you actually are and what you've actually done?
You can be loved by the masses so often That means you can't be loved by individuals in your life.
You can be loved by individuals in your life.
Often that means the masses may hate you.
Well, that's a deal I'm very aware of and one that I pledged myself to serve the truth, to serve virtue, to serve the love that I have and share with those in my life.
To hell with the masses.
Let them see something glorious for once.
And if that glory shatters the fantasy and brings the documentary to light, well, damn well, stare at it, look at it, absorb it.
Know who you are, what you have done.
Because without that, there is no salvation possible.
Without seeing what is, without seeing the compromises, you cannot see the world, you cannot see the powers that run it.
You must see what you have done.
The compromises you have made, the surrenders to corruption you have made.
We have all made them at one time or another.
We just need to see them.
In order to fix what is going on, we must first understand that you cannot fix a complicated motor in the dark.
And for these movie stars, these highly paid fakers, you played all these heroes.
You played heroes in movies.
You picked up trucks and threw them at buildings.
You swirled through Gotham in a cape.
You had magical powers.
And now, after all this time, here's what we know.