The alleged perpetrator is getting counselling; the tarnished figure seeking help. This was what film producer and Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein claimed with each allegation of sexual harassment and abuse that began in the aftermath of articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker.
'Multiple women,' went the New Yorker piece, 'share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.' But the contribution by Ronan Farrow alluded to a tendency that would become violently expressive: Weinstein had been, for decades, 'trailed by rumours of sexual harassment and assault'. It had been 'an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond' but efforts to out the points had been frustrated.
Condemnations duly flowed, stunned by that man behind Miramax and the Weinstein Company, fund raiser for Democratic party candidates, not least of all Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a doyen of progressive causes and, even, dare it be said, women's causes.
Hollywood houses and produces its own hypocrisies. Issues are literally reduced to screen-like dimensions. Complexity vanishes. But more to the point, abuses behind the screen become apologias, the justifiable vicissitudes of having a dream industry. It entails a pact between the dream maker and participants, where all are soiled.
Figures of power and collusion have come out to wash themselves of the Weinstein factor in what can only be described as a culture of rampant complicity. Impure bodies are seeking purity, cleansing, the confessional distancing: by accusing Weinstein, by burying him in reputational ignominy, the nightmare will be exposed, and the complicity repudiated.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in an act of minted hypocrisy, voted to expel the producer over the weekend. 'We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues, but also to send a message that the era of wilful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predator behaviour and workplace harassment in our industry is over.'
As John Oliver of Last Week Tonight explained on Sunday, the statement was remarkable for having been released by a 'group that counts among its current members Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, and Mel Gibson'.
"When film contracts mattered, and sponsorship counted, silence was assured. In the subsequent horror is a hollow, opportunistic echo."
Polanski is a notable case in point, himself a career-making (and breaking) director who had such defenders as Whoopi Goldberg claiming that his sexual misdemeanour against a 13-year-old was