While I was away I viewed from a distance the amazing explosion in stories about Harvey Weinstein. First a trickle and then a flood of stories emerged.
What interests me in the story isn’t the reaction of HRC or Bernie or anyone else in political world. It is the incredible naivete of people. I have worked for two major law firms. Some of the leading partners in those firms had affairs with young staff as a matter of course. They were inherently coercive affairs: my wife came home one night and talked about a partner pressuring her. Where does she go? Does she just tolerate it? She was young: moving to another firm would raise questions about why she wanted to leave.
Polly Townbee writes:
I guess that this week all women my age have been mentally re-running the bum-pinching, grabbing, intimidating humiliations from men in power of our youth. I remember as a gauche and inadequate 22-year-old reporter, that interview with the author Saul Bellow. Bored, bullying, he ordered me to walk ahead of him in the park so he could look at my legs as they were better than my questions. And shamingly, I did. Mordecai Richler, the Canadian novelist, assumed a fixer had set me up for the night with him on his publicity tour in exchange for an interview. He was outraged when I ran off. I never wrote those things into my interviews, as now we would.
I would learn later as a prosecutor that the behavior of the powerful extended fair beyond requests to walk ahead of them. I would try a rape case where the mother, unsure of what to do and scared for her life, would purchase contraceptives for her daughter. A daughter that was being forced to have sex with her father.
Trump boasted of how his wealth and power allowed him to sleep with married women. There are enough allegations for me to believe many of the allegations of harassment.
If Trump leaves earlier, those allegations are far more likely to be the reason than the Russian stuff.
Trump. Bill Clinton. O’Rielly. Ailes. Bellow.
We think these are the exceptions.
Not so much.
