Fin: Sexual misconduct seems to be allowed now

The Eagles win again, Anne Hathaway bleeds green, that Kanye AI video, and more in this week’s notes column.

The reckoning against sexual misconduct, in Hollywood and elsewhere, really got going in 2017, with the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, followed by a wide variety of actors, directors, studio executives, and others in other industries.

I would say there’s been a backlash to that of late, but really the backlash began likely within weeks of the original reckoning. The first New York Times Weinstein story was in October of 2017, and there were “Has #MeToo gone too far?” stories as early as January of 2018.

But if you look at what’s happened in just the last few weeks, one would get the impression that #MeToo is really and truly dead. Cancel culture was always overstated, but now, it’s practically a distant memory.

Donald Trump, of course, was elected president again after he was found liable for sexual abuse, on top of the numerous other accusations from throughout the years. And he’s brought quite a few men accused of sexual harassment, and worse, along with him.

Pete Hegseth, after a credible rape accusation and all sorts of other reports about years of drunken bad behavior, was not only confirmed as secretary of defense, but Democrats reportedly were reluctant to raise that against him. Say what you will about his alleged Drake-like sexual proclivities, but if Matt Gaetz hadn’t antagonized half the Republicans in Congress, he’d probably be attorney general today.

RFK Jr. has been accused of all sorts of sexual misconduct, none of which derailed his nomination. The federal sex-trafficking probe against Trump pal Vince McMahon, which was serious enough to get him thrown out of WWE twice in two years, was dropped this week, ahead of the confirmation hearing of McMahon’s wife Linda.

Even longtime Trump hanger-on Corey Lewandowski, accused in 2021 of drunkenly groping the wife of a donor, got a job this week with the Department of Homeland Security; I remember the days when it would be controversial for a cabinet secretary’s longtime mistress to get a government job.

What’s important isn’t that these people are repentant; almost none of them are. Some claim their innocence, others say nothing, but the overall attitude, as with most things from that crowd, is, “What are you gonna do about it?”

The Trump Administration’s love of past accused harassers even extends to some of Hollywood’s most notorious offenders.

Puck’s Kim Masters wrote this week about the backstory of how Brett Ratner, exiled from Hollywood back in 2017 for a long list of alleged sexual offenses, came to become the director of Amazon’s $40 million documentary about Melania Trump. The details are both horrifying and hilarious — including the part where the Ratner deal seems to have been brokered by the same guy who put Sean Penn with El Chapo, and Oliver Stone with Vladimir Putin —  although perhaps the biggest laugh was that “Melania herself said she was a fan of Ratner’s work.”

And Ratner’s not the only Hollywood #MeToo exile making a sudden comeback. Jonathan Majors — convicted of domestic violence charges — has a movie coming out next month and a former co-star vouching for him. Armie Hammer, James Franco, and Kevin Spacey are in various stages of acting comebacks. The English Teacher was renewed, despite a recent, pretty horrific accusation against its creator and star, Brian Jordan Alvarez.

Mark Halperin, exiled from political news for the last few years, has a new company with $4 million in investment. Jeffrey Toobin just got hired by the New York Times, less than four years after the same newspaper wrote about “The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin.”

I half-expected to hear news that Bill Cosby is launching an arena tour this summer.

This new permissiveness towards sexual misconduct is not a great development, and it’s what Thomas Chatterson Williams this week called “vice signaling”- the backlash to “cancel culture” is such that being a huge racist, sexual harasser and/or piece of shit is celebrated in and of itself. And that’s almost certainly not headed anywhere good.

Unless, of course, there’s a backlash to the backlash to the backlash. If there’s hope for that,, it comes from an interview Seth Rogen gave this week:

Since the end of the Civil War, America’s remained a very divided country in a lot of ways. People get sick of seeing fucking hippies doing acid and fucking on their lawns, and they’re like, Let’s fucking clean up these streets a little bit. And then people get sick of seeing fucking dorks cleaning up the streets and they go back the other way. That’s not to say it doesn’t have very real and troubling ramifications on many people’s lives, but I try to maintain hope that the ball will roll onwards, even though it might be wobbling back and forth.”

That AI anti-Kanye ad

At least Kanye West appears to have permanently canceled himself, at least enough to get his music banned from my son’s upcoming bar mitzvah. (And yes, I’m all for a Kanye conservatorship, provided the conservator is Jewish.)