Column: With Harvey Weinstein, this women's advocate fell off a moral cliff (via latimesopinion)
Honestly, I was not expecting to learn that two attorneys — one a well-known champion of women, the other a pillar of the establishment — would turn out to be the bad guys in the new book “She Said,” by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times investigative reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein sex harassment and assault scandal in October 2017.
What did come as a shock is the way that attorneys Lisa Bloom, a champion of women’s rights, and David Boies, who famously argued in favor of gay marriage, among other things, took up Weinstein’s cause in brutal, compromising ways.Was it only coincidence that Bloom’s book on the Trayvon Martin case was going to be made into a miniseries by the Weinstein Co.
A contrite Bloom, who declined my interview request, has tweeted her regret and described her involvement with Weinstein as “a colossal mistake.”Kantor and Twohey obtained a December 2016 pitch written by Bloom to Weinstein, outlining how the two of them, together, could undermine Weinstein’s first public accuser, the actor Rose McGowan, who alleged that Weinstein had raped her in 1997 and had received a $100,000 settlement from him that included a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA.
They have created a damning portrait of a system that is designed to protect perpetrators by silencing victims while purporting to make them whole.But also with cash settlements that include the prolific use of extremely strict nondisclosure agreements. These agreements ostensibly provide confidentiality to women who may not want to go public with their accusations, but they also allow predators to keep preying without professional fallout, as long as their pockets are deep enough.
As Levy points out, a man who pays a million dollars to a woman he has assaulted is probably not going to go around blabbing about it.One of Weinstein’s victims, Rowena Chiu, told Kantor she felt she’d signed “a deal with the devil.”
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