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In the opening arguments to Harvey Weinstein’s criminal trial in Los Angeles this week, the producer’s defense lawyer pointed to his moldering, overweight client and asked the rhetorical question, “Do you think these beautiful women had sex with him because he’s hot?”
The inference is that poor Harvey was not going to get laid unless in exchange for what he provided in career advancement to conniving “Hollywood wannabes.”
That was not my experience as one of his victims. When I was chased around a conference table at a business meeting, or trying to flee a hotel suite, the last thing on my mind was my career: I just wanted to make it to the exit. Some women weren’t as lucky and became trapped by a solid wall of putrid flesh. Others went into a well-documented survival response to sexual assault and froze, praying it would soon be over. So where is the transaction? If Weinstein gave some women money in exchange for their silence, if he threw crumbs of favors to his victims who were desperate to claw back something as solace for what he had taken from them, these actions are no more commerce, a trading of sex, than hot pennies flung contemptuously to burn the hands of the poor.
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