Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

The power structure in Hollywood has been disgusting for many, many years.

I mean, journos working on a story doesn't imply "it's imminent," people tried to report the Weinstein story for a decade (or more?)

kim masters mentioned that she and some colleagues had been chasing down the story for years and that it’s been impossible getting people on the record

https://apnews.com/2036175b01ff44d8b1ba38b81037a7db/Ex-Weinstein-assistant-says-she-tried-to-stop-him-in-1998?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=APEntertainment

Zelda Perkins quit Weinstein’s film company in 1998, along with a colleague who accused the movie mogul of trying to rape her.

As part of a settlement, Perkins signed a non-disclosure agreement. It kept her silent, but also committed Weinstein to attend therapy for three years. And it required the company to spill the beans to its then-owner, the Walt Disney Co., or to fire Weinstein if he made any more payouts over alleged wrongdoing.

Perkins said her hope was to “create protection for people in the future.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Perkins chose the therapist Weinstein was to consult. She doesn’t know whether he ever went to the sessions.

“I have no idea if any of the obligations were upheld,” Perkins told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

She said that a year after she left the company she ran into Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival, and “he told me that everything I had done was pointless.”

ah, good to know

tweet, for those interested:

My colleague and I spent a lot of time chasing this story. No one had a word of substance to say. If that’s changed, you know where to find us. https://t.co/kN7PCoz6Ar

— Kim Masters (@kimmasters) March 27, 2018

(some masterful legal needle-threading there)

i do wonder how ironclad the ndas that were signed by parents could be. i also think that the general tumult at viacom could lead to more things coming out in the open

losing the support of a corporate backer seems to make it a little less intimidating for victims to come forward, which is depressing in its own way

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/business/canceled-deals-and-pulped-books-as-the-publishing-industry-confronts-sexual-harassment.html?smid=tw-share

I know a lot of that Twitter thread is speculation, but if turns out that there *is* a line that can be drawn between Schneider and the last decade of Amanda Bynes having personal problems in the public eye, this has the potential to be even bigger than Weinstein imo

Like it may cause a fundamental rethinking of tabloid culture writ large

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/business/canceled-deals-and-pulped-books-as-the-publishing-industry-confronts-sexual-harassment.html?smid=tw-share

― j., Wednesday, March 28, 2018 8:15 AM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

huh i nearly distributed the book in the header here

I know a lot of that Twitter thread is speculation, but if turns out that there *is* a line that can be drawn between Schneider and the last decade of Amanda Bynes having personal problems in the public eye, this has the potential to be even bigger than Weinstein imo

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, March 28, 2018 8:41 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Like it may cause a fundamental rethinking of tabloid culture writ large

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, March 28, 2018 8:42 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i want to believe but then again nothing really seems to have happened after it was revealed Weinstein had people who are still currently employed as gossip columnists on retainer to character assassinate accusers (cf. the woman who rejected his advances and then went undercover to make an audio tape.) I think Ronan Farrow went at some of them a bit, but didn't name names iirc. I think if you're a gossip columnist you're already maybe a bit less affected by moral qualms than others and your immediate peers aren't gonna call you out much either.

Yeah, but the obvious difference is that Weinstein was, to most Us/People/TMZ-reading human beings, is a behind the scenes figure, if on their radar at all. Amanda Bynes is a tabloid star that we've been rubbernecking for years .

Like, I'm saying, that if someone can successfully connect the dots from the last 20 years of Perez Hilton/TMZ "hahahaha Britney/Lindsay/Amanda is such a TRAINWRECK" to "Children who suffer from sexual abuse often have tumultuous adulthoods and also that abuse came from inside the industry" it might cause some amount of reflection on just what the fuck we've been doing

i think it's also pretty logical to imagine that a lot of "an insider told us..."-type sourcing about how much of a "trainwreck" someone is comes from people close to the ones responsible for the abuse, if not the abusers themselves.

i mean i guess that also did happen w/Weinstein in exactly that way, it was discovered he was putting out stories about Mira Sorvino and others iirc.

I'm optimistic about Whiney's point but I'm also afraid it's just as easily going to be another round of victim blaming, or blaming the parents of victims.

People have this fucked-up internalized idea that if someone's successful as a youth that being around predatory adults is just part of the game, and they're supposed to somehow magically sidestep those situations or accept it as part of the cost of success.

Or, if they're really vile, they're tweeting around how hollywood is run by liberals/jews/pedophiles and what did you expect

I regret even typing that last sentence but I made the mistake of looking at twitter replies earlier today and that appears to be the idiot sentiment

It takes a long time and a sustained, concerted effort to expose victims of sexual crimes to come forward. With Weinstein, there was a mountain of evidence and the story took years to reach a tipping point because of the stakeholders involved. That's because the stakeholders...are stakeholders in the very system that has evolved to intrinsically protect itself.

It's not only NDAs--which in Hollywood are legendarily tight--it's the threats of getting sued that would and should scare anyone against litigating or pressing charges. Defending yourself in a countersuit is cost prohibitive for the vast majority of accusers even outside of the entertainment world. And as noted by the silence of many, it's a bad for the career.

tabloid culture has survived for decades' worth of scandal, I'm sure it can outlast this.

can NDAs be made constitutionally illegal? I know noncompetes are illegal or unenforceable in some jurisdictions.

popbitch's four-part series on american media (publishers of enquirer etc) was very good reading, if you haven't read it yet

http://popbitch.com/2017/10/the-united-states-of-american-media-inc/

also, ami is responsible for this new publication...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-publisher-pal-puts-saudi-propaganda-magazine-in-us-supermarkets

NDAs are contracts between two parties so they couldn't be made "constitutionally illegal" in that way.

Noncompetes are very much enforced on a regular basis in many venues and most states have plenty of case law to support their enforcement, particularly in the past 20 years.

And by "enforced" I mean that lawyers have the confidence to sue, file injunction, etc. based on a failure to adhere to an NDA or noncompete.

really? last I'd heard, the majority of noncompete clauses don't hold up, unless they can prove trade secrets are in play

ah, now an x-post, and yeah... if you don't have the time or money for lawyers, noncompetes work

and unfortunately in Hollywood the other party is near-guaranteed to out-money you

bynes somewhere all but named schneider as her abuser (I found that yesterday while digging around) but I suppose no one cared?

Is that from recently or awhile back?

are you talking about the crazy days and nights post?

http://www.crazydaysandnights.net/2018/03/blind-item-13-her-words.html

the thing is, with threads like that above, they're contaminated with either discredited stuff (people still using CDAN as a source despite their being debunked years ago) or outright conspiracy theory (people unironically bringing the Illuminati in)

https://nypost.com/2012/04/01/how-crazy-days-and-nights-fooled-hollywood/

sure, i mean there's literally a 'some of this stuff is fiction' disclaimer at the bottom of every page. anyway here's some more recent coverage

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/10/crazy-days-and-nights-enty-interview

https://www.thedailybeast.com/whos-next-the-mysterious-blind-item-king-who-exposed-weinstein-spacey-and-lauer-before-the-media

Like, I'm saying, that if someone can successfully connect the dots from the last 20 years of Perez Hilton/TMZ "hahahaha Britney/Lindsay/Amanda is such a TRAINWRECK" to "Children who suffer from sexual abuse often have tumultuous adulthoods and also that abuse came from inside the industry" it might cause some amount of reflection on just what the fuck we've been doing

otm + corey haim :(

no I saw it somewhere else. but maybe it was fake, dunno. let's think about this though: either there has been a concerted effort for years to bring down dan schneider fueled by the internet and people who hate him; or he's a fucking creep. his work speaks for itself and certainly lends credence to the latter.

amanda bynes did tweet (then retract the tweets) about her dad being abusive, maybe that's what you're thinking of

like most gossip sites, CDAN gets things right sometimes. And the Post has been in the bag with publicists for years, so it's reasonable for wags and pimps to find useful tools to wage public battles over "truth" or "facts".

It was lore for a long time that they don't hold up because a) there wasn't much case law a couple of decades ago, b) it's still expensive for a company to sue, and c) enforceability/damages is more obvious in some industries than others. So, it's not that they don't "hold up" as much as most of the time, it's not worth it for a company to pursue it. If the damages are obvious however...

xp

tbh I looked at that CDAN site once this week and most of the blind items are vague enough that they could apply to a handful of people

maybe there's a strong nostradamus/stopped clock effect thing going on

"This B list former child star recently got out of rehab, but her friends think she's headed back"

"I sense that you are worried about a loved one or relative whose name includes the letter... E"

An aside, but would be interesting to interview Michael Musto about the past year and blind items.

Would love to know how he ever knows who is playing who

the celeb gossip industry's been going for ~100 years now and are likely making more money off exploiting people than ever i dont see them stopping

I noticed in the UK some of that press has been adapting to the current climate with lots of "LOOK AT THIS RAPIST MONSTER"-type covers.

profanity standards aside didnt Fatty Arbuckle get the same treatment in 1921?

Like it may cause a fundamental rethinking of tabloid culture writ large

― Whiney G. Weingarten

peter thiel tried to warn us

profanity standards aside didnt Fatty Arbuckle get the same treatment in 1921?

it's about time this thread had someone show up to argue that every accusation is false and part of a conspiracy, now we can really get down to brass tacks

Is that what you are about to do?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/john-kricfalusi-ren-stimpy-underage-sexual-abuse

oh no :(