Two news items — President Trump pardoning African American hero Jack Johnson, and the arrest of dirtbag Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein — got me thinking: if Hillary Clinton had prevailed in 2016, instead of discussing whether or not the president will get a Nobel Peace Prize, we’d probably be talking about whether HRC will pardon Weinstein.
That is, if Weinstein would have even been charged.
It’s not far-fetched. Not only are Hillary Clinton and Harvey Weinstein longtime BFFs, this is a woman who defended, protected and enabled her sexual predator and likely rapist husband for decades, and dutifully went out of her way to attack and discredit his female accusers.
As The Washington Post wrote, “She discredited claims later revealed to be true and worked behind the scenes to help manage the allegations, according to former aides.”
Juanita Broaddrick, an extraordinarily credible Bill Clinton accuser, told New York Magazine in February, “Donald Trump gave Bill Clinton’s victims a voice that we had been denied for two decades.” And they say, ‘Well, why did you go to that debate?’ Well, I had been told for two decades to go back in the woodwork, I didn’t matter. So here was my opportunity to be heard in a huge public forum. . . . I thought it was important not only because of Hillary running but because who she would take to the White House with her.”
Bill Clinton has had compelling sexual misconduct allegations leveled against him for decades.
Earlier this year, a report from the New York Times indicated that Hillary protected an adviser on her 2008 campaign after he was accused of repeated sexual misconduct
Broaddrick commented: “Hillary Clinton’s actions of protecting her male staffer [Burns Strider] accused of sexually harassing a young female staffer did not surprise me. Hillary’s relationship with this man as a faith adviser was important to her personally. Therefore, the young woman’s degrading assaults took a back seat to Hillary’s own needs. Just because Hillary is a woman does not automatically translate her championing other women, especially if it does not fit her agenda.”
Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at the UCLA said, “Women can be not only complicit but enabling in sexual abuse, and we women as a community, as a society, need to recognize that every single one of us needs to take a good look at who we’ve stood up for and who we haven’t.”
The dirtbag
Harvey Weinstein is accused of sexually assaulting and harassing more than 80 women — including “Boardwalk Empire” star Paz de la Huerta, who claims he raped her twice in 2010. The criminal charges filed against him of both first-degree rape and third-degree rape are connected to Weinstein forcing himself on one woman while the criminal sex act charge is related to allegedly forcing another woman to perform oral sex on him, according to sources close to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
His firebrand accuser, actress Rose McGowan, made a series of TV appearances Friday in reaction to the news that Weinstein had surrendered himself into custody. More than seven months after the allegations first broke, Weinstein was charged with first- and third-degree rape and a criminal sex act in the first degree for forcible sexual acts against two women in 2013 and 2004, respectively.
On Thursday evening, McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of rape and is as an activist in the #MeToo era, posted about his arrest on Instagram.
I, and so many of Harvey Weinstein’s survivors, had given up hope that our rapist would be held accountable by law. Twenty years ago, I swore that I would right this wrong. Today we are one step closer to justice. We were young women who were assaulted by Weinstein and later terrorized by his vast network of complicity.
The culture of complicity also runs deep among Clintonian democrats. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote,
Not one—I repeat, not one—of Clinton’s team in 1992 did not harbor the fear that a “flaw” might embarrass and even humiliate everybody. Was this not a recognition of the character issue, however oblique? Some thought it would be funny money, some thought it would be “bimbo eruptions,” a few guessed that it would be a sordid combination of the two. All were prepared to gloss it over in favor of the big picture, of getting the job done, or of getting a job for themselves.
And Weinstein was equally happy to act as hatchet man.
Back in 2000, Weinstein used his publishing company, Talk/Miramax, to take revenge on those involved in Bill Clinton’s impeachment, two years earlier.
His publishing house commissioned a book by John Connolly to dig into the private sex lives of the people who had helped expose Clinton, including the lawyers behind Paula Jones’ lawsuit, independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s staff, Matt Drudge, and reporter Michael Isikoff.
That’s how tight Weinstein is with the Clintons. I find it hard to believe that people would have been so bold to dare call out Weinstein if Hillary Clinton were “Madame President”.
On Good Morning America this morning, McGowan remarked on Weinstein turning himself in on a “slow media” holiday weekend Friday: “They did something nice for him, that means he has friends in high places still.”
McGowan also appeared on Megyn Kelly Today for a lengthy segment. “This man had hunting grounds all over the world,” McGowan said. “He had accomplices and a complicity machine. He was the cult leader of Hollywood, their king. He tied with God for thanks at the Oscars. And to see that constantly, and to live in that town — and to see people lay wreaths at his feet even though they knew, today is a good day.”
Early Friday morning, Asia Argento — the Italian actress who accused Weinstein of rape and spoke out against him in a searing speech at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival — took to Twitter to comment. “Today Harvey Weinstein will take his first step on his inevitable descent to hell,” she wrote. “We, the women, finally have real hope for justice.”
At around 7:30 a.m. ET on Friday, Weinstein turned himself into the New York Police Department at the first precinct in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, just blocks away from the office of his longtime Weinstein Co. offices.
In court, when he was arraigned, bond was set at $10 million or $1 million cash; he delivered on the latter. Weinstein relinquished his passport and agreed to wear a monitoring device that allows him to be tracked 24/7. He can only travel between New York and Connecticut unless he receives approval from the D.A.’s office and court to travel elsewhere.
Not long after his surrender, Argento tweeted a video of Weinstein’s perp walk and asked, “What took you so long Harvey?”
Weinstein, who has denied any allegations of nonconsensual sex, has been facing multiple criminal charges in New York, Los Angeles and London. Earlier this week, federal prosecutors in Manhattan launched a criminal probe into sex-abuse allegations against Weinstein, focusing on whether he lured women to cross state lines under false pretenses for the purpose of committing sex crimes.
More than a century ago champion boxer Jack Johnson was convicted of violating the Mann Act for transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes”. President Bill Cinton issued no pardon, nor did President Obama, under whom Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.
It’s interesting to note that Weinstein previously evaded arrest in 2015. Last fall, the city faced backlash after it was revealed that it failed to urge prosecute Weinstein after Italian model Ambra Battilana accused him of groping her during a business meeting in 2015.
Even though the police worked with Battilana to get Weinstein to acknowledge the incident in a recording, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., declined to press charges.
5 Responses
This used to be a good porn industry blog. The only thing porn about these articles that I keep visualizing you on your knees sucking Trump’s dick. GEEZ. Biased much???
Trolls like you are emblematic of the fundamental problem with ideologues and fanatics: they are incapable of giving the devil his due. And you have the nerve to accuse this post/site of bias? LMFAO.
Trump did a horrible thing by signing FOSTA, which we stated. But he did a good thing by pardoning Jack Johnson. Hillary is monumentally corrupt. And Stormy Daniels is no friggin’ freedom fighter. It’s a con job to get her feature dancing rate up.
Even the site’s namesake and previous operator agrees that Hillary would have been worse than Trump, so your point is moot.
Don’t like the articles, don’t read them.
No, that’s not a troll. I’m a longtime reader and very turned off by the Trump bias on this blog. There’s little to no logical reason for it, and it comes off like right-wing posturing for attention, which you (for this moment) are getting from me. Between you and Langhorne, what was once a blog that I loved reading as an escape has turned into an inexplicable Trump haven. I recognize ther is some quality in your reporting VOR, but more noticeable has been your Trump bias, and that’s putting it mildly.
On the topic of Jack Johnson, he signed a piece of paper pardoning a dead guy. I love the story of Jack Johnson, he was fearless in the face of serious racial issues, but he was also no model citizen. He deserved his pardon for his non-crimes. But while you are pointing out idealogues, you are leveling accusations at someone for what you guess would be who you GUESS she might pardon. And you’re calling out trolls for your random missive? You want Trump given credit. #MeToo probably wouldn’t have taken hold if it weren’t for how motivated women were against the sex-offending, lying misogynist in the White House. So congratulations. Congratulations on your ability to still call him out on Fosta, but that doesn’t justify fever dreaming over who Hillary WOULD HAVE pardoned. Were we so lucky, and that is not even a positive comment on Hillary, but were we so lucky, employees might have held onto the ability to join together to sue bad acting employers. When the rank and file right finally wake up, it will be far too late, I fear.
I’m sorry that you find my opinion pieces so confounding.
I know very well who the commenter is. Longtime reader or not he’s trolling me with his asinine comment, and I stand by my reply.
It appears to me that I have failed as a writer to the extent that, with regard to my work, you the reader are have difficulty differentiating between someone who loves Trump (not me) and someone (me) who despises Hillary Clinton; sees that Stormy Daniels, Jessica Drake, Alana Evans, etc. are falsely attacking Trump out of self-interest; and seconds Marc Randazza and others who note that Avenatti is a jackass.
The is my view:
Jack Johnson, as you mention, was no model citizen but nonetheless deserved his due, and the same goes for the president. Witch hunts are wrong in any context not because they aim to bring down the guilty, but because of 1) what they do to the process; 2) the inevitable collateral damage and the danger to intentionally-targeted persons; and 3) the distraction from other more serious issues. Even Bill Maher, no conservative, called out progressives for not giving Trump his due when it comes to negotiating with foreign leaders.
Langhorne quoted “A Man For All Seasons” last year, and I borrowed from it in a post in March. When you don’t give the devil his due, when you take something in the name of your own interest of the moment, in potentia you make a rod for your own back. We see this all the time when a congress dominated by one party passes a rule, only to become haunted by that same rule when then power to implement it passes to another party.
Regardless of who the president is, we should want our country to succeed. It shouldn’t be about who gets credit; it’s about getting positive results. Politicians of any stripe who place the party line above the national interest are traitors, in my view.
Thank you for being fair-minded enough to mention my revulsion at Trump signing FOSTA. There are many policies of his with which I don’t agree, from abortion on down the line. But, as the site’s namesake himself has written here, Hillary would have been worse.
Finally, it’s no fever dream to suggest that Hillary would have kept on behaving exactly as she did for decades. I cited some of her past behavior and long-term associations. These are facts, just as it’s a fact that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, et. al. had ample opportunity to sign “a piece of paper pardoning a dead guy”, but they didn’t. Doing so didn’t require anything but the will to do it, and the character to acknowledge that the U.S. government had been terribly wrong. (For the record, I think Trump’s statement to that effect did not go anywhere near far enough.)
On the subject of Hillary, I’m arguing a pattern of behavior. With all due respect, it’s up to those who disagree to point out where I’m wrong and how she’s changed, because I don’t see it.