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Harvey Weinstein is back in court, the right are protesting his innocence, and maybe the left have only themselves to blame. (Photo by MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
If ever you need an example of how backlash politics makes for strange bedfellows, look no further than the unholy alliance between the MAGA Sphere and Hollywood’s most notorious Democratic sex offender.
Harvey Weinstein is back in court this month for a retrial, after his 2020 conviction for rape was overturned by New York’s Court of Appeals. And chief among those advocating not just for his acquittal but his innocence on all charges is none other than Candace Owens—as in, the same Candace Owens who was ousted from The Daily Wire for such scintillating social insights as “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,” and “Hollywood is run by sinister Jewish gangs.”
Owens might seem like an unlikely champion for Weinstein, who in addition to being Jewish was once one of Hollywood’s most prominent and generous Democratic Party supporters. And Weinstein, though he’s hardly in a position to be picky, might once have balked at having someone as kooky as Owens in his corner. But that was the old world, where the vibe had not yet shifted and things still mostly made sense. In our current, bizarro cultural moment, led by a newly anointed political class hell-bent on undoing the excesses of the woke era, the extremely online right has apparently determined that Weinstein is the enemy of their enemy, and hence their friend.
Her account of a series of jailhouse interviews she conducted with Weinstein, titled Harvey Speaks, is fueling a growing sense that he was railroaded or maybe even falsely accused. Joe Rogan, after listening to her take on the case, announced to his podcast audience that he’d found it persuasive: “I can’t believe I’m on Harvey Weinstein’s side. I thought he was guilty of, like, heinous crimes, and then you listen to it, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what? What is going on?’ ”
The political and cultural environment surrounding Weinstein’s original conviction has been a major point of focus for Owens, who suggested on her podcast that Weinstein was an easy target for #MeToo at a moment when it was desperate to collect scalps. “Movements get really big, and they find someone to hang,” she said on the Keeping It Real podcast. “Weinstein was an easy person to hang because he was immoral.”
I for one will leave the question of Weinstein's innocence to the jury (though I feel compelled to note that, if it’s easy to hang an immoral person, it is surely even easier to hang a convicted sex offender, as Weinstein still is in California). But it’s hardly surprising that Owens has chosen to go down this particular road. Because, as Rogan put it: What is going on?
It’s complicated. Weinstein’s retrial is a do-over of legal proceedings that were originally marred by judicial error, and that raised questions even at the time about whether prosecutors were cutting corners in their eagerness to topple one of the #MeToo movement’s biggest bad guys. New York’s highest court found that the judge in his first trial improperly allowed testimony from accusers not named in the official charges. (A similar technicality—this one a more serious case of judicial error—triggered Bill Cosby’s release from prison in 2021.) Weinstein’s lawyers are now arguing that he didn’t get a fair trial in California, either—and are appealing his conviction of rape there, too.
These ambiguities may spell an acquittal for Weinstein; they also provide an opening for someone like Owens to claim the entire case was corrupt. But the architects of #MeToo also bear a certain amount of responsibility for the shape of this conversation. Because while the original purpose of the movement might have been to protect women from sexual predation, what it became—and what it will likely be remembered as—is a machine that wrecked the lives of men by labeling them sex offenders, without due process, and often without even the most perfunctory concern for whether the allegations were true.
That #MeToo so quickly became a tool for destroying reputations and dispensing vigilante justice is only surprising if you don't recognize the movement’s true ideological origins—which had absolutely nothing to do with Harvey Weinstein or Hollywood sexism, and everything to do with the election of one Donald J. Trump.
Ah, Trump: the living embodiment of gross sexual entitlement, a multiply-accused alleged frotteur who bragged about grabbing women by the you-know-what. The subtext of #MeToo, which broke into the mainstream almost exactly one year after the release of that infamous Access Hollywood tape, was that Trump’s election to the presidency despite all these things revealed something deeply rotten in the culture—and that while we’d missed our chance to punish him for his misdeeds, it was not too late to build a movement that would punish men like him. Not just accused rapists like Bill Cosby or R. Kelly, but every man who crossed lines, took liberties, and failed to treat women with the respect they deserved. The boors, the bastards, the gropers and grabbers; men who flirted with their coworkers or cheated on their wives or committed the vaguely sexual-sounding offense of sliding into a woman’s DMs—which seemed a lot more scandalous before I realized that it just meant sending any kind of message on social media, including professional correspondence.
I suspect that Weinstein’s convictions, one of the movement’s few legal wins, were such a big deal—symbolic, even—because it felt a bit like taking down Trump by proxy. Here was a man of a certain age, a certain type, who had a certain way of throwing his weight around to extract what he wanted from unwilling women. And for those who had long been agitating for a more victim-friendly criminal justice system and more dedicated prosecution of sex crimes, his first conviction, which was in New York, was groundbreaking. Not just a rare win, but perhaps even the start of something transformative.
But looking back, Weinstein was an outlier. Mostly, MeTooings were a wild extralegal west of unfalsifiable accusations, social media innuendo, or allegations via anonymous spreadsheet laundered into the news cycle by enthusiastic journalists. The men who suffered the worst consequences were rarely the most credibly accused, and the lack of both process and restraint emboldened both the press and ordinary people alike to go to extremes.
This latter phenomenon is starkly illustrated by the case of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who outside of Weinstein is probably the movement’s most memorable target. As a nominee, Kavanaugh was not only recklessly accused by the media of being part of a teen rape gang, and put through a surreal Congressional struggle session over the contents of his high school yearbook, but was later subject to an assassination attempt by a disgruntled liberal: His would-be murderer pled guilty last month.
This is not to say that no truly bad men were taken down by #MeToo, or that its adherents accomplished nothing. Some important conversations were had; some serial predators got their comeuppance; and a whole lot of corporate anti-sexual harassment training modules tripled in size. But considered in its totality, #MeToo looks mostly like a Salem-style moral panic whose casualties included dozens of innocent—or at least noncriminal—people and, generously, maybe five actual witches. Of course its opponents were eventually going to anoint even those men in the latter category as heroes.
Meanwhile, the tepid legacy of what was supposed to be an era-defining feminist movement is a bit of an elephant in the room for the left. It doesn’t help that some of its most embarrassing and egregious missteps keep resurfacing in new and horrible ways—like the cancellation of author Junot Díaz, accused in 2018 of forcibly kissing a grad student and also of “verbal sexual assault” for arguing with a woman at a dinner party, and who was revealed last month to have been removed from the Norton literary anthology despite having been cleared of wrongdoing multiple times over.
But it also feels, sometimes, like the moment has passed. It’s not just that Weinstein, whose convictions were the biggest and most sparkling jewel in the #MeToo crown, might now be acquitted of some of the most heinous charges against him. It’s that the thrilling momentum of the movement has vanished, leaving its participants both too jaded and too tired to resume the business of witch-finding.
The shift in mood is most palpable when it comes to the most recent spate of scandals, which have failed to generate even a fraction of the energy that accompanied such things at the movement’s peak. Take the host of salacious and horrifying allegations against author Neil Gaiman, which were the subject of a six-part podcast series in the UK last summer, as well as a massive cover story in New York magazine in January. These dominated the discourse for an intense week or two only to fade from consciousness entirely—and the recently announced return of Gaiman’s TV series Good Omens, on which he was the showrunner for two seasons before stepping back earlier this year, has been met with virtually no outrage.
And then there’s the biggest #MeToo story currently going in Hollywood, about the ongoing beef between A-list star Blake Lively and her obscure-by-comparison costar Justin Baldoni. Once, the allegations of harassment alone would have been a career-ending scandal for Baldoni. Today, the public is more skeptical, less credulous—unafraid to note that this story seems complicated, in ways that simply don’t align with the movement’s simplistic narrative of Innocent Helpless Woman Terrorized by Powerful Evil Man.
And of course, there’s Donald Trump—not just a confessed pussy-grabber but also, now, a convicted felon for falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels case. (He was also found liable by a New York jury in a civil trial for sexual abuse.) And now he’s back in the White House. Again.
What’s sad about this state of affairs isn’t that we’re struggling to find new men to feed into the barely-functional woodchipper that is the #MeToo movement in 2025. It’s that we spent six years thumping our chests and vowing to make the world a better place for women, and all we got is the lousy woodchipper. The specter of sexuality hasn’t stopped looming over women’s professional lives; the criminal justice system is no better at handling cases of sexual assault; and terrorizing normal men with the threat of professional ruination for daring to DM us has curbed the behavior of actual predators not at all.
But perhaps this was inevitable. Creating better ways of being is hard, and thankless, and not much fun. Hunting witches, on the other hand? All you need is a little fuel for the fire, and a love of watching them burn.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...916f-663e-4613-8e0a-4457e1bceef6_1320x30.webp
Don’t miss Kat’s piece about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, in which she argued: “If this is a story about men behaving badly, it’s also a story about the women who make their living in the attention economy, where gossip is a weapon.”
Harvey Weinstein is back in court, the right are protesting his innocence, and maybe the left have only themselves to blame. (Photo by MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
If ever you need an example of how backlash politics makes for strange bedfellows, look no further than the unholy alliance between the MAGA Sphere and Hollywood’s most notorious Democratic sex offender.
Harvey Weinstein is back in court this month for a retrial, after his 2020 conviction for rape was overturned by New York’s Court of Appeals. And chief among those advocating not just for his acquittal but his innocence on all charges is none other than Candace Owens—as in, the same Candace Owens who was ousted from The Daily Wire for such scintillating social insights as “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,” and “Hollywood is run by sinister Jewish gangs.”
Owens might seem like an unlikely champion for Weinstein, who in addition to being Jewish was once one of Hollywood’s most prominent and generous Democratic Party supporters. And Weinstein, though he’s hardly in a position to be picky, might once have balked at having someone as kooky as Owens in his corner. But that was the old world, where the vibe had not yet shifted and things still mostly made sense. In our current, bizarro cultural moment, led by a newly anointed political class hell-bent on undoing the excesses of the woke era, the extremely online right has apparently determined that Weinstein is the enemy of their enemy, and hence their friend.
Her account of a series of jailhouse interviews she conducted with Weinstein, titled Harvey Speaks, is fueling a growing sense that he was railroaded or maybe even falsely accused. Joe Rogan, after listening to her take on the case, announced to his podcast audience that he’d found it persuasive: “I can’t believe I’m on Harvey Weinstein’s side. I thought he was guilty of, like, heinous crimes, and then you listen to it, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what? What is going on?’ ”
The political and cultural environment surrounding Weinstein’s original conviction has been a major point of focus for Owens, who suggested on her podcast that Weinstein was an easy target for #MeToo at a moment when it was desperate to collect scalps. “Movements get really big, and they find someone to hang,” she said on the Keeping It Real podcast. “Weinstein was an easy person to hang because he was immoral.”
I for one will leave the question of Weinstein's innocence to the jury (though I feel compelled to note that, if it’s easy to hang an immoral person, it is surely even easier to hang a convicted sex offender, as Weinstein still is in California). But it’s hardly surprising that Owens has chosen to go down this particular road. Because, as Rogan put it: What is going on?
It’s complicated. Weinstein’s retrial is a do-over of legal proceedings that were originally marred by judicial error, and that raised questions even at the time about whether prosecutors were cutting corners in their eagerness to topple one of the #MeToo movement’s biggest bad guys. New York’s highest court found that the judge in his first trial improperly allowed testimony from accusers not named in the official charges. (A similar technicality—this one a more serious case of judicial error—triggered Bill Cosby’s release from prison in 2021.) Weinstein’s lawyers are now arguing that he didn’t get a fair trial in California, either—and are appealing his conviction of rape there, too.
These ambiguities may spell an acquittal for Weinstein; they also provide an opening for someone like Owens to claim the entire case was corrupt. But the architects of #MeToo also bear a certain amount of responsibility for the shape of this conversation. Because while the original purpose of the movement might have been to protect women from sexual predation, what it became—and what it will likely be remembered as—is a machine that wrecked the lives of men by labeling them sex offenders, without due process, and often without even the most perfunctory concern for whether the allegations were true.
That #MeToo so quickly became a tool for destroying reputations and dispensing vigilante justice is only surprising if you don't recognize the movement’s true ideological origins—which had absolutely nothing to do with Harvey Weinstein or Hollywood sexism, and everything to do with the election of one Donald J. Trump.
Ah, Trump: the living embodiment of gross sexual entitlement, a multiply-accused alleged frotteur who bragged about grabbing women by the you-know-what. The subtext of #MeToo, which broke into the mainstream almost exactly one year after the release of that infamous Access Hollywood tape, was that Trump’s election to the presidency despite all these things revealed something deeply rotten in the culture—and that while we’d missed our chance to punish him for his misdeeds, it was not too late to build a movement that would punish men like him. Not just accused rapists like Bill Cosby or R. Kelly, but every man who crossed lines, took liberties, and failed to treat women with the respect they deserved. The boors, the bastards, the gropers and grabbers; men who flirted with their coworkers or cheated on their wives or committed the vaguely sexual-sounding offense of sliding into a woman’s DMs—which seemed a lot more scandalous before I realized that it just meant sending any kind of message on social media, including professional correspondence.
I suspect that Weinstein’s convictions, one of the movement’s few legal wins, were such a big deal—symbolic, even—because it felt a bit like taking down Trump by proxy. Here was a man of a certain age, a certain type, who had a certain way of throwing his weight around to extract what he wanted from unwilling women. And for those who had long been agitating for a more victim-friendly criminal justice system and more dedicated prosecution of sex crimes, his first conviction, which was in New York, was groundbreaking. Not just a rare win, but perhaps even the start of something transformative.
But looking back, Weinstein was an outlier. Mostly, MeTooings were a wild extralegal west of unfalsifiable accusations, social media innuendo, or allegations via anonymous spreadsheet laundered into the news cycle by enthusiastic journalists. The men who suffered the worst consequences were rarely the most credibly accused, and the lack of both process and restraint emboldened both the press and ordinary people alike to go to extremes.
This latter phenomenon is starkly illustrated by the case of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who outside of Weinstein is probably the movement’s most memorable target. As a nominee, Kavanaugh was not only recklessly accused by the media of being part of a teen rape gang, and put through a surreal Congressional struggle session over the contents of his high school yearbook, but was later subject to an assassination attempt by a disgruntled liberal: His would-be murderer pled guilty last month.
This is not to say that no truly bad men were taken down by #MeToo, or that its adherents accomplished nothing. Some important conversations were had; some serial predators got their comeuppance; and a whole lot of corporate anti-sexual harassment training modules tripled in size. But considered in its totality, #MeToo looks mostly like a Salem-style moral panic whose casualties included dozens of innocent—or at least noncriminal—people and, generously, maybe five actual witches. Of course its opponents were eventually going to anoint even those men in the latter category as heroes.
Meanwhile, the tepid legacy of what was supposed to be an era-defining feminist movement is a bit of an elephant in the room for the left. It doesn’t help that some of its most embarrassing and egregious missteps keep resurfacing in new and horrible ways—like the cancellation of author Junot Díaz, accused in 2018 of forcibly kissing a grad student and also of “verbal sexual assault” for arguing with a woman at a dinner party, and who was revealed last month to have been removed from the Norton literary anthology despite having been cleared of wrongdoing multiple times over.
But it also feels, sometimes, like the moment has passed. It’s not just that Weinstein, whose convictions were the biggest and most sparkling jewel in the #MeToo crown, might now be acquitted of some of the most heinous charges against him. It’s that the thrilling momentum of the movement has vanished, leaving its participants both too jaded and too tired to resume the business of witch-finding.
The shift in mood is most palpable when it comes to the most recent spate of scandals, which have failed to generate even a fraction of the energy that accompanied such things at the movement’s peak. Take the host of salacious and horrifying allegations against author Neil Gaiman, which were the subject of a six-part podcast series in the UK last summer, as well as a massive cover story in New York magazine in January. These dominated the discourse for an intense week or two only to fade from consciousness entirely—and the recently announced return of Gaiman’s TV series Good Omens, on which he was the showrunner for two seasons before stepping back earlier this year, has been met with virtually no outrage.
And then there’s the biggest #MeToo story currently going in Hollywood, about the ongoing beef between A-list star Blake Lively and her obscure-by-comparison costar Justin Baldoni. Once, the allegations of harassment alone would have been a career-ending scandal for Baldoni. Today, the public is more skeptical, less credulous—unafraid to note that this story seems complicated, in ways that simply don’t align with the movement’s simplistic narrative of Innocent Helpless Woman Terrorized by Powerful Evil Man.
And of course, there’s Donald Trump—not just a confessed pussy-grabber but also, now, a convicted felon for falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels case. (He was also found liable by a New York jury in a civil trial for sexual abuse.) And now he’s back in the White House. Again.
What’s sad about this state of affairs isn’t that we’re struggling to find new men to feed into the barely-functional woodchipper that is the #MeToo movement in 2025. It’s that we spent six years thumping our chests and vowing to make the world a better place for women, and all we got is the lousy woodchipper. The specter of sexuality hasn’t stopped looming over women’s professional lives; the criminal justice system is no better at handling cases of sexual assault; and terrorizing normal men with the threat of professional ruination for daring to DM us has curbed the behavior of actual predators not at all.
But perhaps this was inevitable. Creating better ways of being is hard, and thankless, and not much fun. Hunting witches, on the other hand? All you need is a little fuel for the fire, and a love of watching them burn.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...916f-663e-4613-8e0a-4457e1bceef6_1320x30.webp
Don’t miss Kat’s piece about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, in which she argued: “If this is a story about men behaving badly, it’s also a story about the women who make their living in the attention economy, where gossip is a weapon.”
