Courtney Love said this week her 2005 public warning to women about serial
predator Harvey Weinstein got her blacklisted by the powerful Hollywood
talent agency Creative Artists Agency writing "although I wasn't one of his
victims, I was eternally banned by CAA for speaking out against Harvey
Weinstein rape". This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez.
As we talk about the latest news right now.
GONZALEZ: Well those allegations were not being made against disgraced..
agains-
>>realll" as he began thrusting his genitals he tried to kiss
me again with my hand still on his chest and I said dude you're trippin right now
attempting to make it clear I was not interested. >>Those allegations were
not being made against this great Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein
but against now President Donald Trump. That is Celebrity Apprentice contestant
Summer Zervos describing her 2007 encounter with Trump in which she says
Trump kissed her on the lips pressed his body against hers and groped her breasts
all without her consent. Zervos was among a series of women who
accused Trump of sexual assault during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump in return called her and the other women liars
she's now subpoenaed Trump's presidential campaign for all documents
relating to her and any other women who have accused Trump of unwanted sexual contact.
On Monday, Trump was asked about the subpoena at an impromptu White House
news conference. This is his response...
>>All I can say is it's totally fake news
just fake its fake it's made-up stuff and it's disgraceful what
happens but that happens in - that happens in the world of politics John.
meanwhile in New York City police detectives are probing two credible
allegations of sexual assault against Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein
the allegations are separate from a 2015 case brought against Weinstein after an
NYPD sting operation caught him on tape confessing he groped Italian
model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. At the time Manhattan district attorney
Cyrus Vance jr. declined to prosecute the case against Weinstein one of
Winston's lawyers at the time donated $10,000 to Vance's election campaign
only days after the district attorney dropped the case the New York City
charges come as Scotland Yard is investigating five sexual assault
charges by three women in Britain more than 40 women now including some of
Hollywood's biggest stars have come forward with allegations of rape, sexual
assault, or sexual harassment against Weinstein's legal team is
continuing to fall apart after learning the extent of the allegations against
their former client this includes entertainment lawyer Charles Harder who
threatened to sue the New York Times for their report on Weinstein's history of
sexual harassment. Harder has a history of taking on the media and successfully
filed a 140 million dollar lawsuit against Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan
that led to the outlet's bankruptcy. Hardier is a third lawyer to leave
Weinstein following Lisa bloom and Lanny Davis Bloome told Good Morning America
that not only was Weinstein's behavior illegal but that quote there was
misconduct for a period of years end of quote one lawyer to join Weinstein's
team is one of Hollywood's biggest criminal attorneys Blair Burke who has
represented actors like Mel Gibson. GOODMAN: last week's report that Hollywood mogul
Harvey Weinstein was also a sexual predator has reignited a dialogue on
sexual assault in many ways and one of them became a trending topic on Twitter
this weekend when women began posting messages on social media to show how
commonplace such misconduct is by using the hashtag #metoo. A flurry of messages
appeared Sunday on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram after the actress Alyssa
Milano shared a post in which she revealed she'd been sexually violated
and included a screenshot of the idea that quote if all the women who've been
sexually harassed or assaulted wrote me to as a status we might give people a
sense of the magnitude of the problem Milano then wrote, quote, if you've been
sexually harassed or assaulted write me too as a reply to this tweet. While many
reports suggested Milano began the Me Too movement, she didn't; it was
actually started about a decade ago by our next guest the activist Tarana Burke
She says she began Me Too as a grassroots movement to aid sexual assault survivors
and underprivileged communities where rape crisis centers and sexual assault
workers weren't going. Tarana Burke is now a program director girls for gender
equity in Washington DC we're joined by Soraya Chemaly who's a journalist who
covers the intersection of gender and politics director of the Women's Media
Center Speech Project. We welcome you both to Democracy Now. We're gonna begin
right now with the woman who started Me Too in 2007.
Tarana, talk about how this is taken off and why you started it back in 2007 or what I
want to say is Alyssa never claimed she started no it's the rest of the media
that is talking about her starting it. Right. And it makes it makes sense to me
right because that's how media works. I have been working with young people for
more than 25 years and I worked in the South in 2007 and as a survivor of
sexual violence myself as a person who was struggling and trying to figure out
what healing looked like for me I also saw young people and particularly young
women of color and the community I worked with struggling with the same
issues and trying to find a succinct way to show empathy right we use a term
called empowerment - empathy and me - is so powerful because somebody had said it
to me right and it changed the trajectory of my healing process once I
heard that and so because the rape crisis centers in the community I was
working didn't go out to the schools they didn't do outreach and I'm an
organizer by training it made sense to me that you have to bring you know you
have to bring it to people people are not gonna seek it out and so me too was
about reaching the places that other people wouldn't go bringing messages and
and words and encouragement to survivors of sexual violence where other people
wouldn't be talking about it.>> And your response - now we've had it's almost a
succession of one big name after another being
being accused of sexual assault Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, Donald
Trump and now Harvey Weinstein. <<R. Kelly, yeah. No, it's not a surprise right and I
think that you know I say all the time I'm never surprised at these allegations
for every R. Kelly or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein there's the you know
the owner of the grocery store, that coach, the teacher, the neighbor, who are
doing the same things but we don't pay attention and so that's a big name and
we don't pay attention til it's a big celebrity but this work is ongoing
because this is pervasive. >>I wanted to bring Soraya Chemaly into this
conversation of the Women's Media Center speech project talk about this latest
these revelations these rolling revelations against Harvey Weinstein
because of the New York Times exposé followed by The New Yorker exposé the
New Yorker exposé is only there because the author went to NBC Ronan Farrow and
he worked on it with them for months and then they killed it which is leading to,
to say the least, enormous questions within NBC what was
their connections to Weinstein putting a lot of pressure on the president of NBC
Talk about this when this will even be reported and the level of the women who
have to make the charges for this to get this kind of attention these A-list
stars. I think this is a very good example of the way overlapping
systems of fraternity work to silence stories like these we know that it takes
a tremendous outpouring of really trauma from women working together in a
campaign like Me Too to make people sit up and pay attention but what we're
really talking about is making people believe what we learn are talking about
because we have a very deep-seated distrust of what women say and and when
women say it it's very easy to dismiss and trivialize and part of that process
of stereotypes in and myth-making directly from media and media frames
questions decides which questions to ask how to report what language to use and
also whose voice matters and whose experience matters so in an instance
like this we see very clearly that person with extreme power and status in
one industry was probably leveraging that power and status across industries
able to tap people possibly in the criminal justice system people in the
media system and again this I think is really common it's not rare it's just
that we're seeing it at a very high level could you talk about this in the
context of a president in a presidency which itself of Donald Trump has been
repeatedly accused of sexual harassment? So I think that what was most
interesting in the wake of the Trump tape that was released a year ago was
the difference in responses between men and women to what happened and we saw a
huge gap in understanding and empathy honestly during the debate that followed
immediately after that tape was released the tape was released and
millions of women were traumatized and shared stories with the #notOK hashtag
very much like they did now but when the debate happened in the immediate wake of
that there was a large scale analysis done by Facebook of what people were
talking about what was important to them and it involved looking at millions of
comments and posts from around the world but especially I believe in the United
States and it showed that for women what Trump was saying and what it represented
was a priority it was either number one or two on the on the list of top five
but for men it didn't make the list at all and I think that's important because
our media systems and our legal systems and our political systems are still
overwhelmingly dominated by men overwhelmingly white men so we're
talking about 80% plus and almost all of those arenas certainly of senior
management and that experiential difference which is transformative in
terms of producing knowledge like really understanding what's going on is missing
in these institutions and so it takes this immense amount of energy to just
try and get institutions to recognize the harm that's being done by dismissing
and trivializing experiences of sexual harassment sexual harassment if you even
think about the term is a term that reflects the perspective of harasser x'
women who are being harassed men who are being harassed this isn't a sexual
experience for them instead experience of fear and threatened violence it's
very intimidating there's always retaliation involved so even the
perspective of the framing of the language reflects the problems that we
face I want to bring Alicia Garza into the conversation, Co-founder of Black
Lives Matter, Special Projects Director for National Domestic Workers Alliance
speaking to us from Los Angeles your response about everything
that has just been unfolding now going from the charges the allegations against
Harvey Weinstein to you know both Scotland Yard and the New York Police
Department investigating him criminally and then the massive response to Tarana's
Me Too movement that started really 10 years ago but now picking up steam
like we've never seen before.
I first have to just say a deep thank you to
Tarana for creating this space for survivors like myself. Without that
space I wouldn't be able to tell my story and thousands and thousands of
other people that I know would not be able to tell their stories and you and I
share someone in common who you are a mentor to and when she reached out to me
yesterday and said you know my mentor Tarana started this and I want to make
sure that black womens' work is not erased -- I had to agree.
My thoughts about this are that exactly what Tarana said earlier that this
kind of violence is as American as apple pie I'm both heartbroken by all of the
stories that I've seen being shared there's more stories being shared every
day and lots of people that I know that I'm in community with and people that I
don't know are asking themselves what do we do about this epidemic of violence,
violence against women, violence against women of color, violence against black
women, queer people, trans people, and even what do we do about violence against men, right?;
cis men, trans men, this kind of patriarchal violence really functions
off of shame and silence and it's not lost on me that every single person who
told their story about Harvey Weinstein talked about how they were silenced how
they were encouraged not to speak up how they were embarrassed or ashamed to
speak up and so the power of this movement of me to this power of empathy
this power of connection is really about empowering people to be survivors
to be resilient and also to make really visible that sexual violence is not
about people's individual actions that this is a systemic problem that then
requires different types of responses to deal with how systemic this problem
actually is. I'd like to ask Tarana, as the founder of this movement, where
do you think it needs to go from here on? So the work that I'm doing
-- and this movement is really about survivors talking to survivors, right? -- Me Too is
about using the power of empathy to stomp out shame and so we
need to keep talking about it, right? It doesn't need to be I mean I appreciate
the hashtag and I appreciate the hashtag elevating the conversation but it's not
a hashtag right it's not a moment this is a movement the reason why people
don't know my name is because people don't think about this unless there is
something big happening so what needs to happen is that we need to stop just
right you know popping up when somebody famous does something and we
need to really look at the numbers look at the people look at the survivors and
think strategically I think like an organizer this is an epidemic, pandemic
even, right? If you applied the numbers around sexual violence to any
communicable disease the World Health Organization would shut it down it'd be
all kind of you know experiment and research around it. >>You think a vaccine could be
developed against it? <<Oh God, imagine right?! If we could stop it out with just "get
your polio vaccine and stop sexual violence" but in actuality it is that
pervasive and so we need to stop thinking about it in spurts and think
about it as something that we need to constantly work on well I want to thank
you all for being with us Tarana Burke thank you so much, founder
of the Me Too campaign. Soraya Chemaly, with the Womens'
Media Speech Project in Washington and Alicia Garza, Co-founder of Black Lives
Matter. This is Democracy Now! Juan will be speaking today in Teaneck, New Jersey,
check our website, and a Wednesday at Rutgers I'm Amy Goodman with Juan
Gonzalez
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